Part of World of Warcraft: Forever's charm is that combat is considerably slower than the regular version of the MMO. It's the kind of game where you'll spend 38 seconds hitting a scorpion because there are so few buttons to press in the early stages of your journey.

Classes in WoW's past were simple, but had small quirks to them that you'd pick up over time. Melee classes, for example, can squeeze abilities in between their auto attacks to maximize their damage output. You'd never care about this if fights only took 10 seconds, like they do in WoW today, but back then you had to use all that time in more drawn-out battles for something.

The WoW: Forever beta has reminded me how satisfying it is to play a class that isn't built like Whac-A-Mole, where the challenge is to hit the right buttons the moment they start to glow. There's a rhythm to WoW's old classes and I'm delighted to hear that Blizzard fully intends to maintain it in WoW: Forever.

Blizzard developers told TechRadar that they want "to err on the side of simpler classes, but with engaging depth," and that all of it will align with its guiding principle of staying true to the old MMO's "core design, pacing, and tone."

"The level of mechanical complexity found in the beta classes is indicative of our intentions," Blizzard says.

That suggests to me that Blizzard isn't trying to speed up the pace of combat, nor will it look to shore up a class' weaknesses by adding new abilities where there were none before.

Source link