- Author: Luxrah
- Date: August 1, 2024
- Updated: August 1, 2024
- Expansion: WoW Classic
In one of three interviews that were released on YouTube this week, Senior Game Producer Josh Greenfield (Aggrend) and Assistant Lead Classic Designer Tim Jones (OptimusJones) appeared with Classic WoW content creator hammerdance to talk about Phase 4 and the future of Season of Discovery and Classic WoW. You can watch the entire video at the bottom of this article. Here’s our summary of the most noteworthy bits!
Classic Plus?
The big news comes near the end of the video, when Hammerdance brings up the success of other classic MMORPGs like Runescape, which have implemented permanent classic era realms with consistent updates based on community feedback. While no definitive announcement was made that Classic+ is in fact on its way, the developers’ response very strongly hinted that this is in fact the case. Jones asked the audience to consider why they are performing this big experiment with Season of Discovery and what the longterm plans for that may be.
Throughout the interview, the devs make reference to their “scrappy” team and the fact that they are still proving themselves. It seems that Season of Discovery isn’t just a small side project; Blizzard has bigger plans for this corner of WoW down the road, but for now they are just testing the waters. Whether those bigger plans will be exactly what players have envisioned for a Classic+ remains to be seen.
Reusable Content
Related to the experimental nature of Season of Discovery and the scrappiness of the team, the devs also shed some light on some of the limitations they’ve been working around to implement Season of Discovery content. Jones described the challenges of acquiring new art assets and the resulting necessity of reusing Vanilla content as much as possible. For example, the new Demon Fall Canyon, Azuregos, and Lord Kazzak instances have new loading screens in the pipeline, but they weren’t able to get those in time for the phase launch, so they’ll be in the next phase instead.
Healthy Servers
Greenfield and Jones emphasized that healthy servers are a top goal, and there is currently a dedicated team at Blizzard who are working on improving server architecture for all of World of Warcraft. They cited Warbands as being a step toward Blizzard’s goal of making servers more flexible, and that technology may eventually benefit Classic realms as well, allowing them to move populations around more easily.
Future Phases
The developers said they would like to make lower level runes easier to get in future phases, although many of the more unique or interesting discoveries will probably remain as they are. They also said they have no plans to add more rune slots. While they haven’t ruled it out, it sounds like they’ve already added everything they planned to add through runes and don’t want to clutter up the character window any more than it already is.
When asked about PvP, Jones admitted the team feels that the PvP community has been underserved by Season of Discovery thus far, and hopes to rectify that in the future. There was no mention of what that might entail, however.
Beyond that, the two spoke about a few of the same topics as we saw in their interview with Ebonhardt:
- Future phases will be more than 4 weeks, but less than 3 months long
- They aren’t committed to treating future raids the same as Molten Core in terms of difficulty levels, etc.
- Season of Discovery characters almost certainly won’t just disappear, but they don’t yet know what retirement will look like
The team is looking at the data for Molten Core now to see how players have been interacting with the content. That data will inform many of their future design decisions.
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