World of Warcraft Forever is a return to an era of WoW that millions of people hold very dear to their hearts – but it isn’t supposed to just be exactly ‘as it was’ back in the day. Blizzard has made clear its desire to push Forever in a new direction, one that retains the core values of that launch experience and expands them out horizontally rather than chasing the ever-upwards vertical climb of level cap and gear score increases. But with such huge popularity in the WoW Forever beta, which feedback do you listen to first?
World of Warcraft Executive Producer Holly Longdale and Associate Production Director Clay Stone just took to the stage at PAX Australia to discuss the road to WoW Forever and how the pitch came to be. During the talk they revealed some of the initial pitch slides that were shown to the team internally when ‘Classic Plus’ was just a spark in the eye, and how Blizzard settled on adding a third pillar to its landmark MMORPG. So far, it’s paying off in grand style.
“It’s insane,” Longdale laughs. “In our recorded history at Blizzard there’s been no beta bigger than this. People are playing it like it’s live, and we make changes, we fix stuff; ‘I don’t agree with that change.'” It’s a nice problem to have. “We’re delighted,” she says, “I don’t think we were ready for this kind of engagement. We hoped – you always hope you get that lightning strike moment. You never expect it. Don’t do that to yourselves. But this is magic, absolute magic.”
With so many voices shouting, there’s feedback in all directions. “Social media when these MMOs came out wasn’t really a thing, so we had some very focused areas where we got feedback,” Longdale remarks. “Now feedback comes from everywhere. And I think the lesson we learned the most over time is ‘You don’t listen to the loudest people in the room.'” She explains that when the team notices trends among those voices, they’ll study the data and “do research to make sure that we have as much information as possible.”
With millions of people all playing, “you just have to accept that you’re not going to make everybody happy,” Longdale continues. “We have to make some calls, determine, ‘What is our game? What is it for? Who is it for?’ We have to try and walk that line as much as possible because otherwise you’ll give a lot of people a little bit, instead of a complete experience when you focus.
Stone mentions that it was the launch of WoW Classic Hardcore in 2023 that sold the team on the premise of being more experimental. “The response to that blew us away. It was crazy. That was the moment when really Blizzard and the community came together outside of the original Classic 2019 launch and we said, ‘Okay, we can build something almost entirely new, or that feels entirely new.'”
During the rest of the talk, the pair discuss some of the new zones in Forever, as well as digging into the nuances of dungeon design and player pathing. Stone touches on the Riverglades, a completely new region: “You’re not supposed to go there now, but I’ve watched the beta and I know some players have found their way in there through large parties… which is fine, they’ve gotten to experience a taste of this.” He says he’s “excited for players to be able to experience it at the appropriate level once we launch the whole game.”
As for how Blizzard is thinking about future content for World of Warcraft Forever, Stone reveals there are “three buckets.” There are the expected things that are on player wishlists such as Mount Hyjal. There are unexpected, “high concept” ideas such as the Skyborne and Zephras Isle. The likes of Riverglades falls into that third bucket, which he says “fits right in between the two – it fits seamlessly into that original vanilla era WoW,” but despite that sense of familiarity, “No one was expecting something like this.”