Taking a Peek at the Forever Beta

Only a few days ago I responded to a commenter that I didn't care about the beta, but I did preorder and have access to it. So naturally, after spending the last few days hoovering up every possible tidbit of information about Forever that I could find, I was very tempted to at least take a look at it myself. Not to play "properly" mind you, I'll still leave the actual testing up to others... but just to have a bit of a look around, you know? Check out those graphics updates and new UI options, to see what those look like.

The first thing I heard was that there were queues, up to 40,000 people strong from what I've read, though the highest I saw myself was 20k. A few days ago I saw a conversation about Forever's launch on reddit where someone claimed that "modern WoW doesn't have launch queues anymore", which made me chuckle at the time. Maybe "modern" WoW doesn't, but that person has clearly never been part of a Classic launch. And this wasn't even the real launch, just a beta test!

There were some issues with lag and disconnects, which were worse for EU players and which eventually led to me learning that WoW betas always take place in the US region. This surprised me only because of how strict they have been about needing to maintain the regional divide everywhere else, which made me think that there were some legal or technical issues that were simply insurmountable. So you're saying all I needed to do to potentially play with American friends is play a beta? Weird.

Anyway, needless to say, things were busy in the starter zones. Night elf, human and tauren were all bustling. I decided to take my tauren up for a run first to see the lay of the land and was delighted to see the new Plainsrunning racial in action. Unlike the original plan for Plainsrunning that was then dropped for Vanilla, this is not meant to replace a mount but instead lets you slowly build up to 30% movement speed increase as long as you keep running, which I imagine will be great for lower-level characters without a mount wanting/needing to traverse the world.

I also came across this new functionality, which they explained was added to help out hardcore players in particular, because it sucks to die when everything around you resets unexpectedly and you're suddenly surrounded due to no fault of your own.

You could argue that it's a bit immersion-breaking, but I think this is an important enough feature that it's worth it, and I'm actually hoping they'll add this to retail as well. I've had so many rage-inducing moments in retail when I was working on some kind of event that needs build-up, or fighting a tough rare or something, and then just as you're about to finish, with the last mob at 10%, everything around you just disappears because you've been phased into a different version of the world. Always hate that.

Anyway, to get back to Forever, the view towards the north of Mulgore was genuinely stunning because you could see all the way up to Mount Hyjal. I imagine the world will feel kind of different with Nordrassil always looming in the distance wherever you go.

That said, in places the updated graphics looked a bit... weird to me, in a way that I found hard to describe. I ran around Elwynn Forest and Stormwind as well to take some shots there, and then took pictures of the exact same scenes in Classic era to compare them. Take this shot of northern Elwynn Forest, just out of Northshire:

Forever

Classic Era

The shadows in Forever are obviously so much more sophisticated, but it also makes everything look so much darker. And I don't know, is Elwynn Forest of all places meant to be this dark? I'm sure there'll be people who'll answer "yes, it was always a little bit ominous" or something like that, but I always remember it as pretty bright and sunlit, so this change just seems a bit strange to me.

Or take this shot of Stormwind Keep:

Classic Era

Forever

I put Classic era first for this one to show that the top of the keep always looked like ass in Vanilla, it just wasn't that big a deal because with the shorter view distances it was always meant to just kind of be this vague silhouette that blends into the background. 

In Forever, the updated lighting somehow manages to give everything more definition, which looks great in the foreground, but it also has the same effect on the towers in the back, basically putting a big highlight on just how terrible they look. Which is awkward! I wonder if they'll do any extra work on updating stuff like that. Either way, it'll take some time to get used to.

I've had similar struggles with the models. I did play around with the SD/HD toggle a bit and it honestly made me feel a bit confused. I love all the old models, but with so much of the environment managing to look more high res somehow (even if it's technically the same old assets), they look a bit out of place at times. But when I toggle HD on, I'm reminded of how much I dislike the new models for some races (hello there, tauren). It's almost like I'd need the toggle to be per character instead of account-wide, so I can see the world in SD when I need a specific character to be that way, and HD when I'm happy to see the newer models. I'm guessing that'd be too complicated to do though. It's just something that'll take a bit of getting used to I guess.

Classic Launch Night on Pyrewood Village - EU

As mentioned previously, in Europe the Classic launch was scheduled for the not particularly convenient time of midnight / 11pm (the latter if you were in the UK like I am). As it was a holiday here, I had the day off anyway and found it increasingly hard to focus the closer the launch came.

