As we set about designing what an instanced version would look like, we took note of some of the unique and iconic features of the original Battle for Wintergrasp. somehow entirely redesigning Wintergrasp, we felt that instancing was the change that would cause the least harm and allow the largest number of players who wanted to participate to do so.Īs a result, we’ve had to make a tough choice to rebuild the Battle for Wintergrasp as an epic, large-scale battleground experience instead. a limited-access experience that excluded the overwhelming majority of players vs. So, we had to compromise, and ultimately when weighing alternatives like unacceptable performance vs. We wish there were a way to recreate the original vision of Wintergrasp, but that simply is impossible with the community sizes that Classic has grown to support. We discovered this fact early on in during Wrath Classic development and spent a significant amount of time trying to find a workable solution to allow it to function as it did originally, but ultimately, we weren’t able to land on a solution that we felt would allow the battleground to function in a satisfying way on any realm with layers. Behind the scenes mechanisms, events, and scripts that control how the battle is initiated, how it’s resolved, and how the rewards are given out cannot function properly across layers. Put simply, the Battle for Wintergrasp as it existed in 2008 is fundamentally incompatible with layers (or the modern sharding system, for that matter). This allows you to run past another player in Westfall and then run into that same player later on in Stranglethorn Vale. There are also additional rules and protections in place around when you are moved from one layer to another to minimize occurrences when experiencing the effects of the world changing around when you are shifted from one layer to another. When certain conditions are met, instead of creating a zone-specific shard to balance player populations, an entire copy of Azeroth is spun up. Layers allowed us to effectively create “copies” of the entire game world. Would we have hundreds of realms with low populations a few months in?Īs a result, we created the layer system. If we configured the servers to allow even double the number of players allowed in-world at once, we would have needed hundreds and hundreds more realms than we had at launch, and we had some serious concerns about what would happen when realms started to mature, and populations shifted.
However, we knew going into it that there would be a large demand to play the game when it was released, but we weren’t sure at the time how that would play out as the game matured. For WoW Classic, we didn’t feel like it was a great solution for population management due to how antithetical it is to the idea of a single shared world. These “shards” are self-balancing, and when a certain shard gets too full, players can find themselves transferred to another shard. In modern World of Warcraft, each zone can be “sharded” to allow thousands of players to congregate in a single zone but spread over several different copies of the zone. From the start, we very much wanted the game to feel like it did in 2004, with a single contiguous world where all players could interact with as few immersion-breaking or awkward moments as possible.
To understand more on how we got here, we thought it might be helpful to give a refresher on how WoW Classic was built. This was not a deliberate design choice so much as a necessary change due to the nature of WoW Classic and the way that our realms function. We have a lot to talk about in this article, but we wanted to start off by sharing that the Battle for Wintergrasp will be available in Wrath Classic as an instanced battleground, similar to Alterac Valley. An iconic part of the original Wrath of the Lich King, the WoW Classic team shares some insights on the Battle for Wintergrasp development in Wrath Classic.Īs a part of our ongoing development for Wrath of the Lich King Classic, we’ve been hard at work on the Battle for Wintergrasp and wanted to take some time to go over our plans for this content.
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