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WoW Forever: developers on lighting, canon and the level 60 cap
Two Blizzard developers explain how the new look was tuned zone by zone, why the story stays in year one, and why it will never be too late to start.
A day before launch, 2 members of the WoW Forever team, associate production director Clay Stone and lead software engineer Nora Mills, gave an interview about how the new version was built. This is a single interview: Blizzard has not published these statements itself, so treat the details as the developers' own words rather than official notes.
On the new look, the team says artists lit every zone by hand and tuned each one for every time of day. The first test was a single corner of Northshire Abbey, and the aim was to embellish classic Azeroth rather than strip away its character. Some early choices were pulled back: Mills questioned whether Elwynn Forest should look so orange, the first ocean effects were so rough that boats tied to the docks sat perfectly still in churning water, and some zones came out too dark or too bright. Lighting and water were among the most discussed topics during the beta.
On the story, everything that came before WoW Forever counts as canon. The game is meant to stay in its first year indefinitely: time moves forward, but the Dark Portal never opens and players never reach Outland. That lets the team add ideas such as the Skyborne elves without the modern game having to react straight away, and they may become canon later. The team also says it found a way to continue The Missing Diplomat, a quest chain the original developers never finished, though it may not be complete at launch.
On pacing, the level cap stays at 60 and there are no plans to raise it. The developers want the answer to whether it is too late to start to always be no, and say players can repeat classic levelling to earn legacy points, with more profession content planned over time. Updates for WoW Forever and the modern game are meant to be spaced so they do not clash for people who play both.
For Europe, WoW Forever opens at midnight on 5 November in Central Europe, after a long maintenance on launch day covered in our report on the launch-day downtime.
