Michael Nuthals has been at Blizzard for 13 years. His latest role asks him to set aside much of what those years taught him.
As lead encounter designer on World of Warcraft: Forever, the WoW version Blizzard revealed at BlizzCon earlier this year, Nuthals said many on the team had to go through a process of “unlearning” the design habits they built up working on the modern game.
“Some of us had worked on the modern game for a long time, myself included. I come from modern, and it’s almost like unlearning what you have learned,” Nuthals said. He has worked on WoW full-time since before Warlords of Draenor, the 2014 expansion. “We needed to understand what the DNA was [of WoW Classic], what the philosophies were, and to do that you just had to put it under your fingers and play.”
Thursday mornings in The Deadmines
The team meant that literally. On Thursday mornings, Nuthals and the other encounter designers played through a classic dungeon like The Deadmines, then went directly into a new Forever dungeon like Ruins of Lordaeron.
The test was whether the two felt like “they could live hand in glove?” and whether both looked like they belonged to one game.
“That was the development process,” Nuthals said. “We thought about what we want Forever to feel like, and we wanted it to feel like you wouldn’t even know,” he said, “like it was made in 2004. That was the vibe we were going for.”
An Azeroth that kept growing
Forever works as a kind of remaster that expands WoW’s “Classic” era. Players go back to Azeroth, the world of the 2004 original, in a version that asks what could have happened had Blizzard kept building out that world, instead of moving players to Draenor, the Orc homeworld, and further afield with The Burning Crusade and the 11 expansions that came after.
The amount of new material is large. Forever adds more than 1,000 quests, many written to follow up on story threads the original left unresolved. New areas open up inside Azeroth, Mount Hyjal among them (the location of one of Warcraft III’s major battles), along with new dungeons and raids.
Classes and items have been rebalanced, and Blizzard built a new global illumination lighting pipeline to add atmosphere. There’s also a new race that wasn’t in the original game, the Skyborne Elves, and that addition has drawn controversy.
A Classic+ nobody could define
Calls for a “Classic+” began almost as soon as Blizzard rereleased the original World of Warcraft in 2019. The problem was that each player imagined an expanded Classic differently. The one point of broad agreement was that it shouldn’t play like modern “retail” WoW.
So no single version of Forever could please everyone. Blizzard is still aiming for something that works for both veterans and newcomers.
Nuthals sounded positive when asked about the pressure of those expectations. “I see it more as an opportunity,” he said, “an opportunity to engage, to listen and show that we’re listening.”
Blizzard just finished the biggest beta World of Warcraft has ever run, and access wasn’t free. To get in, players had to buy one of Forever’s premium bundles, priced from $60. According to Nuthals, the studio collected “a lot of feedback” from it.
Strength, dexterity and intelligence
Nuthals also mentioned Season of Discovery, the WoW Classic spin-off where Blizzard trialed new class abilities, progression systems and dungeons within the constraints of the original game.
“With Season of Discovery, we were pushing boundaries, exploring what Classic encounters could be. For Forever, we really looked back at the original Classic encounters and wanted to capture those, so we could provide a really authentic and nostalgic experience as players do these new raids,” Nuthals said.
The team kept coming back to what Nuthals describes as the “strength, dexterity and intelligence” triangle of encounter design. Strength fights reward the gear you’ve gathered and how well you play your class. Dexterity fights are about movement and avoiding hazards. Intelligence fights measure how well you grasp the mechanics and how much you planned beforehand.
“What we’re trying to do with raids and dungeons is move toward gearing and planning, because Classic players really love that,” Nuthals said. “‘I overprepare, then I come in and crush the content.’ That was the vibe we really wanted to hit.”
Capped at 60 for good
This links to the “horizontal” progression Blizzard has promoted heavily for Forever. The studio says the level cap will stay at 60, so future content won’t deliver large jumps in player power. In theory, Blizzard is wagering on rewarding players who explore the world closely.
“We’re seeding the world with all these new items and things to chase, and in the future, having one of those items might pay off,” Nuthals said. “We’re thinking about those opportunities as we architect future raids and decide what bosses to introduce: making sure you feel smart for having pocketed something that comes in handy later. It feels good to use all that cool gear you went out and got.”
Blizzard wants to add more dungeons and zones down the line, and Nuthals said “not all of them will be max level.” He said “there are areas players know about and want to explore, and there are opportunities for us to tell new stories in this space,” calling the work “taking what might have been a one-off quest name or something you found on a piece of paper and developing that story.”
An unanswered question
One question went unasked in the interview: what happens when players reach 60, decide they’ve had enough and leave for another game?
Promising an MMO that doesn’t exploit player FOMO is simple. Keeping that promise when engagement starts to drop is harder. The first real test arrives when Forever launches on November 4.