The Big World of Warcraft Forever Interview: Blizzard Reveals Its Plan for the Next Great MMO

Now that the World of Warcraft Forever beta has come to an end, Blizzards alternative history version of Vanilla WoW is finally ready for a full launch on November 4. But even though the beta was extensive, it was capped at level 30, which leaves plenty of mystery for fans. Luckily I was able to sit down with Blizzard principal game designer Kris Zierhut and lead Classic designer Tim Jones to tour through the game and chat about what the future holds. And, really, it does sound like WoW Forever is going to take a pretty unique path as it unfolds over the next few years.

Kris Zierhut: I know you're very interested in this question of what it means to have a single subscription with these three pillars that we talked about at BlizzCon and how they're different and what each of them means. We should probably start with WoW Classic, because it’s kind of the base start. Take somewhere like Elwynn Forest where you're going to go to.

It's been that zone for 22 years with very little change, and Classic Era, the Classic cycle, really the Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King as well, is really when we think of it a little bit like a museum. It's what the game was, so we can preserve that forever for the people who loved it and for reference and people to see, oh, what was it like back then?

So it's an attempt to just recreate the world as it was in that 2004 to 2008 cycle.

And now Forever is saying, well, what if instead of opening the Dark Portal and moving on to Outland, what if that dev team back in 2006, Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton and Scott Mercer and Eric Dodds and me, other people on the team, what if we'd stayed in the original world and kept on developing it and done things that were consistent with what they would've done back then?

Whether that's adding additional quests... So here in Elwynn, there's one major new quest line that involves Kobolds stealing books. But every start area has new quests, every zone has new quests, new things to discover. We've made a great effort to look at all of the rare creatures in the world and make sure each of them has unique and interesting things that they drop if you fight the rare creatures.

Or things like Trade Skills, where we made Trade Skills more prominent, achieved Eric Dodds' original vision for what Trades could be by adding to them, adding new recipes and making it more important and more balanced with the rest of the game. So if they've been able to work on the game for a couple more years before releasing it, what would they have done? And then of course, modern.

IGN: How did Blizzard decide on what stayed from Classic unchanged, then what was added that was probably more of a modern feature? Because I know the DPS meters and the Cooldown Manager are in Forever.

Zierhut: Right. First, we look at our four major pillars on our design values. Way back when we were starting to make changes in Wrath of the Lich King Classic, you said, "Hey, before we get started on this whole path of making changes, what is important to us? What are our guiding principles of making the world still feel classic?" The most important probably of those is ‘the world is the main character.’ We think the world has a story that you discover while you explore it with your friends. It's your player stories when you wander into these quirky little places that have their own local stories about minor characters and not world shattering events and not major NPCs.

It's about the journey being just as important as the destination, that there's all kinds of cool things to discover and experience along the way, and we want to make sure that we keep adding new things to see along the way. It's not all about max level.

And I think that's probably one of the biggest philosophical differences between retail as you call it, and what Forever is. Retail is very focused on what's going on at max level. We create a new campaign, you level up through the campaign and now you're max level again. And it's all about things for max level, where we want to keep on delivering new things to do all the way through the level up experience and reasons to make new characters and experience the journey all over again.

A sort of goal of that is then to make sure that the world always feels full, no matter what zone you go to, there's always characters in that level range. We were very inspired by World of Warcraft Hardcore in that. We loved how in Hardcore it always felt like every zone you went to was full of other players. It was never empty, and part of that was because you always had to re-roll a new character when you died. We were looking for how we could get the same kind of effect in World of Warcraft Forever by encouraging [players] to make new characters and experience the journey again.

Approachable and familiar, which is an interesting pillar because in some ways. It's a little bit at war with itself. We want the game to be approachable in the sense that we want a new player, somebody who's never played World of Warcraft, to walk up in 2026. And by the way, we know there are many, many tens of thousands of people in this category just from seeing in the beta.

A new player who's never played before, can they learn the game and find it approachable and understand it and become new people to go on the journey? Can we continue to grow and collect new players? So, [being] approachable is very important. And the original classic game was very, very approachable. And then familiar is, well, as much as possible, try to keep things familiar to what was in the Classic era. So if you played in the Classic era and you come into Forever, you're like, oh yeah, this feels like how that used to work. This feels familiar to me. I'm home. I'm not in some alien, strange place.

And a lot of that was careful attention to things like the models, where we decided we wanted to keep the standard definition models or at least an option between standard definition and high definition models and the animations on them. The way we decided to go about the lighting and shadows of the world and making sure that things felt the same as they always had, or the UI, making sure that while we're using a lot of modern UI conveniences you talked about, that it still feels like a classic game and not just a copy of the Retail UI. It feels like its own game with its own UI goals.

