WoW Forever: alts are part of the progression plan

Blizzard is openly trying to get people to roll alts in WoW: Forever. The team said as much in interviews this week: it wants to tempt players into making new characters. The reasons given are practical rather than sentimental. A low-level character is what lets you play with a friend who has just started, and it is also how you see the new levelling zones and dungeons that later patches are meant to add.

The lever is the Legacy system, which hands out points for notable achievements and lets you spend them in a talent-style tree on improvements that apply to the whole account. Ion Hazzikostas, the game director, says there will be reasons to play alts and to unlock Legacy points along the way, and new journeys to be had in doing it.

Kris Zierhut, who says he built elaborate spreadsheets trying to guess which points a progression-minded player would chase, puts the arithmetic plainly: the easy low-level points cost far less time than the hardest ones, and collecting them means making characters. His example is a brother who wants to start playing. The old answer was: I have a level 60, sorry, I can try to boost you. The new one is: I have a level 20 I have been levelling, you can get there quickly, let's group up.

Holly Longdale, the executive producer, expects Forever to be where new players land. If you are new, she says, this is the one, the lowest barrier to entry Warcraft has going. It opens on 4 November.