World of Warcraft: Forever devs say gear upgrades will stay relevant 'for a long, long time': 'It's very much our intention to try wherever we can to not invalidate old content'

The developers of World of Warcraft: Forever, the venerable MMO's newest 'Classic+' flavor, say that even though the level cap is staying at 60, there will always be new gear to chase, and lower level gear has never been more powerful.

Blizzard Entertainment developers are wary of the drastic increases in power in WoW's modern version, including the recent Midnight expansion, which render previous seasons of gear irrelevant, require massive resets between expansions and lead to periodic stat "squishes" to avoid players becoming omnipotent gods.

"Classic wasn't far off from this," vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas said of Forever's approach in a recent PC Gamer interview. "It's gradual. Going from [Classic raids] Blackwing Lair to Ahn'Qiraj that's actually only a couple of item levels higher. Those two largely coexist. C'thun drops are probably better than anything in Blackwing Lair, but that's like one or two items per player. This is a system that can last for a long, long time."

Associate production director Clay Stone says that's part of what makes gear in Forever—and Classic—meaningful.

"Your best-in-slot that you pick up from a previous raid tier may continue to be your best in slot for a long time. It's very much our intention to try wherever we can to not invalidate old content."

Then again, a long time isn't expected to be literally forever, Hazzikostas says.

"At some point, if you're running the Barrow Deeps raid that's coming out in December, you're going to have all the items that you want. That's fine. You're done with it."

Forever players will see gear progress at level 60: those modest item level increases, gear that's good in specific niche situations, and rare "chase" pieces should keep people hunting, Forever developers say.

An item might be especially powerful when fighting in a desert, or against a dragon, for example, making it particularly good in one especially tough fight.

(And yes, players, developers are aware that this means bag space will be at a premium. "We're already thinking about that," principal designer Kris Zierhut says, mentioning the ideas of more bank space, trinket bags or even garment bags to hold the excess.)

Un-solving the game

Forever launches on November 4, and so far players have seen few of the pieces that will entice them at the end game. The current level cap in the beta is 30, and future items have been hidden from view and datamining to keep them guessing.

"We resurrected some old tech that keeps item stats and properties and tooltips secret, unknown to the client, until the item has actually been obtained by someone on the server," Hazzikostas says. "That's something we can use in modern WoW if we want."

Essentially a flag on items determines whether they are known, making them visible in the game's data. It trips when someone discovers an item for the first time, making sure that if the player links the item to others, it doesn't cause bugs

But until that moment, players can't get a sneak peek at what the piece of gear does. It's one reason why Forever doesn't have an Adventure Guide for dungeons; developers want the game to keep its secrets.

"Every single boss in our raids has some items that are very low percentage drop chase items, kind of like the Dragonspine Trophy was in Gruul's Lair—but for every boss," says Zierhut. "It might be three weeks, four weeks before somebody sees that item drop, and the whole meta is torn up again."

The goal is to keep the magic of exploration alive, he says.

"The goal is to un-solve the game, so players have to figure out again what's the best path," Zierhut says. "They don't know what the best items are. They don't know what to get. It's back to 2004 and nobody knows anything and figuring it out all over again."

Hand-crafted power

To add a layer of complexity—and, again, keep players from gaining power too quickly—items deliberately aren't optimized for players' preferred classes and stats. "Our items are much more idiosyncratic, and you don't get exactly what you want," he says, noting that knowing your class and choosing between gear sets will be one way players express skill in Forever. "None of the gear is perfect."

That's an old strategy—there are oft-discussed items from WoW's original launch that put strength on cloth gear, for example—but what is new is how much power items can have at a relatively low level.

Both low-level drops and crafted gear are powerful early, and that's on purpose, developers say.

"A lot of times tradeskills felt like an afterthought in Classic. Like, 'Oh, I could craft this item, but it's too much work and I'm about to out-level it anyway. Skip it. I'll level up my tailor when I get to level 60,' " Zierhut says. "I made a deliberate effort to make more crafting recipes worthwhile to craft while you are leveling up, including lowering the skill requirement to craft them.

"The typical item from tailoring, leatherworking, blacksmithing requires 25 fewer skill points than it used to. So you'll be able to craft that item right around the time it's your best-in-slot at that level and get the real value out of doing it."

Much of the tuning done so far to gear in Forever's beta has been to keep that idea of modest but steady progression across the whole leveling process.

"It's just a slightly different gradient in terms of power level," lead game designer Tim Jones says.