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.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/world-of-warcraft-forever-launch-interview-blizzard-azeroth
