World of Warcraft’s new character-select screen made me emotional
polygon.comWorld of Warcraft celebrates the 20th anniversary of its launch later this year, and like any long-running game, it’s seen some massive changes in its time. The biggest of these typically arrive in the “pre-patch” updates that usher in major systemic changes shortly before a new expansion goes live. Past pre-patches have reworked all the questing on the game’s original continents, squished the stats on every item, reduced character levels, reworked talent trees, and basically restructured the entire game.
The pre-patch for the 10th expansion, The War Within, just dropped, officially moving WoW to version 11.0. With the new update came the first full redesign of the character-select screen in the game’s history — a seemingly minor update that still caused my heart to jump into my mouth.
Let me explain.
One of a couple of big systemic changes arriving in the 11.0 patch is Warbands. WoW developer Blizzard is moving a lot of progression in the game to be account-wide, rather than specific to a single character: For instance, action reputation will now be shared across all your characters. It’s a recognition of the fact that these days, a lot of WoW’s audience plays multiple characters (or “alts”), and doesn’t necessarily want to do the same grinding over and over again. To simplify this process, Blizzard created Warbands, a grouping of all the characters on an account — even if they belong to opposing factions, or live on different servers. (You can read more about Warbands in this official Blizzard blog post.)
To visualize your Warband, WoW’s character select screen now groups all your characters together, regardless of server — and shows the top four characters hanging out together around a cozy campfire. (Previously, WoW would just give you an individual hero shot of each character against a background appropriate to their race.) Blizzard says it plans to introduce new Warband scenes later on, potentially making room for more than four characters.
It’s hard to
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