WoW Forever: a plan for years, Outland and Northrend not yet

Blizzard has a well-developed plan for the next few years of WoW Forever, covering story, lore and destinations. Senior game designer Josh Greenfield and principal game designer Kris Zierhut talked about it in an interview published on 6 November, answering whether the story will move forward and what happens with the closed Dark Portal.

Greenfield said the game sits in its own little time bubble, as the team mentioned at BlizzCon, and is effectively a different continuity. That gives the developers room to go in slightly different directions. Zierhut described it as time moving more slowly inside the bubble, so the team can go deeper on the story it is already telling.

On Outland and Northrend, Greenfield was careful. He said the team is not thinking much about them yet, but they exist in the world and it would be surprising if Forever never touched them. If the game does go there, it probably will not be the Outland of The Burning Crusade or the Northrend of Wrath of the Lich King. No dates or patches were named.

For now the focus is on Azeroth itself. Zierhut said the team will look at characters, plotlines and places that were left unfinished the first time, naming The Missing Diplomat questline as an example. He compared the original game to a 3-hour film of a favourite novel and Forever to a 12-episode miniseries: the same overall story, told in more depth. The team has already said new content should arrive every 4 months.

Greenfield added that the slower pace lets the team flesh out ideas that were underdeveloped in the original game. He named the war effort and the opening of the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj and the Scourge Invasion, which ended as one big event or as camps of monsters, and floated the idea of a longer war with the Scourge over a couple of patches. These are ideas the team is discussing, not announced content.