3. WoW Mythos
We started by talking about the WoW Mythos. We wanted everybody to align on this. And what is the WoW Mythos? Well, over the past 20 years, a mythos has developed in the community about the unfinished content of the original vanilla WoW. We’re talking about things like raids, dungeons, zones, battlegrounds, incomplete storylines, unused characters, and the list goes on and on.
And players remember all this, and we know that they remember all this because they love to post pictures of the original development team online, including pictures of Chris Metzen pointing at maps of Azeroth, which were painted on the wall at Blizzard, and I think some of them still are. So of course, we knew that this discussion had been in the community and it is been in discussion for a long time. What players were talking about, of course, was this treasure trove of unfinished content, which existed within the community consciousness.
And some of this, I think, folks hopefully in this audience are aware of, which we later pursued in things like Season of Discovery, like the Karazhan Crypts. We are doing a Scarlet raid. But all of this existed within the player consciousness. Even for players who did not play back in 2004-2005, the discussion online was so prevalent that for players who didn’t even experience it, they felt like they were nostalgic for this content themselves. It’s like a vicarious sense of nostalgia through other players. But it was there. It was in the psyche for sure.
So the combination of this expansion of content in Classic Azeroth, mixed with changes grounded in the design ethos of “classic” Classic Azeroth, has created within layers an ever-growing conceptual dream of Classic+. Aka … a vision of Classic Forever.
And before we go on from there, I should just note that when I say conceptual, I underline that word specifically. Because if you ask 50 different Classic players what Classic+ means to them, you are gonna get a hundred different answers. And I think we talked about it a little bit at BlizzCon, too. So it’s hard to define and align on exactly what Classic+ means, but it is some combination of these things, and we are pretty confident in that. So we revealed Season of Discovery back at BlizzCon 2023. You can see Holly up there on stage announcing it, and we launched it just four weeks later.
And we pitched it as an experimental “Season.” We set in in classic era Azeroth, and we focused on delivering new mysteries in the familiar world, new class abilities to shake up the meta, new content in the classic space, but most importantly, unsolving a solved game.
And Season of Discovery found tremendous success in things like the player response and engagement, particularly at launch. The heavy design experimentation. So what works, what doesn’t work? For anybody who plays Season of Discovery, I think you’ll agree we pushed classes pretty far in that. But most importantly, at least as I sit up here today in the discussions that we have, it trained us as a classic team and a greater World of Warcraft development team how to build new content in the classic space, which was critical.
All that being said, this is when we transition into Classic+ as part of the Greenlight process. Classic+ is, this is how we described it, it is approachable and familiar. We want players to be able to enter the game, whether they have played it or not, and feel like it is approachable, just like that original game in 2004-2005. And for players who have played it before, we want it to be familiar, meaning that any of the content that you experience in the game should feel like it could have potentially launched back in 2004-2005. Feels seamless.
It’s also the world as the main character. The world of Azeroth is the thing that we fell in love with in the first place. And if you remember those days in 2004-2005, entering this gigantic, mysterious world that seemed almost endless, that was a core pillar of ours that we wanted to preserve.
| NAVIGATE - PAX AUSTRALIA 2026 - WORLD OF WARCRAFT: FOREVER KEYNOTE TRANSCRIPT | ||||
| 1. Intro | 2. Classic Releases | 3. WoW Mythos | 4. Dev Pillars | 5. Content |
| 6. Riverglades | 7. Idea | 8. Enemies | ||
