Blizzard Entertainment is inching closer and closer to releasing a new pillar of its World of Warcraft franchise. Not an expansion, but a reimagining of the original release via World of Warcraft Forever (WoW Forever). New zones, new quests, new raids, a whole lotta new, with the only limitation of keeping us strictly to before the Dark Portal opened on Outland.
We spoke with two of the developers behind this new core WoW release, Mike Nuthals, lead Encounter Designer, and Tim Jones, Lead Designer, on developing so much new content in the style of 2004’s WoW, what efforts are being made to maintain the economy, and what players may expect in each major content update.
Our conversation began with the challenges of creating so many new raids, dungeons, zones, and more in the style of the original release of World of Warcraft. Mike Nuthals, being a Lead Encounter Designer, talked about the raids and dungeons.
“The first thing we did as a team when we started, we knew we were going to make a bunch of dungeon content; we were like, ‘we should really play a lot of classic WoW’. So we played almost all the Classic WoW dungeons. We poked at the raids. We were looking at what the complexity of the bosses was and how long fights would last.”
World of Warcraft Froever is trying to have a “classic” feel without replicating Vanilla WoW.
Nuthals continued, diving into why so much effort went into hyper-analyzing the original content. “We really wanted the game to feel authentic because we knew our dungeons were going to sit a zone away from the dungeons that existed. We wanted to make sure that they felt like they belonged in the game, that it all felt cohesive and one big experience for our players.”
Tim Jones added that all the new content so far builds on one of WoW Forever’s core focuses. That being, this version of WoW is a found photograph experience, similar to Season of Discovery. “We strive for making content that feels like it could have always existed. We want people who have never played World of Warcraft or who are very familiar with World of Warcraft to feel that when they come across a new piece of content, whether it’s a quest, a zone, a dungeon, or a piece of gear, it feels like it could have always existed within the game.”
Jones continued, diving into the constant comparison of the old versus the new. “We constantly measure anything that we build, whether it’s a new zone, to make sure that it makes sense within the context of existing lore. We playtest the crud out of this content nonstop and continue to point at our core design philosophies. It’s like, ‘Does this make sense? Does this feel correct? Is this overly complex? Does this adhere to the pacing and the visual fidelity and the vibes of that original Vanilla world. We’re constantly checking that ourselves. Even when content is live, we will continue to have that conversation with players.”
QA is important to perfecting encounter designs in WoW Forever.
The conversation moved to encounter design even further. With WoW Forever, each new raid release will include a 10-man and a 20-man raid. The first raid release, one month after launch, will have twenty-one never-before-seen bosses across the Hyjal Summit and Barrow Deeps raids. Patches are released four months apart, and releasing two raids about every four months is a lot of design work and has a high chance of having repeating mechanics or one raid feeling weaker than the other.
Nuthals said the key to preventing these woes from happening is lots of brainstorming and looking at what’s already been done. “We have a big brainstorm. One of the topics that comes up is, does this feel kind of like a boss we’ve done? So we’ll brainstorm some ideas on how to make each boss feel super unique and different.”
He continued by talking about the balance of creating new bosses and making sure they don’t cross into more complex fights that are more commonly found in Modern. “My first kind of draft out of the board, and they felt a little more mainline. Maybe you were moving your character around a whole lot, or there were just like a lot of moving parts. When we playtest as a team, we have an awesome QA group that we work with that gets to playtest our stuff.”
The statement went further, diving into some of those early comments from QA and playtesting. “We’re like, “Oh, I can see as a designer where I may have pushed complexity a little far, or this ability does this and this and this. Let’s maybe pull back on some of that, and then this ability is a lot clearer as to what the cause and effect of the mechanic might be. I think one of the coolest things is there’s so much creativity in those Classic WoW encounters. We have so much creativity and space to explore quirky mechanics and really let players explore their class buttons and have some success in the raid,” Nuthals explained.
With major patches coming out about every four months, Jones shared what players can expect from each release. In summary, there will be constants like new raids, with fun additions every now and then, like new classes, zones, etc.
