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If there’s one thing that Blizzard nailed with World of Warcraft: Forever, it’s the atmosphere. There’s nothing quite like walking under the moonlight in Tirisfal Glades listening to distant howls and flapping wings on the way to your next quest. But many players familiar with the era of WoW it’s based on felt like it was missing something.
“I miss running through Dun Morogh hearing the iconic music with a massive snowstorm lowering my view distance on my Dwarf hunter, picking up quests from the dwarf next to the fire [and] restoring my inventory,” Reddit user Darthbobz wrote in a post pleading Blizzard to bring WoW’s old weather effects to WoW: Forever.
It’s not that it doesn’t rain or snow in WoW: Forever, it’s that it doesn’t rain and snow enough. People like Darthbobz want to be blinded by the amount of weather on screen, not surrounded by the suggestion of a storm.
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Blizzard even says the core pillars of WoW: Forever are that the world is the main character and that the journey is more important than the destination. For the most part that’s true: Over half of the experience involves running around forests and deserts rather than flying across them on a mount like you do in the modern version of the MMO. But the diet weather effects in the beta clash with the rest of Blizzard’s commitment to adding friction back into the MMO.
It turns out, Blizzard agrees, and will be cranking the weather effects up to 10 in “certain” WoW: Forever beta zones, according to a teaser video for the next patch. The video is an ASMR-style montage of a rainstorm in Elwynn Forest. The screen is so thick with rain and fog it’s hard to see past the trees bordering the town of Goldshire. It’s a real storm that makes you instinctively want to duck into the inn to stay dry.
The beta’s level cap is 20, so when Blizzard says “certain” zones will have the increased weather effects I assume it’s because most of the game isn’t available yet. It also might mean that snowstorms and sandstorms aren’t quite ready to go live, but we won’t know until the patch notes are out later this week.
I honestly didn’t expect intense weather effects to come back within the first few weeks of the beta. Blizzard’s quick turnaround has me curious if we’ll see more updates based on player feedback that are more substantial than some balance tweaks and bug fixes. WoW: Forever is already in a really good spot judging from the flood of praise people have given it in the last week. That’s promising for a game that’s going to be here in just a few months on November 4.
