Rulesets replace the realm list

The realm-selection screen is gone in World of Warcraft: Forever. A player picks a ruleset instead, before making a character. Blizzard set out how that works in a post on 21 September. The choice decides who you meet and who you can group with.

Four rulesets

A ruleset works more like a broad ecosystem of players than a single realm, writes Blizzard. There are four:

• Normal: the baseline experience, with exploration, questing and cooperation, and PvP only when a player goes looking for it.
• PvP: every trip into contested territory carries danger. In the game a player is described as almost always at risk of being attacked by the other faction.
• Roleplaying: for players who want to lean into the fantasy, with stricter rules for names and behaviour.
• Hardcore: death is permanent. Hardcore arrives sometime after the launch, and Blizzard does not say when.

Who you can play with

Grouping, dungeons and raids stay inside one ruleset. Cross-ruleset grouping is not supported, writes Blizzard, so two characters in different rulesets cannot run anything together. Battlegrounds are the exception and may mix players from several rulesets, except Hardcore, which stays separate.

Factions stay separate on top of that. Horde and Alliance still cannot group, which is what keeps the war in Warcraft, writes Blizzard.

Switching is deliberately hard

A player cannot hop between rulesets. Playing under a different one means making a new character there.

Hardcore is the one exception, and it only runs one way. A Hardcore character that dies can move to another ruleset, PvP included, to be brought back.

Collections and Legacy Points are account-wide across rulesets. Hardcore is handled apart: what is earned there can become available elsewhere, but progress from the other rulesets never flows back into Hardcore.

One faction on PvP

On the PvP ruleset a player can only make characters of one faction. Create an Alliance character there and Horde is closed off, and the other way round. On Normal, Roleplaying and Hardcore both factions stay open.

Blizzard also plans systems to keep the two populations closer together on PvP, along the lines of Season of Discovery, where character creation for a faction could be limited for a time. Two leads said the same thing in an interview with Game Informer on 20 September; this is the first time it stands in an official post.

A language preference on the account

A player can also set a preferred language and run into others who set the same one. It sits in the Game Menu under Options, then Languages and Social beneath the System heading, as Preferred Online Language.

The setting counts for the whole account and every character on it, and it carries a cooldown of 24 hours before it can be changed again.