As Blizzard continues to wrangle with the unprecedented success of World of Warcraft: Forever, the studio is also looking to the future for the Classic+ MMORPG. While Blizzard has already teased potential new classes for the game, fans are still wary about what that could mean.
The entire point of World of Warcraft: Forever is for the game to expand out with new dungeons, stories, and classes never before seen in Classic WoW. As Blizzard continues to point out that it will not be removing friction from the game, new classes will obviously have to maintain the same rhythm and cadence of an older WoW class.
For Blizzard, that means making sure that classes are simple to learn, but trickier to master, as they told TechRadar, means that updates must “err on the side of simpler classes, but with engaging depth,” that benefit the original’s “core design, pacing, and tone.”
The developers explain that there is no intention to introduce classes that speed up World of Warcraft: Forever. However, there is added depth over the very original game’s classes as Blizzard believes “some classes in the Classic era were too simple, so those have gained a few mechanics.”
As for how complicated classes will get, well, Forever’s launch build serves to show the overall goal. “The level of mechanical complexity found in the beta classes is indicative of our intentions. When considering encounter design, we want to align those with our core values. Namely Approachable and Familiar,” Blizzard stated.
Nevertheless, everything within World of Warcraft: Forever must feel connected to what Classic WoW was. “The pacing and combat speed of original WoW, and that all the changes it makes to classes or raid content need to still serve that while also “adding things to freshen up the vanilla experience,” they said.
There is always a worry with any live-service game that updates will break a very concrete flow. I’m a player of many live-service games, and I can’t count the number of times an update has fundamentally changed something I love. (For example, I wish I could just go back to the simpler, grittier Rainbow Six Siege. Not an MMO, but it’s a game that’s changed so fundamentally that it is simply not the game I loved.) But with Forever’s base content already based on experimenting with Classic, the goal is to keep the feeling the same throughout the game’s lifespan.
While Blizzard expects frequent balance changes over the course of the game’s first year, specifically the first six months, any future content must fit within the current climate “without drastically speeding up the game or making it overly complex or unapproachable.”
World of Warcraft: Forever launches properly on November 4, 2026.
