After 13 years at Blizzard, Michael Nuthals faces what might just be the toughest challenge of his career yet: working on a familiar but different and highly anticipated version of World of Warcraft. As lead encounter designer, he’s part of the team working on WoW: Forever. Announced at BlizzCon earlier this year, Forever is a sort of remaster of WoW designed to expand on the game’s “Classic” era. It takes players back to Azeroth, the setting of the original 2004 game, before Blizzard over the course of 11 expansions took the game in the direction that it did. In the process, it imagines a “what if” scenario.
What if Blizzard had continued to expand Azeroth, instead of sending players to the Orc homeworld of Draenor and beyond with The Burning Crusade and later expansions? In Forever, there are more than 1,000 new quests for players to complete, many of them designed to continue story threads that were left unresolved in the original game. Additionally, there are new areas within Azeroth for players to explore — including Mount Hyjal, the site of one of Warcraft III‘s pivotal battles — in addition to fresh dungeons and raids. Blizzard has also rebalanced the game’s classes and items, and built an entirely new global illumination lighting pipeline to make the game feel more atmospheric. Controversially, Forever will also feature a new race, the Skyborne Elves, who weren’t in the original game.
The challenge Nuthals and his colleagues face is one of expectations. Nearly right from the moment Blizzard rereleased the original World of Warcraft in 2019, players have been asking the studio for a “Classic+” experience that expands the original game. The tricky thing is that, before Forever’s announcement, every player had a different opinion on what an expanded rerelease should look like. Seemingly the only consensus was that the game shouldn’t play anything like modern “retail” WoW. Realistically, there was never going to be a way Blizzard would find a way to please everyone with Forever, but it’s still trying to create something fans both old and new can appreciate.
“I see it more as an opportunity — an opportunity to engage, to listen and show that we’re listening,” Nuthals says when asked about the weight of those expectations. With Forever, Blizzard recently concluded the largest beta in World of Warcraft’s history. This is despite the fact players had to purchase one of Forever’s premium bundles, which start at $60, to take part in the experience. Nuthals says Blizzard received “a lot of feedback” during the beta. He later admits one of the challenges of making Forever has been letting go of habits he learned working on the current version of WoW.
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