This is the official Alpha for the Warlords of Draenor expansion pack. The installer was released on the official battle.net page for Beta testers. It can currently be downloaded and installed by anyone, as the files are on public-facing servers.
Initial notes
- The current alpha is very incomplete, as it is intended for Friends & Family of Blizzard Entertainment only. It is also the build that is being shown at conventions, including PAX East 2014.
- The game no longer uses MPQ files for storing game assets. A new compression format, called "CASC" (Content Addressible Storage Container) is in use, which makes it harder to extract data from the game files (hard, but not impossible!). Luckily, Blizzard exposes an API for reading/extracting files in the WoW executable, so some guys have found a way to hook into this API to pull data out of the archives (effectively step 1 of a custom decompressor app).
- CASC files appear to the game as a filesystem. It has the ability to repair itself from corruption, and reindex itself as-needed to add or delete content, without needing to patch complete files. It also appears to use zLib for compression.
- The Draenor continent is entirely new, not rebuilt from the old Outland continent from 2005 - Except for a small portion of Hellfire Penninsula which appears to have been copied and pasted from the old Outland map directly into the new Draenor map (Kil'Jaden's throne). It is likely that this is just to spruce up the landscape and fill in areas that need to still be developed.
- Several media outlets have scraped the internal game database for new items, spells and misc data.
- MMO-Champion initially showed off all the new zones, but Blizzard 'asked' them to take down all the images, since the Alpha is not supposed to be in the public domain yet.
