We got to sit down with World of Warcraft: Classic‘s Lead Software Engineer Ana Resendez and Associate Production Director Clayton Stone to talk about all the major changes coming to World of Warcraft: Forever. This isn’t an expansion to WoW Classic, or what’s coming after The Last Titan. Forever is a new third pillar of World of Warcraft, promising persistent horizontal expansion that takes place in the first year of the original 2004 MMO.
With Forever, it’s a mix of old and new. Old, classic gameplay, character design, and dungeon/raids mixed with brand new content, improved lighting and water effects, and class/race/specialization updates. We even got a whole new neutral race, the Skyborne, to expand both the Horde and Alliance’s roster. Yet with the pitch being that it’s an evolution from Season of Discovery, a lot of SoD content appears missing. The class changes didn’t appear to be present, and the new dungeons/raids aren’t available at launch.
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World of Warcraft: Forever is purposefully sticking to pre-Season of Discovery content for now.
Per Clayton Stone, that was intentional. The team wanted the launch of Forever to be a conservative take on Classic, with only new additions that fit into expanding the game’s original world. “For WoW Forever, we are starting a little bit on a more conservative side. We certainly heard feedback from players that with Season of Discovery, we pushed the envelope about as far as we could push it.”
Stone continued, “ We learned a lot from that, and as you’ll see over this weekend, as we dive into some of our class changes, we certainly made some unique changes to them while still preserving what makes each class special.” In other words, don’t expect massive shake-ups when Forever launches. Yet he continued, offering hope that for those wanting SoD content and class updates permanently, never say never.
Clayton added, “I think we will certainly bring in more and more of those interesting things that we brought into Season of Discovery for our classes. But for where we’re starting, we’re really working on filling out some of their skills that they didn’t necessarily have before.”
WoW Forever will add nine new dungeons at launch, PLUS two brand-new raids one month later.
Based on the What’s Next panel at BlizzCon, what Clayton means is making every class and specialization viable, a part of Classic and Vanilla WoW that forced players playing specific classes to be specializations that were the only good and viable ones for pushing content.
Lastly, we chatted about the new raids and dungeons coming with Forever. At and a month after launch, WoW Forever will add nine new dungeons as well as two brand new raids for players to experience on top of the brand new zones and the over one thousand never-before-seen quests. With the UI being improved to be similar to Retail, what about the approach to encounter design?
For raid and dungeon design, the Retail form has adapted for better visual clarity and more complex encounters from its Classic counterparts. But what about WoW Forever? They are sticking with making every new raid and encounter authentically classic. Including having set raid sizes and level requirements that don’t scale.
Dungeons and raids will have a set difficulty in WoW Forever.
According to Ana Resendez, the encounter designers focused on that original Classic feel with the new content. “We want to recreate more of the Classic feeling. So the encounters themselves are not gonna start with super complex mechanics where people are being thrown around in the room or anything like that. They’re more grounded. The whole idea is that we want these raid encounters and the dungeons to feel like a place that is challenging, but where you can also bring your friends.”
As for raid sizes, and why they’re sticking with 10-, 20-, and 40-man raids instead of flex or scaling sizes, Ana added that this maintains a level of difficulty that can be overcome. “We’re starting with 10- and 20-man, and no plans for flex at the moment. At the beginning, your group is gonna need 20 people to go in and defeat the new raid. But in the future, as you get more gear, maybe you might need less people.”
Resendez continued, “We don’t wanna lean towards, for example, content tuning or automatically changing the difficulty, or adapting to your level; it’s always gonna stay the same.” So dungeons and raids will have a set difficulty that you can make easier by simply out-leveling and out-gearing it. Which, in a way, makes sense when some of the raids will be available and meant for level 40+ characters instead of level-60 only.
World of Warcraft Forever is meeting every expectation of a Classic+.
Finally, the new raids at launch will not require attunement to enter, similar to the original entry-level raids. Beyond that, according to Clayton, that’s for us to discover. “I actually don’t think we should answer that one today. That one we’ll leave for players to find out a little bit more about.” So only time will tell if the new post-launch endgame raids will feature attunements as well or be more accessible for players to enter.
Regardless, World of Warcraft Forever is meeting every expectation of a Classic+. Lots of new content, and it will be built upon much more and for much longer than, say, a Classic season. Its mix of old and new, with a focus on exploration and allying with strangers in the wilderness, is the kind of freshness the WoW formula needs to stay new in a 20+ year-long MMO.
World of Warcraft Forever is available November 4th on PC, with a beta starting September 17th.
