Blizzard details World of Warcraft Forever launch layering

Blizzard has outlined how layering will work when World of Warcraft Forever launches in the coming days, according to PCGamesN. The studio said the setup at launch will closely resemble the state of layering at the end of the beta.

PvE, PvP and roleplaying rule sets will be kept separate when the game goes live. Layering means not every player is visible to every other player at once, and Blizzard said it is reconsidering which zones are connected to each other for those purposes.

According to the studio, the layering configuration can be tuned and adapted after launch as player concentration shifts. Blizzard also said serious cases of groups vanishing or reappearing were largely resolved by the final days of the beta.

Party size and PvP under discussion

Blizzard said support for larger parties of 80 to 120 players is an idea under discussion but has not been announced. It added that it is exploring autodetection of PvP battles and expanding servers to keep battles contiguous.

In background, WoW Classic was developed while the modern retail game was live and being modified. Blizzard has said housing is not coming to WoW Forever, though work on the housing team's under-the-hood tech improvements helped the game's performance, and large-scale events worked well in the beta.