WoW Forever Will Hand Out Fewer Blue Rewards. Blizzard's first dev podcast says levels 1 to 20 run slower than Classic Era and some Druid forms look too polished for old Azeroth.

What Happened

Blizzard's first WoW Forever podcast says it plans to hand out fewer early blue quest rewards, and that levels 1 to 20 already run slower than in Classic Era.

The episode

• Episode one. Blizzard, the studio behind World of Warcraft, posted the first episode of its Forever podcast on September 24. Forever is the new version of that game, built on the 2004 original and expanded, now in beta.
• Who talked. Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield, a senior game designer on Forever, and Tim Jones, its lead Classic designer, walked through the beta's first week with the creators Countdown To Classic and Xaryu.
• Big audience. The 63-minute YouTube episode had about 533,000 views by September 26.
• Beta window. The Forever beta runs through October 21.

What the team said

• Slower to 20. Blizzard's data shows levels 1 to 20 running slightly slower in Forever than in Classic Era, the long-running servers for the original game.
• Fewer early blues. The team plans to pull back some blue-quality quest rewards in the early game to keep the old white-to-green-to-blue gear curve.
• Shapeshift art. Blizzard is reviewing feedback that some forms of the Druid, WoW's shapeshifting class, look too high-fidelity for a classic Azeroth.
• Skyborne split. Reactions to the Skyborne, the new playable race Forever adds, were described as "wildly mixed".
• Layering bugs. Bugs in layering, the tech that splits a crowded zone into parallel copies, have been common.
• Campfires work. The shared campfires are getting players to socialise without being told to.
• Nothing final. None of these adjustments are framed as locked-in changes.

The detail comes from recaps of the episode by MMOHuts (September 25) and MMOs.com (September 26).

Greenfield on X

• Classes next. On September 25 Greenfield posted "we are going to be talking about classes next week" and asked what else players want the team to explain.
• Skyborne's start. On September 24 he wrote that the Skyborne starter zone was built to follow the Ghostlands and Bloodmyst Isle, the second zones of the blood elf and draenei starts, not Elwynn Forest, the human start.

What This Means for the Riot MMO

Blizzard is tuning loot, leveling speed and art against what players remember, and Riot's MMO faces the same three calls.

• Ex-WoW staff. Riot's MMO team includes three people who worked on WoW: combat designer Brian Holinka, lead producer Raymond Bartos and engineer Orlando Salvatore.
• Loot is pacing. Blizzard would rather make early upgrades rarer than let a blue item stop meaning something.
• A remembered baseline. Forever's leveling speed is judged against Classic Era, a pace players already know, not tuned from scratch.
• Polish can misfire. The Druid feedback shows that new art which looks too good can read as wrong in a game sold on memory.
• Explaining mid-beta. Blizzard is walking players through its reasoning in a recurring show while the test runs. Riot's MMO team has not done that yet.

Our read. The Druid note is the one Riot should study. League players already carry a fixed picture of every champion, so Runeterra art that drifts from it will get the same pushback. The blues are the second lesson: rarer upgrades only feel earned if the first 20 levels keep people playing.

It fits the six BlizzCon decisions we think Riot should copy. Salvatore has already joked that Forever emptied his town.

Your Take

Reported from Blizzard Entertainment; recapped by MMOHuts, MMOs.com and Massively Overpowered and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.