Forever Should Learn From 20 Years of WoW, Not Pretend They Didn’t Happen
I’m pretty damn excited about WoW Forever, but I think Blizzard is already flirting with the biggest mistake they could make with Classic+:
Confusing meaningful friction with pointless inconvenience.
I’ve played since late 2004, played full-time through Cata, Classic through part of TBC, Retail on and off since, and I’ve maxed every class.
I’m also in a large veteran Retail guild that is already used to cross-faction play.
That’s important, because Forever is going to attract exactly the kind of people who already have long-standing guilds, raid groups, Discords, and friend groups.
If my guild decides, “Hell yeah, let’s all play Forever together,” faction restrictions immediately create a stupid problem:
Half the guild wants Horde.
Half wants Alliance.
So now what?
Do people abandon the races and faction they actually want to play?
Or do we split a community that already exists?
How exactly does that make the game more social?
There’s a LOT about Forever that I think Blizzard is getting right.
No level scaling? Good.
No flying? Good.
Actually travel to the dungeon? Good.
No automatic dungeon teleport? Good.
Dangerous elites? Good.
Mana and threat mattering? Good.
Classes having weaknesses? Good.
Professions mattering? Good.
Faction identity and world PvP? Good.
Fixed raid sizes? Honestly, I’m fine with that too.
Those things create gameplay.
Then I see weapon skill grinding survived and cross-faction instanced PvE didn’t, and I start wondering what the actual design philosophy is.
If I equip an awesome new sword and have to go whack random mobs because apparently my Warrior forgot how swords work, what exactly did that add to the game?
Was it dangerous?
Social?
Strategic?
Did I make an interesting decision?
No.
I just wasted some time until a number went up.
Meanwhile, if my buddy plays Alliance and I play Horde, apparently us running a dungeon together would somehow destroy the Classic experience.
Why?
Keep us hostile in the world.
Let us kill each other in STV.
Don’t let me walk into Stormwind.
Keep faction quests, cities, PvP and faction identity.
But if we both walk into Maraudon, just let us kill some fucking centaurs together.
And for guilds like mine, this is bigger than two friends.
We already HAVE the social community Classic supposedly wants to create.
Cross-faction restrictions can literally take that community and cut it in half.
That seems completely backwards.
Retail didn’t get EVERYTHING wrong.
And that’s the opportunity Forever has that Classic never did.
Blizzard has 20+ years of WoW systems to look back on and ask:
Did this actually make WoW better, or was it just something WoW happened to have when WoW was better?
Those are not the same thing.
Things I’d happily bring forward:
• AoE loot