The complicated future of WoW Forever

Blizzard faces one of its biggest challenges with World of Warcraft: keeping a game alive with an approach built around doing away with expansions, keeping vertical progression to a minimum and embracing horizontal progression. Giving that world content will be essential, but so will giving players reasons to stay.

Can an approach like this retain players in the long run?

Blizzard and “innovation”

A long time ago, if someone had asked us about Blizzard, we wouldn’t have hesitated for a second to call it an innovative company. World of Warcraft changed the gaming landscape, not just MMOs, and set precedents that still form the backbone of many games today. Blizzard stood for innovation and, above all, quality.

Over the years, it has lost quite a bit of that identity. So much so that it is no longer even a pioneer within the MMO genre: it arrives late to systems such as Midnight’s housing or the lighting and graphical improvements we have just seen in Forever. For those of us who play World of Warcraft, these changes feel fantastic. But anyone outside the game looking at them might ask: “Sorry, you didn’t already have that?”

And that, to me, is what makes World of Warcraft: Forever so complicated. Can Blizzard come up with enough ideas to make players want to stay, without simply retracing Retail’s path? Can it build an alternative version of WoW with an identity of its own, one that coexists with its flagship without always living in its shadow?

World of Warcraft Retail: the weight of its mistakes

There is no denying that World of Warcraft: Forever starts with an enormous advantage: it can avoid many of the mistakes made in Retail over the years. Retail is more than twenty years old, and some wear and tear is only natural. It wasn’t designed to last this long, and eventually some systems and, of course, the lore got out of hand.

Blizzard has tried to innovate within the game for years, and that is a good thing. The problem is that it often seemed to lack a clear direction: systems discarded from one expansion to the next, others that never quite worked, and a lack of continuity that also affected the lore. For me, the story has been one of the clearest examples of that decline.

Where Blizzard has room to leave many of those decisions behind is Warcraft Forever, not WoW Retail. Once you have given players something, such as flying mounts, you can’t simply take it away. Some systems become very difficult to remove once they are implemented and accepted as part of the game. Forever lets Blizzard start without some of them, including decisions it might now regret or wouldn’t make again. That doesn’t mean they were mistakes from the start: at the time, flying mounts made perfect sense.

Retail’s evolution has largely been organic. The problem comes when the game drifts so far from its origins that people who have played it for years start missing earlier versions. That is understandable. Of course, nostalgia plays a fundamental role here too, and remembering something fondly doesn’t always mean it was better. But that discussion deserves its own space; we’ll leave it for another time.

The danger facing WoW Forever

Pause for a moment while reading this. Take two minutes to think: what could we add to World of Warcraft that would be completely different from what Retail offers, or at least different enough to give players vertical and horizontal progression and keep them playing for months? Go on, I’ll give you those two minutes.

You didn’t come up with much, did you? Perhaps nothing at all. That’s normal. It is very difficult, and that is what WoW Forever’s developers are facing right now. Retaining players today is harder than ever. Twenty years ago, there were hardly any online games; now everything is online. There are countless games offering quick experiences that can give you that dopamine hit in twenty minutes, and World of Warcraft isn’t exactly that.

WoW Forever isn’t made for the general public. It isn’t made to attract new players. It is made to bring back people who played before, people who once heard of World of Warcraft but never dared or wanted to try it even though their friends played, or lifelong players who are still in Retail, but reluctantly. Let’s not kid ourselves: this game is for us. And that is where things get complicated for Blizzard, because many of us no longer want Retail, but we don’t want Classic either. We want something different, and something different means innovation: the very innovation we said Blizzard was starting to lack. How will they tackle this monumental challenge? Honestly, I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes. These are very difficult decisions.

It will be very difficult for Warcraft Forever to avoid becoming a victim of its own success: attracting hundreds of thousands or even millions of players, only for many of them to become disillusioned after four or five months because of the lack of vertical progression. Because, let’s admit it, we players like making progress and having content to play. There is no Mythic+, no arenas and no competitive endgame (nor should there be), but that reduces the possibilities for endgame replayability.

We don’t have a territory-conquest system for world PvP either. Beyond streamers organising groups or stumbling upon people attacking a capital, it is all very spontaneous and always comes from the players themselves: there is no system within the game encouraging you to do it.

Blizzard has a very difficult task ahead.

Hoping Blizzard can surprise us again

I won’t lie to you: I have hope. Honestly, I think the Blizzard we have seen over the past few years has been improving. They have become better at understanding their community (sometimes), and their decisions have been more good than bad. With this latest BlizzCon and Forever’s arrival, I don’t know whether it’s the atmosphere or whether we’re getting carried away, but there seems to be a glimmer of hope. I honestly think Forever will turn out well. I would be hugely disappointed if it didn’t.

World of Warcraft feels like an eternal game. We may well retire and find it still running. The question is which version will still be alive, and what that World of Warcraft will look like twenty or thirty years from now. We will be lucky enough to see it. Perhaps we’ll have to endure it, or perhaps we’ll end up enjoying it a great deal. We won’t be fifteen again, with all day to play, but maybe in our late thirties or forties we can still find a little time to recapture something of what we felt playing when we were young.

Forever is that opportunity. I very much doubt Blizzard will ever get another like it with World of Warcraft as an MMO. That is why I encourage you to take your time and enjoy it, without rushing or racing ahead. This may be our last chance to take this journey.

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