Source: Game Informer's BlizzCon 2026 interview with the World of Warcraft: Forever team on YouTube. Quotes are the video's own caption text, each with the clock, and the video is embedded at every moment discussed.
The Minute at the Fire
One cooking fire, four professions feeding it, and a buff you only get by sitting down for a minute.
The most useful thing Blizzard said about its new game all week was a defense of standing still. Blizzard is the studio that makes World of Warcraft, the long-running online role-playing game its players call WoW, and World of Warcraft: Forever is the new version of it, built on the original 2004 game and expanded rather than replaced. The defense came in a 22-minute interview rather than a keynote, and it came from an engineer.
Blizzard announced Forever at BlizzCon, its annual fan convention, on September 12 and 13. Game Informer, the American games magazine and site, sat two of its leads on a couch afterward: lead game designer Tim Jones and lead software engineer Nora Mills. Jones is the man the earlier pieces in this series could only call Tim, because the What's Next panel never showed his name.
The part that matters starts with a cooking fire. Forever has a camping system, and Jones explained that the fire the cooking profession crafts is now something the other professions can add to.
The cornerstone of the campfire system is the cooking fire that the cooking profession crafts, but we have a new system where a cooking fire can accommodate a certain amount of extra objects that are crafted by other professions. So if you're a skinner, if you're a miner, if you're a blacksmith, if you're a leatherworker, you can bring different things that provide different bonuses to people.
— Tim Jones, lead game designer, Game Informer's interview, BlizzCon 2026, 12:16, watch
Then the sentence the whole design hangs on. You do not get the buffs by walking past the fire. You get them by sitting down, and Jones said the sitting is the point.
You have to sit down for a minute to get these buffs on you. And the hope is that in that interstitial space when people are waiting, you run into someone that might be on the same quest as you. And maybe that turns into a friendship. Maybe you join that person's guild. Maybe you're raiding together. Maybe you're going to BlizzCon together in a year.
— Tim Jones, lead game designer, Game Informer's interview, BlizzCon 2026, 12:43, watch
Mills had set it up a minute earlier, and her version admits what the fire also invites. Sitting down makes you visible.
Our camping system is another way that you can do that. Because we sit down at a campfire, maybe you're going to come take advantage of my buffs, maybe you're going to gank me, I don't know. But it's just wonderful. You can imagine it as just sort of a staging ground for all of these really awesome potential opportunities to engage with other players in a variety of ways.
— Nora Mills, lead software engineer, Game Informer's interview, BlizzCon 2026, 11:39, watch
So the mechanic is small: one fire, objects from four named professions, a buff that needs you seated for about a minute. The design is not the fire. It is the minute, and what Blizzard expects to happen in it.
The Run Blizzard Keeps
Mills on the flight path, the dungeon run and the question in general chat: the time the genre removes is the time Blizzard keeps.
Mills then widened the argument from the fire to everything in the game that takes time and asks nothing of you, and this is the passage worth the whole interview. She started with the flight path, the long automated ride between towns that the original game made you sit through.
When I jump on a lengthy flight path, I might decide I'm going to talk to my guild, to have some conversation. Maybe I'm flying through a zone and someone asks a question in general chat. I'm going to answer the question. Same thing with if I'm running to a dungeon.
— Nora Mills, lead software engineer, Game Informer's interview, BlizzCon 2026, 13:08, watch
Then she made the case against herself, the way a designer who has sat in the meeting makes it. Looked at as a spreadsheet, the ride is dead time: no choices, no problem to solve, nothing to engage with. The genre has spent most of two decades treating that as a defect and fixing it with more flight points, faster mounts and teleports to the dungeon door.
If you look at it at face value and you're trying to think, oh well, but it takes time and the player's not making interesting choices or doing active problem solving or anything, they're not engaging with these systems during that time, they're just running. If you look at that at face value it can be tempting to want to do something about it. We'll add more flight paths, we'll make that run less, we'll reduce that friction.
— Nora Mills, lead software engineer, Game Informer's interview, BlizzCon 2026, 13:33, watch
And then the answer. The run is kept because the run is where a player decides whether to be alone.
