World of Warcraft: Forever plans to differentiate its progression from Classic by really slowing down and offering a wide variety of different types of rewards for players to hunt down over a long period of time.
Exactly what does Horizontal Progression Mean In World of Warcraft: Forever?
After the initial reveal of World of Warcraft: Forever, many players in the community began debating and speculating exactly how the game would tackle progression and what that might look like in a “Forever” experience.
VICE recently had a chance to sit down with some key members of the World of Warcraft: Forever development team and talk about their approach to horizontal and vertical progress in Forever and what players can expect as the game continues to grow.
VICE: There’s been a lot of conversations around the idea of horizontal progression. There’s been a lot of debate in the community about what it actually means and what it will look like over time. Could you explain a bit more about how you think of horizontal progression and how it might look as the game goes on? How does it differ from vertical progression?
Josh Greenfield (Senior Game Designer): Yeah, it’s an interesting topic. World of Warcraft has always had some elements of horizontal progression, right? When it comes to things like collections, things you can get that are cosmetics. And I think that’s an interesting thing to continue to pursue in a classic way.
We’ve sort of done that with things like transmog, for example. We have the collection system for things like pets and mounts. Obviously, we’re not looking to bloat those systems out just for the sake of giving players a treadmill of things to do. But where it makes sense, adding more things to chase is a cool thing to do.
And it’s not just for one type of player either. It’s having a bunch of different things that a wide variety of players could be interested in. Players want different things at different times. I’m primarily a raider, but sometimes I might want to go PvP. Having some cosmetics or some other rep rewards to chase along that PvP side of things is a great opportunity for that.
When it comes to our vertical progression, World of Warcraft is kind of at its core a vertical progression game and always has been. Having that incremental power gain is kind of important to the core of the game. However, we want to really slow that progression down.
Kris Zierhut (Principal Game Designer): We’re trying to make the items in the game a lot more varied. No more feeling like ‘That’s the BEST item in that slot and I always want that.’
So, we have items that have bonuses agains a specific creature type. Or bonuses in specific environments. Or have mechanic-specific things that make them good in certain situations and not in others. The intent is that there’s a lot of variety of what items can do and a very well-developed character has a ‘bag of tricks.’
They might say, ‘Hey on this encounter I’m going to pull out these two trinkets because they’ll work really well against this boss to solve this problem.’ But in another encounter they might use different trinkets or in a raid use a different helm, etc. Having a large collection of tricks to dip into it.
You’ll see players get an item from a raid and say ‘that’s not that interesting, I’ll just throw it in my bank and maybe I’ll use it someday…’ And then when the next new raid comes out, that item may become the perfect item for this new boss because if the circumstances, the setting, the type of creature it is. And so items get new life as new content is created for them.
Having that large collection of different items at that your pursing means there’s a lot of room to move horizontally and to make this big collection.
At the same time, somebody who is brand-new and doesn’t have that wide collection isn’t at a huge disadvantage. They just can’t super optimize.
As far as vertical progression, we do want to make it advance much more slowly that World of Warcraft: Classic did. So we expect the leveled items to grow more slowly and not very many items will be perfectly designed or optimized. They’ll all be sort of lopsized and good for different situations or different classes or different specs.
And, of course, the Legacy System. For some people, instead of going vertical progression on one character, they’re going to want to have a collection of every class. They’re going to have every trade skill. They’re going to explore the world, do every dungeon. And there are rewards that they can unlock that somebody focused on vertical progression doesn’t unlock.
They might get this spectral bear mount that super hard to get and other people who have awesome raid rewards don’t have it. They each have their own things they can pursue for different types of players.
World of Warcraft: Forever is officially live now, but most players are taking their time through the early starting zones and levels. The question of how progression feels at max level won’t pop up for the average player for quite a while as they take their time leveling through Azeroth at a slower pace.
Be sure to check back soon for lots more World of Warcraft: Forever news and updates as the early days of the new experience play out.
World of Warcraft: Midnight and World of Warcraft: Forever are now available now on PC.
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