2. New Features
Josh Greenfield: Hello, BlizzCon. Did you guys have a great day one? I know I did. Alright. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m super excited to get to talk to you about some of the fine details on how some of the systems and World of Warcraft: Forever are going to work.
So let’s jump right into it. Picture this. You’re adventuring in the wilderness and run into another player on your faction. This is an encounter you should be happy to have. Sure, sometimes that other player may beat you to an herb node or a mining node or maybe attack the same mob you’re about to attack, but a core foundation of World of Warcraft: Forever is serendipitous interactions.
Campfire
Serendipitous interactions are the foundations of making friends in online games. So how do we make meeting strangers serendipitous? In World of Warcraft: Forever, we’ve reimagined the simple cooking fire to support these type of interactions. Your cooking fire has now become the basic campfire. Placing a campfire creates a campsite that allows you and other players to rest and gain benefits such as vendors, repairs, trade skill workspaces, and most importantly, buffs that last one hour.
Sometimes it’s important to just slow down a bit and just take it easy. So in order to gain your buffs, you’ll need to /sit by the campfire for a few moments until you’re ready for adventure. A basic campfire allows up to three special crafted objects to be placed at the camp by players.
Each player can place one object, and each trade skill has different objects they can place for a unique buff or utility learned at different skill levels. For example, Blacksmiths can place a Sharpening Wheel that increases strength, tailors can place a faction banner that increases spirit, and herbalists can place an incense candle that increases intellect. All of these are (variants of) and (exclusive with) buffs provided normally by classes such as a paladin’s Blessing of Might, or a mage’s Arcane Intellect.
The first objects are learned at only 20 skill points. More advanced objects can be learned via blueprint recipes you’ll need to find in your adventures. All of these objects add more depth and purpose to trade skills in World of Warcraft: Forever. Overall, we’ve been having a ton of fun with Camping as we’ve been testing it internally, and we can’t wait to arrive in Elwynn Forest or Durotar and see people sitting around the fire getting ready for battle.
So, on the topic of trade skills, this is an area that has been given a massive amount of love in World of Warcraft: Forever. Even outside of what I just described with the Camping additions, there are over 600 new recipes across all professions and level ranges in World of Warcraft: Forever.
(crowd applauds)
In addition, many existing recipes have been overhauled in some way. Even at low levels, you will feel the impact of your profession choice in a meaningful way, and you’ll be excited to continue to level your professions as you go. As a complement to Camping, cooking and food have also received a substantial overhaul.
Almost all crafted food will give some form of a stat boost as well as a small XP buff. This means you’ll always want to go into battle well prepared and well fed. Philosophically, we want tradeskills to become an important part of your progression in World of Warcraft: Forever and we are planning to continually add new recipes, materials, and crafted items as the game continues to evolve.
Transmogrification
So next, let’s talk about transmogrification. As Clay said, not controversial at all. Transmog is an important tool for those who want to show off their accomplishments or express their character in a particular way. However, we recognize that this system is not for everyone. Many players appreciate seeing their gear progression and others reflected in how they actually appear, so we’ve done a lot of work to allow you to engage with the system as little or as much as you’d like.
Thus, we’re allowing you to choose to opt-out of the system in a few different ways. The first is simply speaking to an NPC and disabling transmog, easy enough.
Additionally, when you go into the game for the first time, you’ll be met with a mode selector, and that has a preset of a handful of settings, any of which you can reconfigure later but if you select the Classic mode, the visibility of other player’s Transmog will be disabled as soon as you enter the game.
The goal here is to allow you to play the game as if Transmog does not exist at all, and you should be able to do just that.
So while giving you the ability to opt out of of the system is a good first step, we do recognize that the collection aspect of Transmog has an impact on the behavior of players as well. Right? So one thing we asked ourselves when designing this system is what happens if I go to Stratholme and the Mask of the Unforgiven drops? It’s a sweet-looking leather helm. It looks like a bandit mask. Anybody would be stoked to have it in their transmog collection, right?
Do I have to worry about someone who doesn’t need that as an upgrade but just wants it for the transmog to roll against me? The short answer is no. Any bind on pickup, uncommon, or rare gear that drops in dungeons will grant its appearance to all eligible looters when it’s looted.
Yeah. So this means that that rogue who just wants the upgrade should never be worried that that warrior is just going to roll for the mog. So there’s no need to roll against anybody. Everybody just gets it, everybody gets away happy. For Epic drops in raids we expect groups to have an organized loot system. That’s been the case in WoW for years. So the appearance for Epic items will be granted to the person who looted and binds the item only to preserve the uniqueness and prestige of Epic apperances.
So for those who do want to fully engage with the system, the basic functionality should look pretty familiar. If you’ve played World of Warcraft: Midnight, but with a few slightly more Classic modifications and restrictions. Firstly, you may only transmog your gear to an item of the same type, so plate to plate or cloth to cloth. If you’re a healer paladin and you’re wearing the robes of the Exalted, you’ll need another cloth chest to transmog over that.
However, to support this, we’re adding the ability to select different armor appearance types per slot so you can customize a single saved outfit to have both, say, a pair of leather and male gloves in that outfit in case you get an upgrade out in the field that doesn’t match what you’re currently wearing.
You will not be able to transmog highl-level items as a low-level player either. We want your silhouette to be relative to your level. Once you hit max level, however, all level restrictions are removed and any item in your collection that is valid to be used on your equipped items will be transmogable.
The primary exception to this rule is the case of items like PvP gear that require certain conditions to be met, such as rank. So you will need to have the rank required to transmog that item over your equipped items.
If you have the system itself disabled, you’ll still be able to configure and display your own transmog just in case you want to do something like enable or disable your helm slot or your cloak. And additionally, if you have the system disabled, helm and cloak visibility of other players is not affected. This preserves the original WoW functionality of being able to hide your helm and cloak for yourself and others, regardless of if either party is opted out of the system or not.
While we love Transmog, it was important to us to make sure to be respectful to those who do not enjoy it, and make its inclusion have as minimal impact as possible on the way they play and see the game. So there is actually a lot more to Transmog, and this was just part of an overview of the system. We’ll be talking about this more in the coming days and weeks and blog posts and other communications leading up to our launch.
And so with that, I am going to hand it over to Ana Resendez to talk about some of our server infrastructure and who you will be playing with your friends in World of Warcraft: Forever.
| BLIZZCON 2026 WORLD OF WARCRAFT: FOREVER DEEP DIVE PANEL TRANSCRIPT | ||||
| 1. Intro | 2. New Systems | 3. Legacy System | 4. Server Systems | 5. Itemization |