We look at it as, those are key to providing you with opportunities to slow down a little bit, decide, do you want to engage with other players? If someone's bored and they're posting in local defense and they're just like, hey, this guy over here is flagged, does someone want to come help me go after him? Maybe I'm going to take a detour on my dungeon run and I'm going to go help that person out, and maybe we're going to strike up a friendship, or a rivalry with the guy I just ganked.
— Nora Mills, lead software engineer, Game Informer's interview, BlizzCon 2026, 14:10, watch
Read it again with the campfire in mind and it is the same design twice. The fire makes you sit for a minute; the flight path makes you sit for three; the dungeon run makes you cross a zone on foot. In each case the game creates a stretch of time in which you are present, idle and reachable, and then it waits to see what you do with it. The general chat question, the local defense call and the guild conversation are not things the game does. They are things the game has left room for.
That is a different theory of an online world from the one most of the genre runs on. The usual theory is that a player's time is a cost and every minute not spent on a meaningful choice is waste. Mills's theory is that the idle minute is the social surface of the game, and that when you remove it you do not save the player time, you remove the only moments in which the server is a place rather than a queue.
The Neighborly Realm
A realm with no realm list still wants you to recognize the person who stole your herbs.
The obvious objection is that Forever has no realms. Blizzard deleted the realm list and replaced servers with rule sets and a world logic that distributes players, and a world that shuffles you among strangers is a bad place to build a reputation. Mills said the logic is being tuned against that, starting with the fight you did not ask for.
We don't want there to be a world in which our world logic that's distributing players throughout the world is deciding, well, I see you questing there, doing your own thing, I'm going to decide to throw in like 40 Horde who are going to come after you and just mess you up. It's going to be a little more balanced, such that at least maybe you'll have more of a fighting chance, and there's more social context involved too, so that you can encounter some of the same players more often and have that mega realm neighborly vibe. Maybe Tim's building a reputation for stealing my herbs.
— Nora Mills, lead software engineer, Game Informer's interview, BlizzCon 2026, 15:00, watch
The herb thief is the tell. A realm that wants you to recognize the person who keeps beating you to a node is a realm that has decided repeat encounters are worth more than perfect load balancing, and the 40 Horde the logic must never drop on a lone quester are the other half of the same rule. On a PvP rule set you are held to one faction, Jones confirmed, so the neighbor you keep meeting can be the one you keep fighting.
Mills closed the interview on the same note, and it explains why she defends the run. Asked where Forever goes next, she did not reach for a raid.
I want to say more bite-sized, down-to-earth stories rather than big world-ending threats. What are the people in this world doing at this time period? What do they care about? What are their fears? What situations are they in? Are there opportunities to help them?
— Nora Mills, lead software engineer, Game Informer's interview, BlizzCon 2026, 21:10, watch
And then the sentence that tells you this is personal rather than a design pillar. Her guildmates of a decade came to her wedding last year, she said, and she had met people at the convention that week who met their spouses in the game. The campfire, the flight path and the herb thief are all in service of that: a game that leaves enough room for two strangers to become something else.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Riot has posted one job about social systems and said nothing about travel; the canon it draws on already has a fire every craft fed.
Our read, and it is speculative. Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends, the five-on-five battle game its whole catalogue grew from, has said nothing about travel, flight paths or how players will find each other in its MMO, the online role-playing game it confirmed in 2020 and reset in 2024. The one thing on the record is a job. On July 31 Riot posted a Staff Software Engineer, Social and Store listing in Sydney, tagged to Riot Discovery, the studio Riot has attached to the MMO, to "architect the foundational social and store systems" of an unpublished product with a team of two to four engineers, "adhering to our social safety standards." That tells you Riot is building the plumbing. It says nothing about whether the game will leave room for the minute.
The lesson in this interview is not the campfire. Blizzard is not building a campfire. It is building the minute you spend at it, and calling the minute the product. Every profession has a reason to sit at the same fire, the buff has a reason to keep you there, and the flight path has a reason to be long. Riot, whose company reflex is to remove waiting from everything it ships, is the studio this argument was written for.
