In Paris, WoW Forever opens at 12:00 a.m. on Thursday, November 5. In London it will be 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 4th. In Montreal and Quebec City, 6:00 p.m. On the US West Coast, 3:00 p.m. That is a single instant read on four clocks, with one trap: Europe and North America do not switch to winter time on the same day. Here is the WoW Forever release time in France and elsewhere, what Blizzard writes word for word, and what is worth sorting out beforehand.
What Blizzard writes in French and in English
In its announcement of the editions to pre-purchase, published on September 12, Blizzard sets the WoW Forever release time like this: the game launches « on November 5, 2026, at midnight (Paris time) ». Access is included in the World of Warcraft subscription or game time. The English version of the same article gives the West Coast time: the game « launches globally on November 4, 2026, at 3:00 p.m. PST » (Pacific Standard Time). The two match: 3 p.m. PST is 11 p.m. universal time, so midnight in France, which will be one hour ahead of universal time after October 25.
A second English article says PDT: the French version is the reference
The same day, Blizzard published « Carve a New Path with World of Warcraft: Forever ». Its English introduction says the game « launches November 4 at 3:00 p.m. PDT globally », then the same text, further down, goes back to PST. PDT is Pacific Daylight Time, one hour ahead of winter time (PST). With that label, the WoW Forever release time would become 11 p.m. in Paris, an hour before midnight.
This PDT is very probably a typo: on November 4 the West Coast will be on winter time, since the United States changes its clocks on November 1. The French version of that same article says « on November 5 at midnight (Paris time) », like the previous announcement. Timesaver.gg, a game services site, spotted the same discrepancy in its launch checklist and keeps PST. As of October 22, the English page still shows PDT, and we found no correction from Blizzard. One calculation would explain the error without proving it: between October 25 and November 1, the gap between Paris and the Pacific drops to 8 hours, and 3 p.m. plus 8 hours is 11 p.m.
The WoW Forever release time in each time zone
| Place | Time zone (offset from universal time) | Launch time |
|---|---|---|
| US West Coast | PST (minus 8 h) | Wednesday, November 4, 3:00 p.m. |
| Montreal, Quebec City | EST (minus 5 h) | Wednesday, November 4, 6:00 p.m. |
| London | GMT (universal time) | Wednesday, November 4, 11:00 p.m. |
| Paris, Brussels, Geneva | CET (plus 1 h) | Thursday, November 5, 12:00 a.m. |
A time zone is an area that shares the same legal time. These rows assume all four regions have gone back to winter time: Europe on Sunday, October 25, the United States and Canada on Sunday, November 1, according to the time zone database we used for the calculation. Between those two Sundays, Paris is only 8 hours ahead of the West Coast instead of 9. A conversion table made that week therefore gives the wrong time for November 4.
What you need to play at midnight
You need an active World of Warcraft subscription or game time, as Blizzard writes in the announcement quoted above. The Skyborne Epic Pack adds 30 days of game time starting November 5. The « Invite-A-Friend » codes give a guest access without a subscription during launch week, November 5 to 12 in the French version. Blizzard has been emailing them since October 20.
On the hardware side, timesaver.gg, which relays the Battle.net shop listing (we could not open it without logging in), gives 128 GB of free space on an SSD, a flash-memory drive, and says a mechanical hard drive is not supported. We could not cross-check this figure against a readable Blizzard page. Blizzard does require, in its graphics card article, an AMD GCN 1 (2012), NVIDIA Maxwell (2014) or Intel Skylake (2015) chip, or newer.
Pre-install: no official date, but players already see it
We found no Blizzard announcement about pre-install (downloading the game before it opens). The « WoW Forever Pre-Install » thread on the US forum, opened on October 22, tells a different story. The first message says « It’s available to pre-install 12gb the data in the battle net launcher ». One player writes that the European launcher « offers the installation » and that, by pointing it at the beta folder, he downloaded only about 250 MB, the main data being shared between the beta and the release version. Another still sees « the game cannot be installed yet ».
These are player reports, not a confirmation from Blizzard, and the announced size varies from one account to another. One tip from the thread is worth keeping: hold on to the beta or stress test data until the release version is installed, to avoid downloading everything again.
The checklist before the night of November 4 to 5
- Set your alarm to the local time in the table above, not to a conversion made before November 1.
- Check that your subscription or game time is active.
- Free up 128 GB on an SSD and check your graphics card.
- Start the pre-install in Battle.net without deleting the beta.
- Reserve your names, possible from October 27 to November 3 with a paid edition, up to three characters.
- Agree with friends on the same ruleset (Normal, PvP or roleplay) before reserving names.
For the evening itself, the October 21 stress test showed the realm selection screen blocking players for almost an hour before the game held up under load. If that bottleneck comes back at launch, the WoW Forever release time will not be when you play but when you wait, and the survival guide for the launch helps fill that wait usefully.
0 Commentaires
Aucun commentaire pour le moment. Soyez le premier à commenter !