WotLK Beta Blog – World Phasing and You
In two months, the WoW buzz is going to be all about world phasing. It is JUST that good.
World phasing allows multiple people to see the same part of the world in different ways. Through quests and events, you can change the world (Granted, it'll be only for you, but that doesn't change the impact). It is basically it is like every person has their own reality of the world game world but all realities are compressed into one, with each player able to interact with other players there but every player sees their own reality.
I never played more than a half hour on a death knight character so I didn't experience that zone's phasing so my first encounter with it was in Grizzly Hills. The first Horde town in the Grizzly Hills is Conquest Hold, lead by the merciless orc Krenna. After doing some quests for her and other NPCs in the zone, you realize how brutal she is. Someone lied? Break their legs! There's a group of human wilderness hunters passing through? Slay them all. While she may be brutal and quick to anger, her level-headed sister Gorganna assists you in circumventing carrying out some of Krenna's orders. At one point you even get a letter from Gorganna in the mail warning you that Krenna's wrath may soon be upon you.
In the center of Conquest Hold is a giant pit for a Ring of Blood style quest chain that awards some nice blue quality gloves. You fight a couple various different enemies including a bear, a stone golem and a gladiator orc. The final event, however, is a showdown between Krenna and Gorganna in which Krenna falls. We've encountered plenty of events like this before, so I figured that this event was nothing special. It reminded me of the questline in Dustwallow Marsh where you challenge and defeat the ogre leader of Brackenwall Village and he runs off, only to be back standing there 5 minutes later. This time it was different though. When I went back into the main hold, Krenna was no longer there. Her sister had taken up the mantle of leadership from where Krenna used to be. Imagine if when you scared off that ogre in Brackenwall, he never came back.
This is one of the things many people have been wanting for ages. It is a world that changes with us. While not a fully realized changing world, this is a major step in the right direction for WoW. It almost seems like phasing hasn't been getting enough buzz, I haven't but a few people in the blogosphere talk about it so I wonder why Blizzard doesn't hype it up a little more. While it would be nice to see world phasing retroactively added to the past content, I understand what a monumental amount of man hours that would take to do that and how in all honesty, it isn't worth it. Though this all does make me very excited for any future expansions and whenever Blizzard DOES make a new MMO so we can see a ground up implementation of things like this.
P.S.
There was a major event I recently encountered in my questing that heavily relies on world phasing, but I am going to put that into a separate blog post because it is filled with HEAVY spoilers since it is what Blizzard considers to be the end of "Act 1" of WotLK and I don't want to accidentally spoil it for those that don't want to know.