// KOTAKU — GAMING
Blizzard Added A Working Torch To WoW: Forever And I Hiked All The Way Across Azeroth To Try To Get It
BlizzardWorld of WarcraftWorld of Warcraft: Forever
It was a long quest. A dangerous one. A quest that took me into the heart of enemy territory. I faced terrifying monsters and impossible odds. All for a single treasure:
Players have recently discovered a new, coveted item in World of Warcraft: Forever. It’s called the Night Watchman’s Torch. It’s a “toy” item that lets your character hold a light-producing torch in their hands for a period of time, while still letting you have a weapon equipped.
They added Torches! byu/IrishFistPunch inwowforever
Why is this such a big deal, you ask? Well, for one, World of Warcraft has never had a toy like this before, nor is there really a way to have a proper, working torch like this in any version of the game. There are weapons that are torches or torch-like, and many that light up or are on fire. But none of them actually cast light around the way this does, in such a way as to properly light up dark areas. It’s never been necessary in World of Warcraft, which is largely not a super dark game that would require such light sources.
But WoW: Forever…well, it doesn’t need them, but it can benefit. The improved lighting effects mean that some areas are brighter than normal, but others are darker, or misty, or have interesting shadows. Holding a torch, as shown in the video above, really adds a lot to the feeling of mystery and danger and adventure. It’s a cool little touch, the kind you want to see given the philosophies of the team making WoW: Forever.
I wanted to try to get a torch today to show you all, with some nice screenshots. So I checked where this thing is located: it’s apparently on a dead body in Duskwood which, if you’re unfamiliar, is on the south end of the Eastern Kingdoms, just south of Stormwind. Oof.
I play Horde, almost exclusively. It probably would have been easiest to just roll an Alliance character I didn’t care about and corpse-run my way down to Duskwood for the torch, but for some incomprehensible reason I decided—today, the day of a massive maintenance patch that would drop this afternoon and take hours—that I wanted to get this torch on one of my “main” Horde characters in the beta.
Duskwood is a zone for characters largely in their 20s, and I don’t have one of those. No one does. The beta, as of yesterday morning when I was doing this, capped everyone at 20. The big update raised that cap to 30, but at the time I was doing this, Duskwood was a bit of a dicey zone for anyone. My highest-level character was my Skyborne Elf, who was level 14, and also inconveniently located in Mulgore, which was…well, not the farthest possible zone from Duskwood, but certainly a non-ideal trek.
I’m a shaman, but not a high enough level yet to have Ghost Wolf. No one has mounts yet. I haven’t even been over to the Eastern Kingdoms at all, so I have no flight paths to speak of. I will be walking, then, across multiple zones in Kalimdor, taking a Zeppelin to Eastern Kingdoms, and then walking all the way from one end of the continent to the other, dodging high-level enemies and Alliance guards the whole way.