Forever didn't add weather. It rebuilt it

The first time you walk into fog in the Forever beta you'll probably stop and look around. It doesn't switch on any more. You move into it, and it thickens around you, and when you turn your head the edge of it is somewhere behind you rather than pinned to your camera.

That's not a texture setting you forgot to turn down. Blizzard rebuilt how weather is drawn.

A shaft of light falling through the canopy in Ashenvale, picked out against hanging mist — Ashenvale. The light shaft is visible because there is something in the air for it to catch. Classic draws god rays too, but it has nothing for them to pass through.

Why Classic's rain never felt like you were in it

Classic renders weather as a sheet. There's a texture, it falls past the camera, and it moves with you. Stand still in Elwynn in the rain and then run: the rain doesn't stay behind, because it was never in the world. It was in front of your face.

Eighteen of Classic Era's twenty-one weather definitions work that way. They set an effect texture and very little else.

Forever ships sixty-one weather definitions. Of the forty-one that are new, exactly one uses that old texture path.

The rest are volumes you stand inside

The new definitions reach for fields Classic barely touches. Volume flags on 36 of the 41. Wind settings on 29, against two in all of Classic Era. Density and opacity overrides, colour tints with their own intensity, and a per-weather particulate layer that Classic ships with a single row and Forever ships with fifty-nine.

	Classic Era	Forever
Weather definitions	21	61
Particulate layers	1	59
With wind settings	2	29 of the 41 new

Mount Hyjal under a heavy purple haze, with motes of light drifting over the water and distant trees fading out — Hyjal, and three of those fields at once: a colour tint over the whole volume, drifting particulates, and far trees dissolving into the haze rather than popping out at a draw distance.

Several new entries carry sound ambience Classic doesn't have, so the audio got the same pass.

Durotar at sunset, the mesas behind Orgrimmar fading into orange haze — Durotar at dusk. The mesas do not get smaller into the distance so much as they get thinner, which is the same tinted volume doing the work.

Don't read zone forecasts into this

Worth being clear about what this doesn't tell you: the client now can render a lot more weather, but where it gets used is a different question, and for the new zones it isn't filled in yet. Nobody can tell you Riverglades gets storms. Not from this.

The client also numbers weather types rather than naming them, so anyone confidently telling you exactly how many new rain variants there are is guessing.

What you can say is that the toolkit went from a sheet in front of the camera to volumes in the world, and that's the kind of change you feel before you can explain.

From beta build 1.60.1.69977 against Classic Era 1.15.9.69722, both read through wago.tools. Screenshots are Blizzard's own, from the WoW Forever press kit, © Blizzard Entertainment. They show the look rather than any one weather entry; we can't match a press shot to a row in the table and won't pretend otherwise.