Half an hour before the whole thing was supposed to go live, the first reports of queues started to come in: Apparently people were already clogging up the pipes on some servers just to get to the character selection/creation screen.

Wanting to avoid getting caught up in something like this on our own server, my friends Nemi, Ollie and I decided to already log in as well (there was no queue on Pyrewood Village yet) and passed the time by creating additional level one characters to make sure we wouldn't get kicked for inactivity.

Then the final seconds ticked down, the "Enter World" button lit up... and everything froze. "This is where we crash the server," I commented on Discord, but actually the servers did hold up alright to begin with. There was a noticeable pause of about half a minute on the initial loading screen, as the system clearly laboured under the pressure of thousands of people wanting to log in at the exact same second, but eventually the intro cinematic started.

And I had to laugh, seeing the huge, teeming mass of tauren. My husband came over to look at what was causing such hilarity. That said, the crowds dispersed relatively quickly, and to me at least it felt nothing like my main point of comparison, the re-launch of the Nostalrius PvE server (which is a good thing by the way).

"Woot" seemed on point.

Sure, it was busy and not exactly easy to find mobs, but I guess it helps that the tauren starter area is so large and open - as long as you always kept ambling across the next hill, you'd find a mob to tag sooner or later.

Relatively speaking, I'm also pretty sure that it was actually the quietest of starting zones, as tauren are the least popular Horde race from what I remember. (Or was it trolls? But they share a starter zone with the orcs in any case.) Nonetheless, it wasn't a good night to be a plainstrider or mountain lion.

While there was a little bit of lag initially, this went away remarkably quickly, and after that everything seemed to go quite smoothly - until I was suddenly kicked back to the character selection screen with this message:

I got back in almost instantly and then proceeded to play just fine for a while, but my friend Nemi, who had also rolled a tauren but immediately hit the road to Durotar in order to maximise her reputation gain with the orcs, got kicked out even sooner and was unable to log back in for hours. At a later point I was eventually kicked out long-term as well.

Checking sources like Twitch and the forums, this seemed to be a problem uniquely affecting the EU servers - on US everyone was just complaining about queues, and while we had some of that as well, it was weird to have the game completely breaking down on one side of the pond but not the other. It certainly didn't help the ancient prejudice of EU players being considered less important than US ones.

Even though it was going on silly o'clock, we persisted with our attempts to log in again and eventually Blizzard must have fixed whatever was going wrong. The "world server down" message seemed a bit misleading as the problem never actually seemed to affect the entire "world" of the server. Best I could tell, based on the fact that both of my DCs happened when I was crossing from one sub-zone into another, there seems to be some sort of instancing going on in the background that went haywire.

I think in total the problem persisted intermittently for about three hours, during which everyone affected was super grumpy and complaining bitterly... just to instantly forget about it all again the moment they were finally able to log back in.

I stayed up until gone 4am (yes, I admit it - I binged, especially as I had taken the next day off work specifically for this purpose) and managed to reach level ten on my tauren shaman in that time.

Population control seemed to be working fine, at least in Mulgore on my server. As I said: it felt busy, but not too busy. As soon as people got off Red Cloud Mesa they spread so far and wide that no quests were really problematic anymore.

The only quest that felt like a bottleneck early on was the one to kill quillboars in Brambleblade Ravine. The narrow, tight corridors forced everyone there into way too small a space, and where I previously mostly remembered that area as being quite deadly to new players, my experience this time around was that the quillboar didn't stand a chance against the onslaught of tauren forces.

Particularly interesting was the quest to kill the named chieftain, who was spawn-camped to hell and back. Unlike what I've heard from other servers, many of the early Pyrewood players weren't inclined to form an orderly line or even to group up, the latter of which I found very odd.

While standing in the crowd I asked about grouping up in /say but received no response. Eventually I just started manually targeting every single character around me and attempting to invite them. Some were already in groups but a surprising number were not, which meant that I quickly assembled a full five-man, which managed to nab a kill soon enough.

That still left the problem of the generic quillboar killing quest though. Two people left as soon as the chief died and a third quickly walked away even though he didn't leave the party, but me and the one remaining other guy seemed to share a quiet sense of frustration as we ran in circles over and over again, failing to tag anything.

Eventually we found a slightly out of the way precipice, which I think people were avoiding intentionally as it had three or four mobs on a fast respawn right next to each other, but with the two of us together we were able to take them on and killed them as many times as needed to get our quest done.

