Blizzard’s decision to reveal far-away release dates for Diablo 5 (2029) and the new open-world StarCraft shooter (2030) at this year’s BlizzCon represented an uncharacteristically transparent look at its future plans. So much so, there was a moment when the spotlight turned on World of Warcraft and it seemed we might get a monumental reveal there too.
Debatably, we did. Blizzard announced World of Warcraft: Forever, colloquially known as Classic Plus, a sort of alternate-reality take on the 2004/5 launch version of World of Warcraft – one that’s expanded and remastered to provide a familiar but different experience. And that’s a big deal: it’s a notable moment in WoW’s near 22-year history.
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Here’s a look at World of Warcraft: Forever.Watch on YouTube
WoW: Forever reimagines the vanilla WoW experience with new zones, expanded original zones, new dungeons, new raids, new skill and talents, new race and class combinations, a new playable race – the Skyborne – a new battleground, and 100 new quests. There are new items and rewards, new things for professions, new reputation rewards, and account-wide perks. The graphics have also hugely improved, and there’s an SD/HD character toggle to flick between the old and new looks while you play.
Perhaps more importantly, WoW: Forever is to evolve in different ways to vanilla WoW – it isn’t beholden to the path the game originally took, unlike the previous Classic iterations of the game. “The future is untold,” WoW executive producer Holly Longdale said on stage at BlizzCon. “We may see stories that could have happened, and some that didn’t happen at all.”
WoW: Forever is, then, in many senses, a redo. But it’s not a sequel. Nor does a WoW sequel appear to be anywhere on Blizzard’s schedule – I’ve a hunch Blizzard would have announced it if it were. And judging by Blizzard’s comments in an IGN interview, it doesn’t sound like a sequel is likely.
“One of the things that’s singularly great about WoW is we have this game and this world and this design that has been continuously developed for the last 25 years,” WoW: Forever principal designer Kris Zierhut said. “And we keep making it better. We made the graphics better, we made the rendering better, we made the lighting better; all that new stuff we showed on stage today.
“But we’ve also made the way the engine draws things move more efficiently. The way the server runs, handling players and moving them around, and all the things that handle spells and combat, all of that’s been made more efficient and better over the years. We have this incredible engine and server infrastructure driving the game that is second to none. Why would you throw that away and start over?”
Modern WoW, too, is currently halfway through its Worldsoul Saga trilogy of expansion releases, with a huge upcoming titan battle teased at BlizzCon. That’s a point Zierhut picked up on. “It’s not like there’s something wrong with [WoW’s] story,” he said. “We love the story. So going back to the beginning [with World of Warcraft: Forever], there’s a chance to explore that story in new and different ways. So it’s really hard to say, ‘Well, what would a WoW 2 give you that World of Warcraft: Forever isn’t already giving you?'”
Of course, making a sequel to a game like World of Warcraft – which was already large when it launched 22 years ago, but is colossal today – would be inordinately complicated and expensive. Blizzard has seen what happens when you force a migration within a player base in the bumpy transition from Overwatch 1 to Overwatch 2, and it would take years and years, and hundreds of millions of dollars to create something of the scale we’d expect from a WoW successor. In some ways, WoW’s own phenomenal success has made following it impossible.
Plus, we’ve seen Blizzard attempt and fail to replicate it previously, when making sci-fi MMO Titan – a game that was eventually scrapped before being fortuitously salvaged into Overwatch, arguably for the better. Would Blizzard want to put itself through that again while making Diablo 5, a new StarCraft game, and while maintaining Overwatch, World of Warcraft, and HearthStone? With Blizzard owner Xbox preparing to cut 1600 more jobs and looking for areas to save money, I highly doubt it.