And finally, our last big pillar was to nurture and protect social experiences. So we feel that one of the Classic era's biggest strengths was just how social a game it was. You need other people to do things, to make progress on the big things. Now, you could go adventure by yourself, you can make progress by yourself, but the game's just kind of always better with friends to do a dungeon, to do a harder quest, to do a raid. There's always opportunities to have friends and get more out of the game.

So for that, we leaned into new systems like the new camping system, which is designed to help people have good experiences. They run into each other in the wilderness. I find somebody out in the wilds in Feralas and they've got a camp and I sit down at camp and I add something to it. They're happy, I'm happy. We both get buffs. We have to sit there for a minute and talk to each other. And when we talk to each it's like, 'Hey, we're working on the same quest.'

Well, let's group up and do it together. It'll be faster. It'll be easier. We log in the next day and say, oh, that person's on my ‘recently played with’ list. Maybe I'll ask them to play with me again. Maybe they still have some quest in Feralas. And soon an actual relationship is born that continues past those couple encounters.

That's our goal, our vision for how that works. And so those pillars drive a lot of our decision making. So we say, 'Hey, we want to change this thing. I've got this idea for how I could change it. Should we do it or not?' Well, does it strengthen those pillars? Does it weaken those pillars? Does it do something sort of neutral? And we try to pick only the things that strengthen the pillars.

One area we made a lot of changes on is sort of a sub-goal that we ran across during development, which is the idea of ‘unsolving’ the game. People who've been playing Classic era for the last 21, 22 years, they know the perfect leveling path. They know exactly what Trade Skills to take, exactly what talents to take, exactly what gear to collect. And we wanted to make a new experience so somebody familiar with how it played before understands how it works, but maybe what they've done 10 or more times before isn't always the right choice.

IGN: One of the biggest questions I've had about Forever since it was announced at BlizzCon is, there's all these graphics improvements, and the game looks incredible, especially when it comes to lighting and the water physics. Why were these improvements made here and not in the modern version of the game?

Zierhut: I think they were made here first, is a better clarification. I think they're planning on eventually doing some of these same things in the Retail game as well. So it's not like it's a Forever-only feature, like better water, better lighting, those things are coming for retail as well. I don't know when, but I know they're talking about doing it.

But why here? A few reasons. One big one is in our minds 20 years later, we remember what WoW was like in 2004 as just a little bit shinier and better than it actually was. So there's this vision of, let's give people Azeroth as they remember it, not as it actually was. They remember it having spectacular graphics and these crazy vistas and lighting and shadows, but when you go back and look at it and say, oh yeah, we've made a lot of progress making these things better.

This isn't as great anymore as it used to be, but I remember it being that great. So let's make it actually look as cool as our memories tell us it looked. That was one part of driving it.

Another part of driving it was those tens of thousands of new players we're talking about. We want to bring in the next generation of gamers who are used to a lot of these higher graphical fidelity things. Let's bring that into Forever, especially if we can maintain World of Warcraft's classic style and visual aesthetic, which we did. I think we did an excellent job. The game looks like the same game in terms of the style, the art style and the types of characters and the types of buildings you see, but it just looks so much more beautiful than it did before.

IGN: How much of a lift was it bringing these new graphic systems to the WoW engine? Because I know the WoW engine is famously huge and I’ve heard the word spaghetti code a few times in the forums, for instance.

Zierhut: It is not spaghetti code. I think that's totally an unfair player characterization. I think it's personally one of the best game engines out there. When I have friends go off to, because they've left Blizzard to work in another company, work in other engines, when we have conversations like, 'Oh man, I wish I just had the WoW engine. Could we just license the WoW engine? It would be so much easier, better to do the things I want to do.' I've heard that comment repeatedly from other developers.

And kind of the opposite of spaghetti code. What our developers have done over the last really 25 years, because it started even before the game came out, was continually improve the engine and make updates to make it run better, run more efficiently. We can get a higher frame rate, have more units in the same area, [and] have better server response times because we've been perfecting these algorithms and making them better and better and better every year.

And now it's really hard to catch up. It's the best that there is because it's been continuously developed for 25 years, which is the complete opposite of spaghetti code. It's really a fantastic engine. Players say that on the forums and it really isn't that. There's bugs, that's what players say when there's bugs. And any piece of software is going to have bugs. That's reality.

IGN: On the subject of bugs, another thing I've been curious about is what the update schedule for this game is going to look like. Because one of the biggest topics in the modern version of the game right now is the eight week patch cadence since Dragonflight. I've seen a lot of people complaining about repeated content and buggy launches. Are the future updates for Forever going to be coming as frequently or is it just going to be more laid back, slow growth?