At one point my questing buddy also suddenly opened a trade and simply handed me a white shield that was better than the one I was using at the time. Feeling like I should reciprocate, I found a pair of grey boots in my bag that was slightly better than his and traded him those in turn. Simple gestures.

As I already mentioned, once people dispersed across the plains, things got a lot better, though I was also reminded of how incredibly annoying those early Mulgore quests are in terms of bag space. Not only do you get half a dozen quests to collect different animal parts, sometimes they are different parts of the same animal, so of course you feel that you should have them all in your log at the same time to benefit from synergies, but the end result is simply that you have no bag space for anything not quest-related and I ended up jogging in and out of Bloodhoof Village to vendor things every handful of mob kills for a while.

When a small green pouch dropped from a Flatland Prowler later in the evening, I actually gasped out loud and took a screenshot. This immediately made so much of a difference that I decided I needed to fill all my bag slots nau.

Fortunately this was handily facilitated by a friendly tauren tailor that had been advertising in general chat that they were happy to craft linen bags for the small fee of one silver as long as the customer also provided their own linen. So I sought them out and filled out my remaining bag slots, while also supporting local business. It immediately felt sooo much better.

Oh, and speaking of chat, as someone who usually turns off or ignores general chat in most MMOs, I was pleasantly surprised by how civil it was all night. There was some banter ("Is this Barrens chat?" "No, it's just a tribute") but everyone remained relaxed and in a good mood.

And that was my launch day/night experience - I've since had a whole day of even more play behind me, but that will have to be a story for another day.

Adventures of a noobcow

I didn't think that I considered the daily emblem grind on my various alts a chore, since I still enjoy running instances despite of the repetition - but it's funny how quickly those emblems became (at least for now) uninteresting when I was suddenly presented with a fun-looking alternative way of spending my in-game time, also known as Tamarind's guild experiment. In other words, as soon as I read about it, I hopped over to Argent Dawn and created a little tauren shaman there to join Single Abstract Noun.

The guild, so far, feels like one of those unique social environments that you only seem to get on the internet - where people know each other yet don't, and it's mind-boggingly easy to have a good time with people who for all intents and purposes you don't really know, but you know that you all like WoW, and you know that you like to think and write about it, and you know that there are real people behind the avatars - and somehow that's enough.

It's also been a long time since I created a new alt, and even longer since I did so on a server where I didn't have any higher-level characters yet. As such I was quite surprised by a lot of things that I vaguely recalled skimming in recent patch notes but that I then didn't pay further attention to, like the new and improved tutorials for new players. I didn't need them of course but I couldn't be bothered to find the option to turn them off, plus I thought it was vaguely interesting to see what Blizzard had to say to new players these days. Most of their "tips" seem glaringly obvious to someone who's played for a while, and my boyfriend and I spent some time gently mocking some of the advice we received ("What, I can use the WASD keys to move while swimming too? Amazing!"), but I do think that they are a good addition for people truly new to the genre, and they tend to pop up at the appropriate moments. For example I got a warning that my bags were nearly full when I only had two or three free slots left, and another when they actually were full, advising me to see a vendor soon.

Another noticably useful change is the increased mana and health regeneration for low levels. I can actually move from one mob to the next without having to pause most of the time, and if I get in trouble by over-aggroing and find myself forced to run, I actually regenerate enough mana while running that I'll often be able to get one more spell off while running, which has saved my little shaman's life more than once already. It's easy to forget how difficult life can be at low levels, when you only have a two or three abilities in total and no cooldowns to use to compensate for mess-ups. The increased regen definitely helps though.

And finally... the neutral mobs! This was a funny issue that I saw get brought up by someone in guild chat literally every other hour (myself included). There has always been a bit of a "safe zone" around the spawning points for new characters, with the first and second level mobs in the area being neutral, so nobody ends up stumbling to their death before they've even figured out the movement controls. However, many of us didn't know that this "safe zone" had been expanded to include whole starter areas - which isn't a problem per se, but felt very strange when superimposed on stories that were originally written with hostile mobs in mind. Go slay those evil quillboar that threaten us! Except... they totally don't, they are minding their own business and bother no-one. In fact I felt pretty evil wandering into the middle of their village unharmed and then assassinating their leader. Aren't we supposed to be the good guys here? Other starter zones drew similarly bizarre pictures, with those magically transformed mobs in Eversong not actually harming anyone, and the Burning Blade being a bunch of nice chaps that are just fond of hanging out in caves in Durotar. One more thing for the "I hope Cataclysm will fix this" list, I guess!