WoW Forever podcast: three raids, Molten Core revamp, hidden secrets

The WoW Forever podcast Blizzard published on October 22 runs 1 h 41, and the beta closes the next day, Friday, October 23 at 10:00 PDT (7:00 PM in Paris). The developers look back on the beta, then spend half an hour on the launch raids.

The host is Josh Corbett, alias Countdown To Classic. Facing him are four developers: Josh « Aggrend » Greenfield, senior game designer; Clay Stone, associate production director; Ana Resendez, lead software engineer; and Michael Nuthals, lead encounter designer. The guest, Meeix, plays retail World of Warcraft (the current version) and has never touched Classic. Blizzard’s news page presents the episode as an « End of Beta Special ».

We already covered the first episode and the second, on classes. This fifth WoW Forever podcast covers raids, hidden items, layering and the schedule. Here are its announcements, separating what is confirmed from what is only hinted at.

Three raids at launch: 10, 20 and 40 players

Around 1:13 into the WoW Forever podcast, Blizzard gives the list for November 4. A 10-player raid, Barrow Deeps. A 20-player raid, Hyjal Summit. A 40-player raid, Onyxia’s Lair, presented as a nod to the original Classic experience, when everyone came out of the shadows to kill the dragon together. Entries for the dungeons we already know are on the WoW Forever dungeons and raids page.

The first two are brand new raids, and the older raids stay in reserve. The developers talk about more than 20 new bosses split between the two. They also make a commitment: content for 10 and 20 players patch after patch, without reshuffling raid sizes. A ten-person guild knows its format won’t be forgotten, and two groups of ten can team up for the 20-player raid.

On difficulty, the team repeats one formula: « beer and pretzels », meaning a game among friends, without competitive pressure. There is a strategy to find, for example the order in which to kill the adds (the secondary monsters). A group that has done its prep dungeons and brought potions and a flask or two should be able to succeed and walk away with new epic items. Meeix, used to competition in retail, compares the two to apples and oranges: a different kind of fun.

Four fights described by Michael Nuthals

Around 1:36, Michael Nuthals declines to give boss names. He notes that they exist in the game’s legacy system, so in the files dataminers dig through. He describes four encounters:

• Barrow Deeps: a boss with a damage-boosting buff that comes at a cost. You have to choose between topping the DPS (damage per second) meter and dying at zero damage.
• Barrow Deeps: a fight against a pair of spiders.
• Hyjal Summit: an undead, crocolisk-like creature, a wild god possessed by a ghost. The fight alternates between killing the husk and dealing damage to the ghost possessing it.
• Hyjal Summit: a « body horror » fight, with no further detail.

On design, he aims for low-complexity encounters, where the group lives an adventure rather than a loot race. Example given: a locked door that opens in several ways, with an explosive charge, a rogue or a key found in the dungeon. The ping system (signals placed on screen) from the main game lets you coordinate without voice chat, as do text-to-speech and speech-to-text, planned for accessibility. None of these fights has an official name so far.

Molten Core won’t stay as it was

Molten Core is not announced: asked whether it will get new mechanics, the team answers that it doesn’t have much to share yet. Aggrend still lets slip that you won’t just stand there and « tank and spank » Golemagg the Incinerator. He recalls that the word used at BlizzCon was « revamped », followed by « reimagined ». It is a hint, with no specific content behind it.

For the original five-player dungeons, the line is different. The developers thought about adding mechanics or bosses, then chose the additive approach: don’t touch what players know, and build alongside it. They cite Cataclysm, which transformed the original world and destroyed part of it. The new dungeons should feel like something the 2004 team could have made.

Nothing is set in stone, though: through quests and other objectives, there will be slight differences in the existing dungeons, and the team says it is just getting started.

Items that stay invisible until someone finds them

Within the first minutes, Clay Stone (associate production director) warns against datamining, meaning digging through the game files for what hasn’t been announced yet. According to him, all versions of World of Warcraft share a large part of their art assets and code. An item dug out of the files is therefore not necessarily planned for WoW Forever. Blizzard only steps in when a hasty conclusion solidifies in the community. Clay names no specific case, but players have spent the last few days combing through a PvP datamine around the Grand Marshal rank.

Clay says he is proud of the work on concealment: some items are kept hidden on purpose, to « unsolve » a game everyone knows by heart. Josh « Aggrend » Greenfield, senior game designer, confirms that secrets were turned off during the beta. Journalist Demi Williams made it the headline of her TechRadar article.

The principle: some items stay invisible to everyone until a player gets them in game. Michael Nuthals, lead encounter designer, gives the example of Herod in the Scarlet Monastery: he doesn’t know what he drops. Aggrend knew the Deadmines pants that speed up smelting existed, but had never seen a pair before getting one in the beta. Mounts are hidden by a different method than items.

