(Image credit: Tyler C. / Blizzard Entertainment)
Harvey Randall
I've played about 50+ hours of the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, and wouldn't you know it, I'm going to be playing a lot more when it comes out November 4.
Earlier this week, Kris Zierhut, principal game designer on World of Warcraft: Forever, said that the game would have a release schedule that's a "little more laid back". Rather than the blisteringly fast eight to 10 week schedule of Season of Discovery, Forever'll aim to release major updates once every four months or so.
This is honestly music to my ears—I've been impressed by retail WoW's blistering pace and its seasonal structure, even if there have been some rocky, bug-filled patches in the past; and it's certainly something I've praised before, especially in contrast to other certain MMOs that have been coming to a standstill.
But I've been playing WoW… well, for a long time, but I've had a consistent sub since Dragonflight, and I've been able to see the arc of Blizzard whipping up its schedule into a proper roadmap. Which did pull the game back from the brink, true, but three expansions in and I'm just sort of exhausted.
There's always some new bar to fill, some new doohickey to collect, some new reputation track to chew on, and it all moves so fast that if I, say, have an off-week to go play another game, I feel pretty lost. While Midnight does major patches at roughly the same release tempo (12.0.0 came out in January, 12.1.0 came out in August) it also has a ton of interim stuff to flood out your schedule every three months, rather than four.
Launch was already crammed with stuff—a raid tier, delves, the new prey system, housing, and so on. Just under three months passed since launch, and wham, suddenly we've got Void Assaults! Ritual Sites! The Omnium Folio! Whatever Abyss Anglers is, I never checked, which is kinda the problem! Just over a month later, and there's a new raid and a new system plugged into Void Assaults (which I'm literally just now finding out about, I completely missed it). Two months later, and it's 12.1.0, which I hadn't even sat down to properly play before Labyrinths became a thing.
The idea of smaller, chiller patches in an overall slower-paced game (here's fellow PCG writer Lincoln Carpenter's treatise on the virtues of hitting a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds) sounds like a nice, soothing bath after an overstimulating day at the circus.
I do feel that prickling sense of overstimulation fear return when Zierhut talks about the interim stuff, however:
"And then one nuance on that is: We do plan on making content that unlocks in between … you want to stagger out some content across those four months. It's not just patch day comes [around], here's a content fire hose, and now we're silent for four months. A lot of that is, hey, there's a time event calendar that gradually unlocks things and opens them up over those four months to give things a little bit more life instead of that all at once effect."
Still, given Forever's meant to be a horizontally-progressing game that doesn't have expansions (we'll need to see how that pans out), I might find these little tasks a lot more soothing than the looming feeling I have with WoW, where at any point it might suddenly become too late to get stuck into a season.
Ideally, these mid-patch trickles will be optional tasks I can get around to basically whenever, rather than something I feel pressured to get done just so I can stay up-to-date for whatever flashy system's trundling down the pipeline next. Hit me with that lo-fi update cadence, I'm ready for it.
