World of Warcraft: Forever is “realmless”, which has a couple of advantages for oceanic (OCE) players—who so often get the short end of the stick when it comes to MMORPGs. Blizzard has servers in Australia, so OCE players can enjoy not having terrible ping, but due to the smaller playerbase they share a lot of overlap with the North American server architecture.
Which produces a unique problem: As it stands, OCE players are stuck in perpetual night. See, Forever has a 24 hour day/night cycle, so if you play during the evening and your timezone’s matched to the server, the sun will set in Azeroth roughly at the time it would outside your window. But since OCE players are very much not local to North America… the curse of endless night persists.
As explained here on the WoW forums: “Because our servers share North American clock cycles, playing after work means the game is locked in pitch black. Log on at 7 pm? Midnight. Saturday afternoon? Dark. Unless you ruin your sleep schedule to play at 4 am, you practically never see the sun in Kalimdor.”
A solution, however, was offered by the game’s developers in an official podcast on the WoW channel—since Australia does actually have local server architecture, lead software engineer Ana Resendez says that “we could have an Australia timezone in those, but what happens if you’re playing and suddenly you get an invite from [a North American player], then all of a sudden you go from night to day within like a couple of seconds? It’s something we talked about.”
Which is a little immersion-breaking, for sure, but likely preferable to being stuck in eternal night—especially given how gosh-darn pretty Forever’s lighting changes are. There are a ton of lovely sunsets that’d be a shame to miss. Senior game designer Josh Greenfield, however, straight-up asks if Australian players would be happy for the chance to get some virtual vitamin D every once in a while:
“How would you feel about that, Australian players? Is that a thing you’d be okay with? Would you be okay with your day/night suddenly changing abruptly? … Getting feedback on that honestly would be helpful.”
It’s a teeny-tiny sample size, but at least on the r/wowforever subreddit, OCE players are all in favour: “In Retail,” writes the author of one thread, “to make ourselves day time we are constantly having potions or toys to shift the sky for us anyway, it’s something a lot of us are accustomed to … the shift would only happen when joining a dungeon.
“The gameplay in WoW Forever is a lot slower, you are not joining and leaving groups, getting kicked for your score or your gear level, you spend a significant time in that group so you’re not going to be always changing the day and night.”
However, as some players note, maybe the problems with the day/night cycle being 24 hours to begin with. Some suggest it exists on a 20-hour cycle, instead—which would gradually shift the time of sunset around so that players with more rigid schedules could experience Forever’s different lighting states for themselves.
Which, personally, sounds like the best bet. While I do think it’s neat if a game world matches my real-world state—it’s always fun to get cosy—I’d rather have variety than consistency, especially when Forever’s lighting is such an upgrade.
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