Earlier this week, Blizzard released their latest installment in the WoW franchise, World of Warcraft: Forever. I primarily write about Guild Wars 2 on this blog, as that’s my main game, but recently I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in Forever. I’d like to talk about my experience and give a bit of critique and my thoughts so far. As I continue my journey through the game, I’ll probably make a couple more articles along these lines, as well; for now, let’s start with my first impressions.
Context
I’d first like to establish a bit about myself and my relationship with WoW; if you aren’t interested in that context, you can safely skip to the next heading.
As already mentioned, my main MMO is Guild Wars 2. I’ve been playing it actively for at least six years now, and it’s my favorite video game of all time. It wasn’t my first MMO experience, though; that title actually goes to WoW. Both of my parents have always been avid WoW players, and when I was a very, very young child I would watch them play. Baby me was utterly enchanted, and so I asked to be allowed to play as well. My father replied that a lot of reading is required to play MMOs, so I couldn’t play unless I knew how to read; this young autistic boy’s response to that was to just teach himself how to read, obviously. I was allowed to make a character on my father’s account, making WoW one of if not my very first gaming experience.
I don’t remember a lot from my initial experiences back then, given I was so young, but I look back on it fondly. My first character was a Tauren named Hornhead, and one of the few moments I do vividly remember is attacking a wandering creature—I think it was a kodo?—and being shocked that its family was smart enough to come and attack me together.
I never got particularly far on Hornhead or any other character I made; I was, after all, a very young child who had no idea what he was doing. At some point I stopped playing, and I wouldn’t touch WoW for a very long time after that, pretty much until right now with the launch of Forever. As a teenager I got back into MMOs, and I experimented with a few—at one point sinking quite a bit of time into RIFT—until I settled on GW2 as my main game. The “buy once, play forever” model and its focus on respecting players’ time and horizontal progression made it the perfect game for me. I never touched WoW again, most of all because I couldn’t really justify spending what little money I had on a monthly subscription just for a videogame.
My parents have continued to play WoW on and off my whole life, and they were very excited for the launch of Forever—so excited, in fact, that they convinced me to play with them. Most of my playtime so far has been together with them. Now, let’s get into how that gameplay actually went.
First Impressions
Usually I like to organize my reviews into proper sections, but I don’t really have a ‘main point’ I’m building towards here, so I’m just going to freeform this and get all my thoughts out. There’ll be a summary at the end of the important points.
Forever has definitely succeeded in sucking me in. I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far, though I think that’s definitely in significant part because I’m playing in a party with people I know. The new models and effects look great. I think the game does a really good job at capitalizing on WoW’s signature cartoony style and a bit of the classic low-poly look while also incorporating modern tech in a way that makes for some pretty stunning scenery at times. The special effects might be a bit overdone at times, though; there was one point where me and my party were blinded by an incredible green light consuming the whole area, but that turned out to just be the sun reflecting off of the nearby shore.
(Dis)Respecting Your Time
After spending so long in GW2, it’s been a bit funny to experience the classic “kill 10 boards” approach to quest design again. WoW was a pioneer of this style, and I wouldn’t say they do it poorly, but the system is definitely prone to being a bit frustrating by design. Since travel can be such a long and grueling process, you naturally want to be as efficient as possible and handle multiple quests at a time, but I’ve already encountered a few situations where quests forced me to backtrack between a town and a distant area several times in a row. Most aggravating was when there were multiple quests for getting drops from the same two enemy types I’d already done quests for, with these laid out in such a way that it’d be impossible to do all of them in one trip.
I’ve also found that any quest that wants you to gather loot from enemies tends to be a pain. I really don’t remember enemies being this stingy with quest drops when I played as a kid. Whenever we reach an area to do all the quests there, it feels like we can blitz through most of them in just five minutes, then spend thirty running around and killing the same enemy over and over just to get a handful of drops. Maybe this is a consequence of playing in a party, since you only get to loot some of the enemies you kill? If so, that’s a pretty disastrously terrible design flaw for a game that very explicitly wants you to play with friends.
There are a lot of things like this throughout the game, as Forever is trying to go for a very “classic” experience. Less QoL, less handholding, more adversity—a real “hardcore” experience. I appreciate this approach, and I think in some ways the game does it pretty well. One example I’d give is the lack of a dungeon finder; more on that later. But there are a lot of little things that seem to me like attempts to make the game more “hardcore” but actually just end up wasting your time with zero benefit.
