Forever’s language preference: where to set it, and what it does and does not decide

Forever lets you choose a preferred online language, and Blizzard’s ruleset guide, updated on 22 October, explains where to find it. Press Escape to open the Game Menu and choose Options. Under the System heading, select Languages and Social, then pick your language under Preferred Online Language. These steps come from the guide; we have not checked them in a launch client.

One setting for the whole account, with a cooldown

According to the guide, the setting is account-wide and applies to all of your characters. After you change it, there is a 24-hour cooldown before you can change it again.

That makes it a choice to settle before a guild or friend group starts making characters. A wrong pick costs a day.

What it is meant to do

The guide says the preference lets you encounter other players who share it. Blizzard’s Deep Dive panel recap from 13 September describes the same aim. Neither post says how strongly the setting weighs on who you meet, or whether it ever keeps players who chose different languages apart.

It is separate from your ruleset

Your ruleset is the bigger boundary. The guide says grouping, dungeons and raids happen within one ruleset, because cross-ruleset grouping is not supported. Battlegrounds may include players from other rulesets, except Hardcore, and Horde and Alliance still cannot group together. The guide does not describe the language setting as changing any of those rules.

What the region announcements cover

Blizzard has announced several regional details in writing:

• Names are unique per region, according to the Deep Dive recap, and use a two-part format.
• Early Name Reservation opens at regional times, according to the name reservation post of 20 October. It opens at 18:00 CET on 27 October in Europe and at 1:00 p.m. PDT that day in North America, with Korea and Taiwan following at 07:00 local time on 28 October.
• A stress test was scheduled for 21 October on what Blizzard called Forever’s proper regional hardware, according to a staff post published the day before. That post announced the plan; it does not confirm how the test went.

These posts set out names, schedules and hardware by region. On their own, they do not answer whether players in North America and Europe can group together, and none of the posts reviewed for this article addresses that question. If your group is split across the Atlantic, look for a direct answer from Blizzard before you plan around either outcome.