“There’s going to be things that we want players to be able to expect and rely upon. There will be a steady cadence. I think that this is most especially true for our raid content. We want players to expect that we will continue to deliver content every patch that provides some new avenue of gameplay exploration or character progression for players of all types.”
Jones added, “So whether that’s a new PvP season that comes along with the raid tier, a new reputation, new crafting recipes, or a progression path for a profession that didn’t exist before, or new zones, new quests in existing zones, new mysteries, secrets, new dungeons, new level-up dungeons, or new max-level dungeons.”
Continuing, “The gist of it is, players should expect from us that we will continue to build upon this game at all levels and for players of all types. If you’re rolling an alt, we want that experience to feel brand new. Like take a different path, find, go through, go through different dungeons this time, go for different item sets, level a different set of professions. There are items and sets and profession stuff that people have no idea exist, even from like level 30 to 60. Beyond our max-level content, it’s going to be exciting for people to figure out the best in-slot list is for getting ready for raids, and we want to disrupt that every patch.”
WoW Forever is trying to avoid additional catch-up mechanics.
Speaking of alts, we chatted about what is being done to help new characters and new players who may be starting later after release to get caught up. In Modern WoW, every mid-season patch includes new catch-up mechanics for gear. Every season changes the baseline for obtainable gear as well, to prepare for the harder content.
Jones said that they’re trying to avoid all that. “When you do that, you just run the risk of diminishing the accomplishments of the person who’s put a lot of effort into doing that. We’re not letting people skip the leveling process. So if we’re not doing that, then why would we allow people to skip a raid tier. The level cap’s not moving anywhere. There’s only so many raids above you, and hopefully, as I mean, we’re seeing so many people jump into the game. There’s going to be a rich community of people at various skill levels and guild sizes, so it will be easy for people to find a group that matches your pace and progression.”
As for patch cadence and overlap, Joens said all teams within Blizzard communicate about what they’re cooking. But overlap isn’t much of a concern for the team when going up against Modern WoW and other Blizzard properties.
“It’s a giant Jenga puzzle. It’s a fun one, but our production works very hard and coordinates between classic and modern, as well as the other games at Blizzard, to make sure that we do our best not to cannibalize each other. But that’s the wonderful thing about World of Warcraft Forever. The best thing about the game is that it’s completely okay to play at your own pace. So even if there’s other cool stuff out there, go play it. Come back. Take it at your own pace.”
WoW Forever is cracking down on selling gold for real money.
Lastly, we talked about the player economy and how to maintain it so it doesn’t get overbloated or overwhelmed by outside influences. One major push since WoW Forever‘s beta began was the crackdown on real-money transactions for gold. Jones confirmed that Forever‘s team is paying closer attention than ever before:
“We are committed to making sure that we are paying more attention than we ever have to our economy, and making sure that we enforce fair play where possible. It is extremely important to us to maintain the integrity of the economy, especially given how big economies are going to be on our real estate architecture. We’re taking a much stronger stance on what we tolerate in terms of breaking the rules economy-wise.”
Similarly, Jones talked about any in-game ways to manipulate gold acquisition. That too is being watched very closely.
“We probably have too much information to sort through, but we have very talented people that organize all that information. They do economy reports. They communicate with us weekly so that we understand which creatures are generating the most gold. What vendored items are generating the most gold. What creatures are being killed the most, etcetera.”
Adding, “We can’t guarantee that we’ve caught every situation out in the world that might be an unfair giveaway to players, but you know it’s a beauty of a game that we are going to continue to support and build upon. We can fix those things almost instantly once we know about them and understand the issue. If I have to come in on a weekend and send a hotfix to nerf a certain unfair spawn or gold farm or something like that, I’ll do it.”
With launch less than a week away, it’s exciting to see how a more chill-focused WoW product will play out. One that is full of unknowns, mysteries, and dark corners to explore, all in a world that we all have loved to be a part of for over 20 years.
World of Warcraft Forever launches on PC on November 4th.