World of Warcraft Forever launches a week from today, and while the game will have a huge swath of content available on day one, there will be new content continually added to the game. But how frequently should fans expect new content to arrive? It sounds like Blizzard is willing to take things a little slower than in the modern version of World of Warcraft.
In a recent interview with IGN, World of Warcraft Forever principal game designer Kris Zierhut said Forever will use a slower cadence than Midnight’s aggressive eight-week content cycle, noting: “we’re fairly convinced the correct [update] rate is something closer to once every four months or 17 weeks or three times a year.”
This contrasts with the modern version of World of Warcraft, which has maintained an aggressive update cadence since Dragonflight launched in 2022. While that approach has meant players of the modern version have something new every couple of months, some have said the updates often feel rushed, with bugs and repeated content. After all, we’ve all done some form of invasions several times in the last couple of years.
World of Warcraft: Forever Screenshots
Zierhut did say that Blizzard experimented with a faster update schedule in Season of Discovery, an experimental Classic game mode that came out in 2023, but “we cut it down to closer to that eight week or 10 week schedule. It felt way, way, way too fast.”
But by going with a four-month update schedule, Forever will also avoid the content droughts that some older expansions were infamous for. There have been times in WoW’s history where the game didn’t have new content for a year at a time, like in Warlords of Draenor, where patch 6.2, which included Hellfire Citadel, lasted for 13 months before the prepatch update for Legion.
Zierhut acknowledged this as well, saying: “We’ve played around with different rates of releasing content and going six or eight months without new stuff always feels bad. We know that.”
The idea there is to ease players into content.
The idea there is to ease players into content, rather than overwhelming them with everything all at once. Zierhut continued, saying: “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.”
Only time will tell if this middle ground between rapid updates and slow updates will pay off, but according to the roadmap that Blizzard released at BlizzCon, Forever will have its first major update sometime in spring 2027. So, if that four-month timeline that Blizzard is targeting pays off, WoW Forever should have a fresh round of new content sometime in March.
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Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
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