Interactables
Let’s go over one example. One of WoW’s core design principles is that players are always at odds with each other and competing for resources. Need to farm enemies? You can’t leech off of other players, you need to be the one to aggro and fully kill the enemy yourself. Want a resource node? Better get to it before other players do. This is all well and good; I’d consider it a positive example of that “hardcore” feel they’re trying to build. However, I think this concept is applied too broadly, in ways that only harm the game by simply wasting players’ time without providing any benefit to the gameplay experience. Enemies and resource nodes being competitive resources makes sense; interactable quest objects, less so.
Many quests require you to go out into the world and interact with something. Sometimes you’re collecting it, sometimes just doing something to it. Whatever the case, these objects usually despawn after you interact with them, and for some reason, this despawning behavior is global. Need to go pick some weeds or gather some firewood? You better hope there isn’t another group of players also on that quest.
Those examples still make a bit of sense, at least; they’re another type of resource you’re competing with other players for, even if that’s annoying. The absolute worst example I saw was a quest in the dwarf zone. We needed to go around and collect three specific objects placed in set locations for some guy named Felix, and these three objects also despawned when interacted with. They very, very clearly weren’t meant to be something you compete over, since they respawn pretty much instantly. This means that, for absolutely no reason, my party of three has to sit there and wait through three cycles of the long animation and the respawn just for each of us to get it. This one felt less like a design decision and more like an outright bug, but it’s consistent with how every other interactable is coded. Does it work this way because the programmers couldn’t figure out how to make an interactable that doesn’t despawn, or because they genuinely thought making us sit there and each click on it at different times would be more fun? I can’t decide which would be worse.
Conflicting Design Philosophies
Good games are designed with intent—the dev team comes up with an idea, and they build the game around that idea to achieve and end result that feels consistent and accomplishes something specific. In GW2, one of its main design philosophies is that the game is meant to respect players’ time. This is why it utilizes horizontal progression, why it has a built-in LFG system, why it’s more casual overall, and why many of its systems (masteries, wardrobes, achievements, etc) focus on account-wide unlocks. Another of its design philosophies is creating situations where players are encouraged to work together with strangers and form temporary groups to achieve their goals.
For WoW, I’d say that one of its main design philosophies seems to be competition between players. There’s the aforementioned competition for enemy kill credit and resource nodes, and the whole Horde vs Alliance thing it’s got going on. A second philosophy is a focus on teamwork. Many classes aren’t self-sufficient, many things can only be accomplished by a specific class (such as needing a Mage to identify scrolls for you), and there are challenges both in the open world and in the form of instances that require groups of organized players to take on.
You might already notice a bit of a problem, though. Aren’t those two design philosophies, like, the exact opposite of each other? How can the game do both at the same time? Well, for the most part, the answer seems to be that it doesn’t. Activities that require teamwork are often completely separate from those that encourage you to be selfish. Sure, the game wants you to trade, and use your class-specific utilities for each other, and share your campfires, but those are all auxiliary, utility-focused things—completely separate from the main gameplay loop of killing and questing and gathering out in the field, which is where the game wants you to be selfish. Dungeons are designed to be hard enough that you strictly require a group to take them on; since the game knows you’ll always be with other players in there, it can abandon most of its competition-focused design. The parts that remain, such as rolling for high-value loot, can actually feed into the teamwork side of things if you’re playing with people you know; making sure that drops go to the players that actually need/can use them is an important part of your group’s teamwork.
This, finally, brings us to the situation in which I’d argue the game fails to reconcile its two main philosophies: questing as a party. In this scenario, you’re out in the areas where the game’s “be selfish” systems are in full effect, despite the fact that you’re working as a team. The game clearly wants you to work as a team, too, at least for some areas; there are zones of elite enemies that you simply don’t stand a chance of beating without a team. Healing and tank roles also have a miserable experience questing on their own, so it’s safe to assume the game also expects you to level those together with other players. Despite setting the systems up this way knowing that players can and will quest in groups, there seems to be no effort made to account for the two warring design philosophies of competition and teamwork.
