Retail World of Warcraft players, your wait is nearly over.
Most of the Warcraft chatter in recent weeks has been about a different project. The WoW Forever beta has been in the spotlight, from dataminers finding hidden items to reworked campfires. It's easy to forget that the main retail game has been testing its own next patch the whole time, with a lot less fanfare. That testing is now close to finished. Patch 12.1.5 for World of Warcraft: Midnight will go live on October 14th.
That's two weeks away. And while a ".5" patch can sometimes feel like a holding pattern between bigger releases, this one brings a solid list of additions for players who are still logging in to the retail game every week.
Dataminers love a beta. With World of Warcraft Forever, though, they've run into a wall.
The beta for WoW Forever has opened, and as expected, the people who dig through game files for a living went straight to work. What they found is interesting mostly because of what they didn't find. A large part of the game's item list is being kept out of sight on purpose, and it's not a small slice.
The Numbers Behind the Curtain
Icy Veins, the long-running guide and news site that many WoW players use for class builds and patch coverage, has put together a detailed breakdown of what is still hidden in the beta. The headline figure is simple: roughly 40% of the game's items are hidden from players.
Nobody expected the campfire to be the star of the show.
In the World of Warcraft Forever beta running this month, the feature generating the most chatter isn't a class, a zone or a boss fight. It's a pile of burning logs. Campfires have quietly become the beta's sleeper hit, the thing players keep bringing up when they talk about what makes this version of Azeroth feel different.
But this is an MMORPG, and any new system in an MMORPG will be pushed, poked and eventually turned against other players. Campfires were no exception. In short order, a feature built to bring people together became a trap for the most vulnerable people in the game.
Blizzard has plenty of new toys to show off in World of Warcraft Forever. Six of them, to be exact. But if you watch the latest promotional video for the game, you might come away thinking there is only one that really matters: the Undead Paladin.
That is not a knock on the other five. It is simply where the attention goes. The "Classic Plus" version of World of Warcraft Forever is adding six new class and race combinations, and the studio has clearly picked its headliner. The Undead Paladin gets the long, careful introduction. Everyone else gets a quick wave on the way past.
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