•Blizzard is deliberately designing World of Warcraft: Forever so that players want to create additional characters, according to developers who spoke exclusively about the game’s approach to character progression.
“We’re basically trying to entice players to want to create new characters, to roll an alt,” vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas says. The newest version of the MMO launches November 4, and executive producer Holly Longdale describes it as the intended entry point for newcomers.
“If you’re new, this is the one, right? This is the lowest barrier to entry that we have going,” she says.
The developers cite several reasons for encouraging alts. Lower-level characters make it easier to welcome friends into the game and to experience future leveling zones, dungeons, and encounters coming in patches after launch.
A central part of this design is the Legacy System, which awards achievement-style points for major accomplishments. Those points can be spent on talent-tree-style options that provide quality-of-life improvements, and accumulating them becomes easier across multiple characters.
Principal designer Kris Zierhut says he built elaborate spreadsheets to predict what progression-minded players would choose when spending those points. Creating alt characters to grab the easier low-level rewards makes sense compared with chasing every difficult option.
“There’s less time investment,” he says. “One of the things I love about that is, now let’s say my brother wants to start playing the game. Normally I go, ‘I got my level 60 character. Sorry—I can try to boost you.’ Now I can say, ‘You know what? I’ve got this level 20 guy I’ve been leveling. You can get there pretty quick. Let’s group up and play together.'”
The team also wants alts to drive engagement with new content. Because the level cap does not change, much of the ongoing additions are oriented toward leveling players.
“We’re releasing content around all of the different level bands,” says lead game designer Tim Jones. He adds that this lets players spend as much or as little time in Azeroth as they wish, opening many lines of progression and allowing people to fit play into short sessions.
“I’m a dad. After [the kids] go to bed, I have time… I can log in for 30 minutes or an hour. I can open my quest log, see I have a couple quests that will help me round out completing Elwynn Forest, or I can head up to the auction house, grab a couple materials and make a few incremental advancements in blacksmithing. That’s a form of meaningful progression.”
डेवलपरs are adding new items to professions, plus new leveling dungeons and areas in future patches, according to lead software engineer Michael Nuthals.
“When we think of future updates, we want to make sure we’re creating content that everyone who plays the game has something to look forward to,” he says. “If I love leveling, I’ve got a new path or a new quest chain or a new dungeon I can do.”
Lead software engineer Nora Mills adds: “Your journey is never identical to what it was.” She notes that Forever’s emphasis on alts has the team weighing features that could support that playstyle, including account-wide banking.
“Particularly with a Legacy system that encourages playing alts, taking out the extra couple of steps of having to mail items manually from your main to your alt—logging over, taking them out of the mail, I don’t know that’s in anyone’s interest,” Hazzikostas says. “An account-wide bank is something I could see adding in the not-too-distant future.”
“As people decide to make their alts, they’ll take different paths,” Jones says. “We promise to consistently add new leveling dungeons and new leveling zones.”
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