When it comes to World of Warcraft Forever, MOP’s Justin and I are largely simpatico. We both tend to play our games in very different ways, sure, but my initial assessment of what was shown at BlizzCon is pretty much the same as his. It looks very interesting! I don’t know if the hurt has subsided enough that I can play the game, but I would certainly like to. There is a lot of interest here, and I want to try.
I say all of this up-front because this column is not about earnest excitement, so I want to make that clear before people read any further. Because I think there’s something very important to note about the game that involves a whole lot of questions that are going to be asked pretty much right out of the gate, and I can summarize these questions by asking something very simple and straightforward. What about Goblins?
“What about Goblins?” Well, can we play them?
Let’s be very clear here: Goblins are not some hidden and rare part of Azeroth during any part of WoW’s history. They are front and center the whole time. Goblins have been the technology service providers for the Horde, if you want to call them that, since the game first launched. They have a whole school of engineering devoted to their love of high explosives. But they aren’t playable in the base game. In fact, a lot of people were kind of perplexed by the fact that it took us three expansions to get to playable Goblins in the first place back in the day.
So can we play as Goblins?
Obviously we cannot at launch, but this question is right there. These are not some obscure race that got added because we needed some kind of player race to go here. Goblins have been here the whole time. It’s weird that they aren’t in at launch. But they also are undeniably not a launch race. And you’ve got to start wondering why that’s the case, and that leads to the question of whether or not we can play as Goblins.
“No” is a viable answer here, sure, but you sort of need a good reason for why they’re not playable when Cash Elves are. And if you say “yes, they are,” then you have to answer why they get in but not Draenei or Blood Elves. You can make some defenses with the former, but they’ve still been a playable race in WoW longer than Goblins have.
The closest thing to a viable answer might be about the timeline, but the problem is that’s not accurate. If you’re going to claim that they weren’t here at this point in the story, why are the Skyborne here? I’m sorry, but I am just not going to believe that in a prequel set one year before the vanilla game launched there were a bunch of blue air elves that allied with both the Horde and the Alliance but then went away forever and nobody talked about them ever again because… reasons. (Picture someone doing jazz hands and slipping behind a curtain here.) Logically, the Skyborne need to be accounted for, or we’re just in straight-up AU territory… and in either case, you’re back to the Goblin question.
Speaking of Goblins, why can’t I use the enhanced character creator the current game has? Why should my character creation be limited by people who want to use the old character models? For that matter, can I use all of the updated hairstyles through Wrath of the Lich King? You can’t tell me that can’t be displayed on the old models, it totally can! And if so, why is that fine but something also further forward isn’t fine?
Why can’t we have Death Knights or Demon Hunters? These are both Hero Classes that exist in Azeroth during this time period. They’re already here. Sure, they didn’t exist in the vanilla game, but a bunch of other stuff didn’t then. You’ve already established that “wasn’t around during the original game” is not actually a splitting point. Are you going to include new content from Season of Discovery? Are we going to get better transmog outfits moving forward? What’s our horizontal progression actually going to look like? What are you going to do to make it rewarding to keep playing my Level 60 Human Paladin once I’m happy with my build? What if I really don’t want to do any raids? How are you going to make them more accessible? Are you going to? How do you answer party formation?
I could keep going, but I’m cutting myself off there because I want to make something clear. My point here is not that there is only one answer. There are lots of logical answers that I can think of off the top of my head, sure, but I don’t want the takeaway to be that the game must allow us to play Goblins or it’s doomed. My point is that these questions are right there, and they loom over the future of Forever as a project.
As it stands right now – that is, at the time I write this – what we get from Blizzard’s public comments is that the studio wants WoW Forever to be two incompatible things. The developers want the game to be Basically Just Classic and a reset back to zero and a chance to go in a different direction. That’s not really a problem. From the point that we’re at right now, it can be both. Marketing it right now as both isn’t really a bad thing or even incompatible with what we observe. It can be both. It can be both for a while, even!
It just can’t be both forever.
That’s not a value judgment, it’s a statement of fact. Sooner or later, for example, the pressure of people who want upgraded character models and upgraded character creation and barber shops are going to hit an inflection point with the people who absolutely refuse to look at any updated models. These two things cannot occupy the same space forever, and you have to eventually decide that one group gets what they want and the other doesn’t. You can want and enjoy things like a world without flying mounts, more horizontal progression, more archaic class design, and more expansive zones to quest in while also wanting more character customization and playing a Draenei. These are not exclusive desires. (Case in point: me. I want these things.)
And to be equally blunt, the fact that sooner or later one group has to get what they want and the other has to be disappointed isn’t actually a bad thing, either. As someone who is definitely on team Add Housing, I’m not saying that the only correct answer is to add housing even if it is the option I want. Not putting it into your launch priorities isn’t a bad thing. Treating the modern game as “a test ground for stuff we can pull out and add back in” isn’t a terrible viewpoint.
This isn’t about me needing the answers right now. It’s about me worrying that Blizzard’s team also doesn’t have the answers right now. And that is a potential problem. Forever is, honestly, a more interesting potential take on the game than we’ve had in many years. It’s not trying to course-correct a huge ship with massive ontological inertia, nor is it an exercise in raw nostalgia; it’s an attempt to basically get a do-over on the game from first principles, trying to do a full-on reboot. I’m available for persuasion here. But if the people making the decisions don’t have a clear picture of the ultimate direction and goals – if they don’t have an end point in mind – then it’s only a matter of time before Forever becomes the same kind of flailing beast that the other arms of the game have been. And given that this isn’t the first time trying this again, I have to admit to a degree of concern.
