// KOTAKU — GAMING
WoW: Forever Is Cranking Up The Weather And Players Are Losing Their Minds
Blizzard is about to make a slight tweak to World of Warcraft: Forever to enhance one of the game’s most beloved features: its weather.
In an extremely simple post to the WoW subreddit yesterday, the official WoW developer account shared that “increased weather effects” would be coming to certain zones in WoW: Forever‘s ongoing beta:
Starting soon you will see increased weather effects in certain WoW: Forever Beta Zones! byu/WarcraftTeam inwowforever
Let me tell you something: WoW players, we love weather. We’re always asking for more of it! The original version of World of Warcraft had fairly intense weather effects patched in pretty early on in certain zones. Like blizzards in Dun Morogh:
Critically, this weather was dynamic: sometimes it would rain, sometimes it wouldn’t. This, combined with the day and night cycle, meant that zones across Azeroth had different looks and feels to them depending on when you explored them, which added to the sense of Azeroth being a real place.
Unfortunately, as time went on, Blizzard stopped including such intense and varied effects in new zones, and in the retail version, a lot of the existing effects were removed. You can still get weather in some zones (I remember really loving the brief downpours in Zul’dazar several expansions ago), but it’s selective, and not nearly as common in the old world anymore. As such, a lot of players have been begging Blizzard for years now to bring back the old dynamic weather in retail, and with the announcement of Forever, some have been making their case for its reimplementation in that version of the game:
Hope that with classic forever we will get more weather byu/InternEven9916 inwow
Bring back the WEATHER EFFECTS FOR WARCRAFT:FOREVER! byu/Darthbobz inclassicwow
We need more intense weather effects. byu/Smokey42O inwow
In addition to just wanting weather, a lot of these people’s arguments center on WoW: Forever‘s improved visual effects, which are already giving a lot of old zones more character. Dark forests are misty, the sunsets and sunrises are glorious, the water is shimmery. Why not add rain and snow and such to that?