Blizzard is not building a campfire. It is building the minute you spend at it, and calling the minute the product.
| Side by side | WoW: Forever | Riot's MMO |
|---|---|---|
| The fire | One cooking fire; skinning, mining, blacksmithing and leatherworking add objects; buffs after a minute of sitting | Not revealed |
| Travel | Flight paths and dungeon runs kept long on purpose, as the place you answer general chat | Not revealed |
| Who you meet | World logic tuned for repeat encounters and faction balance, one faction per character on PvP | Not revealed |
| Social systems | Built into the 2004 game and its add-ons | A Sydney listing for a staff engineer to architect "foundational social and store systems" for a 2-4 person team |
| Stories | Bite-sized and down-to-earth, in Mills's words | Not revealed |
Runeterra, the world League of Legends is set in and the one confirmed fact about the MMO, already has the fire. The Freljord is the frozen north of the map, and there the Hearthblood were a people of master craftspeople who gathered on the slopes of Hearth-Home at the base of the dormant volcano where the forge-god Ornn labors: blacksmiths, architects and brewmasters, thousands of them, drawn from across the continent to work beside one fire and bring it their best. Ornn answered their work with a nod or a frown, and his highest praise was the single word "Passable." A cooking fire that every profession feeds is not a WoW idea. In the canon Riot draws on, it is how a culture began.
The same map has the caravan. The Notai are the nomads of the Freljord, a people who travel in elkyr-drawn carts from village to village bringing song and dance, one last celebration for everyone they meet as each winter's chill sets in. Nunu, the boy who rambles across the Freljord with the yeti Willump, was raised in that caravan, gathering tales his mother turned into songs. The Notai are Mills's flight path written as a people: the journey is the social event, and the villages are the stops.
Further south, Kenethet, a desert city in eastern Shurima, is a waypoint for anyone crossing the deep desert, its bone-souks drawing armed trade caravans down from the north before they strike out across the Sai Kahleek, the stretch of sand where burrowing Void creatures hunt anything that moves on the surface. That is a crossing you do not make alone, and a stop where the crossings meet. It is the dungeon run and the local defense channel in one place.
Take this
- The minute. A buff that needs you seated is a reason to sit where other people sit. Copy the wait, not the fire.
- Every craft feeds one fire. A skinner, a miner, a smith and a leatherworker each bring something. A profession that improves a stranger's evening is a profession people talk about.
- Keep the run. Mills's test is the honest one: if a stretch of travel is where people answer general chat, shortening it deletes the conversation, not the boredom.
- Bias the world toward familiar faces. Realmless is fine as long as the logic still lets Tim build a reputation for stealing your herbs.
- Small stories. Mills wants to know what the people of Azeroth fear at this point in time. Runeterra's short stories already work at exactly that scale.
Leave this
- Waiting with nothing at the end of it. The campfire works because the buff is real and the crowd is real. A minute of sitting in an empty zone is a loading screen with extra steps.
- Friction only a veteran can read. Blizzard can keep a 2004 flight path because its players remember why it is there. A new game has to make the wait legible on the first day.
- A balancing act that becomes a dungeon finder by another name. If the world logic is tuned so hard that nobody is ever outnumbered, nobody ever needs a hand either.
That map is the fiction Riot draws on, not a launch plan. Which regions the MMO opens with, how much of the map it covers, its era, its platform and its price are all unrevealed. The Freljord and Shurima are here because the canon that lives in them already answers the question Mills was answering.
Your Take
Should the Riot MMO keep long travel on purpose?
What to Watch
Three dated Forever beats, then three more RuneGrove reads on the same convention.
World of Warcraft: Forever beta opens
Jones said he cannot wait for people to have those moments when they jump into the beta.
World of Warcraft: Forever launches
The first time the campfire and the world logic meet a full population.
The first new raids unlock
The first dated beat on the roadmap Blizzard showed at BlizzCon.
Reported from Game Informer's BlizzCon 2026 interview on YouTube, embedded above with the clock. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.
