World of Warcraft: Forever’s convinced me that we lost too much to modern MMO quest design

I’ve been having a jolly old time with World of Warcraft: Forever—for the most part, it really does just feel like an alternate universe where the Cataclysm world revamp never happened and, instead, Blizzard simply funnelled more quests into the old world. There’s still plenty here that’s familiar, but there’s just enough new stuff to do to smooth over the levelling and questing experience.

A questing experience that is otherwise unchanged. If anything, the oldschool-ness of it is actually elevated by the changes, reflecting some of WoW’s best questing areas. It’s as though every single zone has become The Barrens, flooded with lots of little tasks for your dopamine-starved brain nugget.

And let me tell you, I’ve been staggered at how much fun I’m having. Not just in a “nostalgic oldschool rose-tinted goggles” sort of way (although I’ll concede that is part of it) but from a genuine perspective of someone playing a modern videogame. Because the quest design that captured an entire generation of MMO players back in the early 2000s? It holds up.

Not in terms of the “collect five bear arses” thing, but in terms of how it’s all structured. See, in the good ol’ days, WoW had questing hubs wherein you’d flood your journal with anywhere from five to fifteen tasks, some of which had their own branching storylines and quest chains.

You were then faced with a map and a decision of how to complete them—okay, clarification time, the quest markers on a map ARE new, but it’s not like we didn’t have quest helper AddOns back in the day. Anyway, keeping that decision-making interesting are what I’m gonna call the three layers of questing friction: Ordering, travel, and level variety.

‘Ordering’ is the most straightforward—simply put, the player has to decide what the most efficient way to do these quests is with limited information. Sometimes, you might finish your batch of quests, only to discover that if you’d turned in a different one first, you’d be able to be far more efficient. Womp womp.

‘Travel’ is the idea that quests shouldn’t be within a convenient distance of each other all of the time. Sometimes, you should put a quest just far enough out of the way that the player is encouraged to go: Ugh, I might as well. The journey to these quests is often just as interesting as doing them, and you can put even more quests on the other side of that journey to make them feel worth it in a surprising way.

‘Level variety’ is the fact that quests should have a small variation in both enemy level and location—Zalazane in Durotar’s a good example of this. He’s a couple levels higher than everyone else (level 10, compared to level 8) and is a bit of a pain in the arse to kill. You either need to group up with folks, come back when you’re a higher level, or develop some kind of cheese strat to make things easier. Or hey, maybe you’re just a class that has an easier time soloing and you’re fine. That’s good too.

You’ll notice that retail WoW has cast all three of these things aside entirely. Modern WoW questlines are often delivered in batches of two to three quests which are turned in as small parcels, usually while following a character through a linear narrative, so no ordering required. Travel is nixed because you have a flying mount—one that’s become far faster with Skyriding. And level variety isn’t a thing anymore because everything scales.

There is a reason why this approach was adopted, don’t get me wrong—it’s smooth, a nice little breadcrumb trail of dopamine shots to keep you blissed out in a “numbers go up” loop. But it’s trading ease and comfort for satisfaction, because… I mean, look at this.

I think I speak for us all when I say: God. God yes. Ugh, that’s the stuff.

What makes Forever so delicious to me is that it eases up on the friction a little bit by giving you more to do, but it still keeps that core satisfaction of coming up with your own routes. In my recent quests through Tirisfal Glades, I had one quest send me way far afield, up a mountain, and across a lake. And I still chose to do it, because I was already halfway there and my hearthstone was almost off cooldown.

The level variety thing also encourages you to group up more often, too—sure, you could come back and knock Zalazane over later. Or you could ask if anyone wants to kill the guy now. Grouping in this case isn’t a strict requirement, like in the case of an “elite” quest, but it saves you time in the long run.

Vanilla WoW was by no means perfect—sometimes all that friction gave you ropeburn, feeling more accidental than deliberate. But that’s kind of the exercise that Forever’s attempting, here. Rather than tearing out the old world entirely in favour of more modern quest design, there’s been a considered effort to polish out the friction just a smidge. Plugging holes and gaps in a zone’s quest design while keeping the overall structure the same.

And in the same vein as my love of tab-target MMOs, I think it’s nice to see this oldschool technique be given a second swing. You can improve an old formula to bring it up to date without ruining what made it special, and gosh, I think Blizzard really might be achieving that here.