4. Dev Pillars
And then next, we had the journey before the destination. For as epic as Endgame is, and I think I mentioned that, I promise you it will be epic. That 1-60 leveling journey is something that is only found in Classic, and we wanted to make sure that that was a pillar of every decision that we made for this game.
And then lastly, we wanted to nurture and protect social experiences. Classic is incredibly social. It is impossible to do everything in the game literally if you don’t at least talk to somebody else. So all of our decisions- we’ve talked about the things which we talked about at BlizzCon, things like camping- and hopefully some of you playing the beta right now have experienced that; those ideas were born out of this. But these are the design pillars that we use any time we think of making a change or adding some new piece of content to WoW: Forever. But the bottom line is that we wanted to make what made and still makes Classic great and different as we move forward.
So just as important as Classic+ is, let’s talk about what it is not. Obviously, very important for us when we are pitching this thing. We’re not saying it’s everything for everybody. What is it not? And the first thing is that it is not a WoW remake. Aka is not WoW rebuilt from the ground up. It is the same WoW that you know. We’re not changing the combat or the way that works. We are grounding it in the things that made that original game so successful.
Secondly, it is not a drastic reinterpretation of the World of Warcraft art style. We love seeing the videos online of people recreating World of Warcraft in Unreal Engine 5. They’re very interesting, for sure. But I think, as we mentioned at BlizzCon, we believe that that Classic art style is timeless and something that we want to preserve, and that’s a key focus of ours.
And then, lastly, we don’t want to stomp on or substantially contradict post-vanilla lore. And I think what this grew into is, as we again talked about at BlizzCon, we are starting from a place of canon, but we are going to be existing in a time bubble, essentially in Year One of World of Warcraft: Forever, or as long as players want to go on in this journey with us — which will allow us to be able to tell new stories that feel authentic to that space but at the same time, not force the modern game to have an immediate reaction to things.
So we introduced our brand-new race: the Skyborne Elves. We don’t want the modern game to basically have to say, like: Well, here’s an answer for where they’ve been this whole time or things like that, or new dungeons that we introduce.
They may one day adopt that; that’s not gonna be up to me, but that’s the reason why we sort of exist in this space.
| 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 | ||
