Today, it’s become the source of a number of technical limitations for World of Warcraft. We’ve been able to introduce some great new technology using MPQ, such as our streaming client, but we’ve really pushed the file format far beyond what it was ever intended to be used for. Introducing Our New File Format: CASCįor nearly 20 years, Blizzard games have used a file format called Mo’PaQ (MPQ for short) as a way to compress and store game files.

This early phase of testing will help us ramp up for our larger beta phase later on, when we’ll be inviting more players. As such, the expansion content available during this first phase will be quite limited-many of the expansion’s major features, such as Garrisons, won’t be available until a later point in the testing process. One of our goals for this very early stage of the Alpha is to test out some new technology in the wild with employees and friends and family, including a new file format called CASC (more on that below). As part of this, we’ll begin using public servers to host the data, which means you may begin seeing some datamined information show up in the usual places. We’ve been hard at work on World of Warcraft®: Warlords of Draenor™, and today we’ve entered the Alpha phase of our expansion testing.

Heroes of the storm sound files