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- World of Warcraft: Forever's classes won't be modernized, Blizzard says
- However, they will receive more "engaging depth" since some Classic classes felt "too simple"
- Blizzard wants to serve the "Classic" ethos, while also "adding things to freshen up the vanilla experience"
Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed it won't modernize World of Warcraft: Forever's classes, as it wants to align with the "Classic" experience, but some will receive more "engaging depth."
World of Warcraft has undergone many class and balance changes over the years, in both 'retail' and Classic, and with WoW: Forever launching next month, players can expect similar updates.
However, in an interview with TechRadar Gaming, the WoW: Forever team doesn't plan to dramatically alter vanilla classes fans are familiar with; instead, it wants to build on them to make them more engaging as part of its design framework.
Blizzard wants to make a "Classic Plus" experience centered around four design pillars (Nurture and Protect Social Experiences, Approachable and Familiar, World as the Main Character, and Journey before destination), which will help the team build on the vanilla experience while staying true to the game's established "core design, pacing, and tone."
With this in mind, Blizzard plans "to err on the side of simpler classes, but with engaging depth,". The company further explained that "some classes in the Classic era were too simple, so those have gained a few mechanics."
How many? "The level of mechanical complexity found in the beta classes is indicative of our intentions," the team said. "When considering encounter design, we want to align those with our core values. Namely Approachable and Familiar."
It explained that its encounter team played a lot of Classic dungeon and raid content "to truly get an understanding of how the Classic game felt," and it discovered that "encounters that were very approachable and systems that encouraged players to go out into the world, adventure, prepare, and come back ready to take on any sort of challenge ahead of them."
But when it comes to specific mechanics, "we want to empower the team to be creative and surprise the player, but we always want everything we do to point back to our core pillars."
Blizzard touched on the "complexity" of class combat, saying that it likes the pacing "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."
"Particularly in terms of classes," the team said, "as some classes or specs had wild power swings and/or sometimes uninteresting gameplay. That’s something we want to improve upon without drastically speeding up the game or making it overly complex or unapproachable."
As for specialization changes and multi-specs, the game already has Dual Specialization, which can be learned at level 40 for a cost, but there are "no plans to go past that."
"We do not want to have cheap respecs," Blizzard continued. "The first re-spec every hour is temporarily cheap in the beta. When the game goes live, the price of re-spec will climb quickly and only decrease once per week. We want players’ talent decisions to be meaningful. There is the possibility, however, of some increased re-spec utility coming to the Legacy talents in the future."
However, Blizzard does plan to incorporate "a lot of class changes in beta" with a rather ambitious update schedule. "When we do make changes, they will be batched up to all happen at the same time, rather than trickle in."
The company added that it anticipates frequent balance changes in the first six months, as it will be able to gather class performance data during this time. Blizzard said, "Initially, we plan this to be once per week."
However, the aim remains to make "very few design changes once the game goes live" on November 4.
