With one of the guests on this podcast episode being Meeix, a player more devoted to the modern version of World of Warcraft, Countdown's Josh asks Clay Stone who WoW Forever's target audience is.
"Broadly speaking, this game is for anybody who likes World of Warcraft, anybody who previously liked World of Warcraft, and anyone who's interested in playing World of Warcraft. As just mentioned, a game designed for everybody is a game designed for nobody, and that's something we recognized. When we were approaching the development for WoW Forever, the makeup of the team, obviously, much of the team is the Classic team, and from that standpoint, we know how to build Classic-like experiences."
However, Stone would go on to clarify that current Classic WoW players are not the only target audience for this new game.
"We also recognize that there are a lot of players out there who have not played World of Warcraft in a very long time... and we also know that there are Classic players similarly that have walked away from the game, but there's a yearning from those players for something new in the classic space. We know that is a massive audience for us as well."
As he continued the conversation, he would also explain how they hope to attract brand new WoW players to WoW: Forever, but also wanted to elaborate on where the Modern WoW player stands in this conversation.
"When we think of this experience, it was very important for us to design an experience that deliberately did not feel like the modern game. Now that being said, we obviously brought in some modern components, like the collections menu or transmog, but in both of those cases we made very big decisions about how those were going to operate in this game to make them feel not exactly the same way they do in the modern game, and part of the reason for us doing that is to build a complementary experience."
Stone would go on to say that Forever is a game that Modern WoW players can still check out whenever they've finished all of their gameplay in the current mainline expansion, and they can come into this game to experience that "classic-style leveling journey". However, he did want to clarify that the direction is not set in stone and could change depending on who the retaining players are in Forever.
"We think we know who the audience is going to be based on who we developed it for and the beta indicators, but we won't know for sure until we launch this game, and at that point, when we see who the players are and the ones who choose to join us for this journey, that's going to inform some of the decisions we make going forward as well."
As this topic wrapped up, Aggrend would clarify that they don't think of this necessarily as "retail vs classic", and that it's more, again, whether or not it fits their four core pillars that they've introduced at BlizzCon. Clarification like this is helpful to the player base, as the last time we heard from a developer about who the game was designed for was through a tweet a month ago from Matt Armstrong.
