WoW: Forever is going to shard, and Blizzard is not pretending otherwise. “I want to set expectations that it’s not going to be a perfect continuous world at all times,” senior game designer Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield says in episode six of Blizzard’s WoW: Forever Podcast, published today. “There will be times where you will hit a zone boundary, or you’ll hit a situation where you’ll need to basically have a realm refresh or a world refresh happen.”
The better news is in the same conversation. Principal software engineer Frank Williams says the most visible problem of the beta, whole crowds popping in and out of existence at the Orgrimmar exit, was fixed in the final days. “The improvements actually pretty much erased that whole clip,” he says. “You won’t see that anymore when we go live.” Forever launches November 4.
Each zone, or small group of zones, is its own layer, and Blizzard can retune which ones connect
Greenfield gave the clearest description yet of how Forever’s partitioning works. To keep performance up, “we sort of have each individual zone or a small grouping of zones be kind of like one layer together,” and the thing Blizzard can tune is which zones are connected. That is why someone could walk out of Orgrimmar in the beta and appear out of nowhere in Durotar: the two were separate layers. For launch they will be connected, because Durotar will be “very slammed” with new characters while Orgrimmar sits quiet. Later that flips, and Blizzard expects to regroup zones as city battles start. “The way it looks at launch may be much different than the way it looks a month down the road.”
Williams added that the world servers for the connected zones are now “actually going to be the same between the two,” which is the technical reason the boundary pop-ins went away, and that “a whole bunch of bug fixes and tweaks” for the system are still coming. Greenfield said the team will not explain the internals in detail, because doing so would hand players ways to exploit the edge cases.
Original WoW capped a realm at 3,500 players, which is why one world cannot hold everyone
Lead software engineer Ana Resendez answered the question Blizzard keeps getting, which is why Forever cannot simply run one realm the way the Season of Discovery megarealm did. “There’s limits, actually, from the beginning,” she said. The original World of Warcraft hit its ceiling at a few thousand players, and a host chimed in with the number: 3,500, at which point realms queued. The servers “cannot handle hundreds of thousands or even potentially millions of people at the same time in a single contiguous world,” so some partitioning is unavoidable. Greenfield called it “another iteration” of the layers from 2019 Classic, with one difference: layers then copied the whole world, so a full Orgrimmar spun up an empty duplicate of everything else, while Forever’s smaller partitions let Blizzard cap individual zones. Westfall and the Barrens felt too full for tags early in the beta, and halving a zone cap fixed it within a day or two.
The trade-off Blizzard is defending: no wrong server to pick
Greenfield’s case for accepting the seams is the 2019 launch. “The biggest problem a lot of us had in 2019 was that you could have picked the wrong server, and we don’t ever want to create a situation again where you can pick the wrong server.” Region-wide rulesets, a healthier economy and more performant zones for PvP are the benefits he lists, and the team is “committed to continuing to make those incremental adjustments and improvements.”
Not everyone bought it. A r/classicwow thread titled “Time to Riot: Blizzard says Sharding will stay” drew 164 comments within hours, though its top replies mostly pushed back: “If I had to choose between sharding/layering and having the same dead server problems 2019 classic had, I’m picking sharding/layering all day.” Podcast guest Shobek, a self-described roleplayer and former “one realm, one layer Andy,” said the beta changed his mind because he never had to think about it while playing.
Time to Riot: Blizzard says Sharding will stay
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