We wish there were some ways to recreate the original vision of Wintergrasp, but it is simply impossible with the family size that Classic supported. We finally found a solution that would allow the battleground to perform on various layers in a satisfying way. Over time we wanted to find a solution to allow it to operate as it was initially done. We began to discover that in the fall of Wrath. Inside the scenes, there are mechanisms, events, and scripts that control how the fight starts, how it’s resolved and how the rewards are given out can’t be treated logically across layers. The Battle for Wintergrasp as it existed in 2008 is fundamentally incompatible with layers (or, for this reason, the modern sharding system).
This makes it easier to see if one of these players has already turned down at Westfall and later in Stranglethorn. There are also additional rules and safeguards in place when you move from one layer to another to minimize the chances of the changing world around when you are shifted to the next. When certain conditions are achieved, an entire copy of Azeroth is given away instead of creating a zone-specific shard to balance player populations. By a layer, we managed to create the entire game-world in real time. Would we have hundreds of mountains of smaller populations a few months in? We had serious concerns about what would happen when realms began to mature and populations changed. If we configured the servers so that the number of players allowed in-world at once would be doubling, we would have needed hundreds and hundreds more realms than us were at launch. But we knew that the game would come to a huge demand when it was released, so we were not sure how it would have been as soon as the game was fully finished. For WoW Classic, I didn’t think this could be a great solution for population management because of the irony of the idea that a shared world would be the universal reality. These shards do the same, and in case of being too full, players can find themselves transferred to another shard. In World of Warcraft, every zone can be harded so that thousands of players can congregate in a single zone a thousand times but spread across several different spheres. From the beginning we really wanted that game to feel like it would in 2004 with the same contiguous world where players could interact with one as few immersion-breaking or awkward moments as possible. To look at how we got here, we thought it might be helpful to refresh our experience with regards to how WoW Classic was built. This wasn’t a deliberate design choice for us, so the reason for this was not a necessary change, due to the nature of WoW Classic and the manner in which our realms function. But I wanted to say in the beginning that the Battle for Wintergrasp will be available in Wrath Classics in the instances of a battleground like the Alterac valley. We have to talk about that in this article.
The WoW Classic team shares some insights on the Wrath Classic and its future.Īs part of our ongoing development for Wrath of the Lich King, we were in intense work on the Battle for Wintergrasp, and wanted to review our plans for the game of the present and discuss that content.