Let’s go back to the frustrations I described earlier with drop quests. If you’re questing as a group, these take dramatically longer to complete than any others. Everyone shares credit for each others’ enemy kills—an exception that the game makes to the ‘competition’ rules to help out parties—but the same doesn’t go for loot, as only some of you get to loot each time. It seems to me like it works on a cycle, rotating who gets to grab something each time. This means that, in order to get the drop, you need to first win the roll to be the one who actually loots something, and then also win the roll to actually get the drop you need. At minimum this multiplies the time the quest takes to complete by the number of players you’re questing with, but it gets worse. If some players complete the quest before others, they’re still in the loot rotation. If you’re in a party of three (like I was) and 2/3 of you are done, that means 2/3rds of your kills are worthless and don’t even have a chance of advancing the quest.
This feels like a pretty massive oversight. As I already mentioned, you get credit for your party members’ kills, seemingly even if you don’t get a single hit off on the enemy. The fact that it works that way clearly means that the team don’t want to punish you for playing in parties—they want you to play with friends, and for playing together to make things smoother. But due to how these drop quests work, you are punished—quite severely, in fact.
I hope this is viewed as a real issue and not another bit of “hardcore” design, and that it’s addressed by the team. The solution should be really easy—just make the quest drops separate entirely from the normal rotation of loot. Each time an enemy dies, it rolls for who gets to loot it, and then it separately rolls a chance of its quest item dropping for each player; if you get a quest drop, you can pick it up even if the enemy has no other loot for you. This maintains the balance of the economy and the aspect of competition over resources without turning drop quests into pointlessly bloated slogfests, which is what they currently are.
A Positive Example
I’ve been a bit negative so far, so I’d like to change course and talk a little bit about what I consider a good change, at least from the perspective of a game’s design philosophy. As mentioned, WoW is all about a balance of competition and teamwork, and those combine to form a third guiding philosophy—community. As you both compete against and play and trade with other players, you get a sense of community. MMOs can be like their own little worlds; it’s one of their unique strengths.
Difficult, instanced content is a big part of this community. WoW utilizes dungeons and raids to force players to interact with each other. You can’t take these on alone; unless you happen to already have enough friends who A: play WoW, B: are the right level, and C: play the right roles to fill your comp (unlikely), you’re going to need to team up with strangers. This can lead players to form or join guilds, or to just assemble a group from whoever they can find in their zone. It’s a great way of making the community feel that much more tight-knit, of spurring players into forming bonds and friendships, and of generating lots of in-game interactions.
You might see where I’m going with this. The dungeon finder is a bit of QoL available in retail WoW which spits in the face of pretty much all of those things. Who needs to ask around in cities or join a guild? Just queue up and wait until you get thrust into the dungeon with a bunch of strangers you’ve never met and may never see again. I wasn’t around for this transition back in the day, but the WoW players I speak to have told me that the introduction of dungeon finder resulted in a very significant paradigm shift among the game’s community. Considering it under the lens of design philosophies, it’s easy to see why: it doesn’t really align with any of them, and is actively incongruent with the philosophy of in-game community building that gave early WoW and other MMOs of the time such a distinctive feeling.
Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that LFG systems like the dungeon finder are inherently bad; GW2 has one, and while it kinda sucks in its own ways, its presence is definitely a benefit there compared to not having one at all. I’ve only played a tiny bit of FFXIV, but I’d say the same goes for its duty finder. The issue isn’t the system itself of dungeon finder, but the way it interacts with the rest of the game. GW2 is all about jumping quickly between different, short activities and doing things with impromptu groups of strangers; it’s perfectly suited for an LFG system. WoW, on the other hand, simply isn’t. I haven’t reached the right level to try out my first dungeon yet, but based on this analysis of game design philosophy and what I’ve heard from other WoW players, I think the choice to not include dungeon finder in Forever seems to be a good one.
Conclusion
A lot of what I discussed here ended up being negative, but that’s just because my gripes with the game make for better writing material. It’s easy to write a whole bunch of thoughts down about whatever frustrates me, or the design flaws I manage to pick out; you don’t think as much about the parts you enjoy because, well, you’re enjoying them.
I’ve been having a pretty good time with the game overall. The feeling of community is definitely unlike anything I’ve experienced in other games so far, and just taking a break from GW2 to play something different is a really nice change of pace. I’m looking forward to trying some dungeons and putting together a more interesting build. As I said at the start, I’ll probably make a few articles on my journey through Forever, so check back for future updates if you found my ramblings here entertaining. Thanks for reading!
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