WoW Forever: new content planned every 4 months

WoW Forever will grow more slowly than the modern game. In an interview ahead of launch, principal game designer Kris Zierhut said the team settled on new content roughly once every 4 months, or 17 weeks, which works out at 3 times a year. That is the planned gap between raid tiers, and PvP seasons, which Forever will have, are planned 4 months apart as well.

Zierhut said the team tried different speeds on the Classic games. Going 6 or 8 months without anything new always felt bad, while the 8 to 10 week rhythm used in Season of Discovery felt far too fast. Between the big patches, a timed event calendar will unlock smaller things 1, 2 or 3 months in, so a patch is not one burst of content followed by 4 quiet months.

The classic raids are still coming, just later. Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and Ahn'Qiraj are part of the plan, but the timeline is stretched out and Forever does not open with Molten Core. Alongside them come new places that feel as if they always belonged to the old world, and some that are deliberately unexpected, such as the Skyborn content. The Dark Portal, Northrend and Pandaria exist and short trips there are something the team thinks about, but not soon: the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor stay home, with no new capitals, auction houses or innkeepers anywhere else.

On other questions, Zierhut said there are no plans for player housing in Forever right now. Dual specialisation is in at launch and a third spec is not ruled out for later, but talents will not be swappable one by one. Banks are already bigger than in the original game, and the team will watch storage as more situational trinkets arrive. He also admitted that at some point there will be too many raids and dungeons, and said the team has ideas for that it cannot share yet.

These are plans described in one interview, not a published roadmap, and Blizzard has given no date for the first content update. The same conversation also covered the lighting and water coming to the modern game. Forever launches for Europe at midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.