There have been news coming out of PAX Australia all weekend, and content creator Fiamma had a chat with World of Warcraft’s Executive Producer Holly Longdale and Associate Production Director Clay Stone about the possibilities of cross-region play, character limits and features from WoW: Forever coming to Retail.
The Limitations for Cross-Region Play
WoW Forever will be launching without realms, and players will instead be choosing the “Ruleset” they want to play in: Normal, PvP, Roleplay, or Hardcore (coming soon). Many players at first thought this meant no region locks either, but that’s not the case.
Fiamma asked what they challenges and problems are with cross-region play, and Clay pointed to the fact that Forever being realmless is already a big step for the technical infrastructure. Holly followed up by saying that it’s not only the technical side of things that stand in the way, there are also regulatory differences between countries and regions.
However, both Clay and Holly said that cross-realm play isn’t possible “right now”. They are open to the idea of it, but need a minute to figure it all out.
Character Limit per Account
Since we will no longer be having realms in Forever, a natural question is how many characters we will be able to create per account. When Fiamma asked about this, Clay said that they aren’t ready to announce the number yet, and straight up asked her back “How many would you like?”
The team is aware that this is something players are thinking about, and perhaps especially collectors and completionists. They again voiced some technical limitations to why we can’t have an unlimited amount of characters, but didn’t seem surprised when Fiamma voiced her desire of the cap being similar to Retail. Holly even asked “At least 50, right?”.
Forever Features Coming to Retail
There have been a lot of WoW Forever features that players have requested to be ported over to Retail. Some of them have already been shot down (like last names for our characters), but something that many collectors have been begging for since the announcement of Forever is learning transmog appearances if an item drops from a boss, whether you win the item or not.
According to Holly, this specific feature is something that is definitely possible to make it to Retail! It’s not ready to be implemented, and perhaps not even being worked on yet, but they are actively looking at what features make sense to port over.
Player Feedback
Finally, Holly and Clay spoke at length about how they are collecting feedback from players. They say they are present on as many places as they can be. Reddit, official forums, YouTube videos, and even the comment sections of videos. In short, they want to make sure that they are listening to what players want.
So continue to be vocal about what you want in Forever, and in as many places as you can. It seems like the team is listening.