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With World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard had to reconnect with what made WoW great in the first place

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With World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard had to reconnect with what made WoW great in the first place

A lot of the team had to "unlearn" design habits they picked over the years.

After 13 years at Blizzard, Michael Nuthals faces what might just be the toughest challenge of his career yet: working on a familiar but different and highly anticipated version of World of Warcraft. As lead encounter designer, he's part of the team working on WoW: Forever. Announced at BlizzCon earlier this year, Forever is a sort of remaster of WoW designed to expand on the game's "Classic" era. It takes players back to Azeroth, the setting of the original 2004 game, before Blizzard over the course of 11 expansions took the game in the direction that it did. In the process, it imagines a "what if" scenario.

What if Blizzard had continued to expand Azeroth, instead of sending players to the Orc homeworld of Draenor and beyond with The Burning Crusade and later expansions? In Forever , there are more than 1,000 new quests for players to complete, many of them designed to continue story threads that were left unresolved in the original game. Additionally, there are new areas within Azeroth for players to explore — including Mount Hyjal, the site of one of Warcraft III 's pivotal battles — in addition to fresh dungeons and raids. Blizzard has also rebalanced the game's classes and items, and built an entirely new global illumination lighting pipeline to make the game feel more atmospheric. Controversially, Forever will also feature a new race, the Skyborne Elves, who weren't in the original game.


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