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World of Warcraft’s Warbands system has been a pretty solid win for the aging MMO, adding a whole layer of alt friendliness to the game—I’ve particularly enjoyed being able to huck loot at my alts willy-nilly, and the stacking XP bonus you get for hitting level cap on each of your characters isn’t bad, either.
Well, there’s some more functionality coming to the system with Patch 11.1. As per Blizzard’s own patch 11.1 PTR notes, two major upgrades will be arriving alongside Undermine(d), which’ll be here early next year.
Firstly, as the notes read: “Additional camp groups can now be created on the character select screen with a maximum of 20 groups. Groups can be renamed or deleted by right clicking the group header button.” Previously, while all of your characters were considered in your Warband, you’d only be able to arrange four of them in the login screen’s campsite. Good for memes, not so great for the feeling of amassing an army of alts.
Now you’ll be able to group them. Which might not seem like a big deal at first, but as a long-time MMO player, I know the allure of glamour systems and style flexing. There will be a significant subsection of players arranging their action figures—I mean, World of Warcraft characters—in themed squads. Count on it.
Oh yeah, about that—the second upgrade are those backgrounds, as the notes read: “New Warband campsite backgrounds can now be unlocked for the character select screen. A list of available campsites can be found in a new tab in the Warband Collections pane.” Once you’ve collected a campsite, you’ll be able to assign them via the character select screen.
We also know roughly what these campsites look like, thanks to WoWHead’s crack team of dataminers. Patch 11.1 will have your default camp, a camp on the deck of the Nightfall Sanctum in Hallowfall, what appears to be a goblin rave—probably from Undermine(d)’s new raid—and two flavours of Dornogal.
Slim pickings for now, but I can only imagine now that the tech’s here, Blizzard’ll be hucking fistfuls of these at players soon: They’re likely easy enough to make with existing assets and locations.
All in all, it’s neat to see Warbands get expanded upon—and sooner, rather than later. The whole system is perhaps the biggest evidence point that Blizzard has chilled the hell out in the past few years and, just like Dragonriding, has the potential to add a ton of evergreen goodness to a game that’s somehow still on top of the MMO market, 20 years later.
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Kurt Indovina
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