World of Warcraft Forever gets its full release on November 4, and while the MMO will stay tethered to the two vanilla continents, Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, it sounds like future updates could add some of the areas we’ve visited in the expansions.
I recently got a chance to sit down with Blizzard principal game designer Kris Zierhut to talk about the future of WoW Forever, and when I asked him if there were threads the developer could pull at to find new content “without going to outer space,” Zierhut responded by saying: “Correct, correct. Now, that said, the Dark Portal exists, Northrend exists, Pandaria exists, and we could make minor forays into those areas. We might have a dungeon or a quest that takes you there for a mission or two and come back.”
So, rather than going to these places for these multi-year epic quests, like going to Northrend to stop Arthas, it seems like these would be little jaunts to a different part of the world, then quickly returning back to the vanilla continents.
Zierhut emphasized that any journeys to other parts of Azeroth would be brief, saying: “But the key detail there is Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor are your home. You don’t have capital cities, you don’t have auction houses and innkeepers and things like that outside of Eastern Kingdom and Kalimdor. We won’t introduce new capital cities in this plan. Okay. You always come home.”
Later on in the interview, Zierhut clarified that the versions of these continents wouldn’t be the same as what we’ve visited in the expansions. Using Northrend as an example, he told me: “If we ever went to Northrend, we wouldn’t be visiting the version that you see in Wrath of the Lich King. But could we visit some extremely hostile level 60 version of it because Arthas is still in the stage where he’s sending Kel’Thuzad to Eastern Kingdoms to assault Eastern Plaguelands? We could. There’s so much that we can do with the timeline that we’re in.”
While it seems like working in areas from the expansions would run counter to Forever’s mission statement, the developers are more focused on maintaining the spirit of classic WoW, rather than strictly adhering to the same content that we played in 2004 and 2019. For instance, Blizzard took a pretty early stance against adding features like group tagging, because it wanted players to group up and do content together. But, later on, it added the ‘Kyle’s Gone Missing’ quest, even though it intially came out as a part of The Burning Crusade, because it fit with the spirit of the original game.
Forever is also adding entirely new parts of the world, including some maps, like Mount Hyjal, that were originally supposed to be part of the original World of Warcraft, but didn’t make the final cut. It’s going to be interesting to see what direction future content is going to go in, because unlike other versions of Classic, Blizzard doesn’t have to rigidly stick to what World of Warcraft did in the past. One thing’s for sure, though, we won’t have to wait as long between patches as some of the older WoW expansions.