The torch shows how the team doses these secrets. The quest and the NPC who gives it, in Duskwood, were turned off the first week. Blizzard opened them to test the technology, which caused performance problems, fixed since. Players used it, and the team decided that the guards of Stormwind, Ironforge and Orgrimmar will pull out a torch at night.

For dungeons and raids, an effort called « preserving the surprise » holds back the map tab, and some locations were impossible to load. YouTubers explored the maps without being able to reach the hidden zones. Aggrend, around 1:12 into the show: « really really really well-buried stuff » that will take people a long time to find. He says neither what nor how much.

Layering groups you by language, not by continent

Layering is how the game spreads players across several copies of the same zone. Ana Resendez, lead software engineer, explained the logic around the 42-minute mark of the WoW Forever podcast, adding that a fuller technical episode is coming. Her team ruled out a scoring system that would rate who you play with. It preferred a bit of « friction », like a school class where you bond with classmates you wouldn’t have chosen. The game should therefore put you back with familiar faces and add new ones.

Aggrend described the effect in the beta: grouped in the Skyborn starting zone, he ran into those same players several times two days later in Westfall. During the first-night stress test, it was the realm choice that had blocked players for an hour.

On language, an options setting lets you pick your preferred language, and the game places you with those who chose it. Ana stresses that these are not sealed borders. You may not land with players of your language, and you can always group with friends who chose another. Meeix asked about Germans who play on English realms today. For a French player, the answer applies the same way: pick French, and stay in the Europe region.

The only hard limits are in fact regions, Clay specified. A player who picks English in Europe ends up with other European English speakers, not with North America. Physical servers still exist: Australia will get its own for better ping (the game’s response delay). Merging North America and Europe won’t be possible at launch. Ana doesn’t close the door: the infrastructure shared with the other versions of the game imposes constraints, and she invites the community to keep asking.

The viral clip of players disappearing in front of Orgrimmar wasn’t covered. The host is saving it for the technical episode of the WoW Forever podcast, with no date announced.

Blizzard’s biggest beta, and what it revealed

Clay Stone explains early in the WoW Forever podcast why the beta was limited: level 30 max, 4 of the 9 new dungeons, no raids. Unlike Season of Discovery, launched without a beta four weeks after its announcement, WoW Forever has to last. Blizzard therefore tested the foundations, that is the classes, camping and the « pro-social » server infrastructure. The studio owns the downside: everything past level 30 hasn’t been tested by the public.

Turnout exceeded forecasts. Clay Stone calls it one of the biggest betas in Blizzard’s history. On opening day, the number of connected players hit the concurrency cap, then a second, then a third: the teams raised them several times, even though the Battle.net team thought nobody would reach them in a beta. Every progression blocker was treated like a full launch.

This map comes from an internal tool the team showed around 1:03 into the show. Its lesson, already raised in the PvP episode: the number one cause of character deaths is other players. Fights happened everywhere, including in zones where you weren’t supposed to go. Players reached Mount Hyjal very early. Blizzard considered closing access with a forbidden zone that teleports you away, then left the explorers alone. Along the same lines, the creature aggro radius, too small the first week, was fixed the following one.

The spontaneous PvP left a mark on the team. As soon as the Ruins of Lordaeron opened, the battle to keep the Alliance out of Undercity raged, and hundreds of players clashed in Southshore without the server giving way. Campfires, placed in starting zones, killed newcomers: Blizzard plans to revisit their damage while keeping the spirit of the mechanic. The controller had its moment too. Ana Resendez, skeptical at first, now plays mostly with one, and the team got help from the Diablo team. Finally, Blizzard lent one of the new 1v1 arenas to the community-run Forever Open, won by Warlockguy (final results). The beta closes this Friday, October 23 at 7:00 PM Paris time (end-of-beta details).

Before November 4: what the WoW Forever podcast still announces

Two weeks remain before release. Blizzard is spending them on the move to production servers, whose hardware differs from the beta’s: the machines, the realmless setup and each server’s rules have to be configured. Epic edition owners will be able to reserve their names next week, which means Tuesday, October 27.

The level cap stays at 60. « We don’t intend to go from there, » says Clay Stone, and content will be added during the leveling journey and at max level. Levels 30 to 60 haven’t been tested publicly. They include undead paladins, new quests in existing zones and new zones like Riverglades, which some players have already reached. The team is counting on quick fixes after launch.

Michael Nuthals dropped a teaser at the end of the show: groundwork for a more distant future, with homes and manors that players have already found, and other instance portals hidden in inconspicuous spots. No schedule is given. On quest loot shared across a group, Aggrend answers « never say never », adds that the team has already experimented with round-robin distribution, and says that playing in a group doesn’t slow you down much.

The show continues after the beta, at viewers’ request in the comments. The next topic is already chosen: a technical episode on how the servers work.