World of Warcraft: Forever is one of the rare big-budget online game launches that seems to have mostly gone down without a hitch. Not only has the MMO been well-received critically and by players, it's also been an exceptionally smooth release from a performance standpoint as well, with the MMO community dubbing it "the smoothest WoW launch ever." And yet, in the early days of the dev team's pitching process, it took some convincing to get Blizzard leadership on-board with yet another WoW branch.
Talking to Bloomberg, Blizzard senior game designer Josh Greenfield says it wasn't until the dev team showed off the project's new lighting system and updated visuals in a very specific area of the map that everyone was sold. Working with the 2023 WoW Classic update, Season of Discovery, as a concept, the dev team cooked up an updated version of the Northshire Abbey zone, calling it a "beautiful corner" and visual showcase for the people making the calls.
"There were a lot of people who were diehard, original Classic players on the team who were skeptical," Greenfield says. "And we knew we had something special when we showed them that 'beautiful corner' and they said, 'OK, yeah, I’m in.'"
For the uninitiated, or just for anyone confused about there being three distinct WoW branches now, WoW: Forever is essentially the version of the MMO that launched in 2004 but with dramatically upscaled visuals and new features that were never added to the vanilla release. It's distinct from WoW: Classic, which continues on a parallel track to the original release, meaning it gets the same updates and expansions that followed way back when. In other words, WoW: Forever is staying in 2004 Azeroth permanently and keeping the old 60 level cap, but adding new dungeons and quality of life features, while WoW: Classic is continually being updated exactly how the vanilla WoW was from 2004 on.
