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Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
World of Warcraft: Forever seems, at first blush, like an antidote to the idea of a modern MMO. I see it in the (naturally, traditionally) insufferable trade chat as I potter about on my fury warrior—people turning up their noses at the idea of retail players. Cushioned as they are in their soft little bubbles, ptooie!
But as someone with a 9-5 job and other MMOs I play, I wouldn’t particularly describe myself as a “hardcore” WoW player. Competent, sure. I’ve cleared high-end content in other games (like a Savage tier in FF14). I know how to push buttons and avoid mechanics—and I also like hard games in general. But I’m definitely not on that grindset, particularly not in a beta.
And while I do admire the folks trying to get best-in-slot gear for a month—there’s something beautiful and ephemeral about the effort—I do have to wonder: Are we playing the same game? Because WoW: Forever’s actually super casual friendly. And if you played it with the right attitude, honestly, Classic was pretty casual friendly, too.
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Seasonal grindset
WoW’s gone through what I’m going to frame as a water cycle of difficulty—its starting point, back in vanilla, is what we’re going to call an “oldschool” mindset. A big, open world that required a lot of patience and cooperation to get around, littered with quests, where getting to level 60 was part of the journey itself. The water in this laborious metaphor.
Then we start moving towards Cataclysm, a halfway state—steam rising up into the clouds. Things are more straightforward, you’ve got people griping about “welfare epics”, the dungeon finder has well and truly obliterated the social contract, people are finding new and inventive ways to insult your mom, and so on. However, you still need a challenge, a carrot on a stick.
Enter borrowed power grinds: Your artifact weapons, your Azerite armors, your Covenants. In a world where everything but the hardest of content comes easy and levelling is a brisk inconvenience, these systems are needed to keep players logging in every day. Eventually these systems go from beloved for their sense of progression to reviled for their meaningless tedium.
And, crucially, for the fact that a missed day, week, or month sets you permanently behind folks who’re putting in the hours every single day. The clouds get heavy, resentment brews, and suddenly—bam! Max exodus, pandaemonium! And to fix it, we move into the downpour cycle: A seasonal structure.
Seasons are an antidote to borrowed power. You’re no longer permanently left in the dust for an entire expansion, and their short lifecycle allows them to be filled mostly with secondary rewards—there’s the gear treadmill, sure, but you can pepper ’em with less impactful things like cosmetics. But they have a catch.
When you put the expectations of that loud, noisy seasonal structure against that oldschool design… which is asking more of you?
At the end of a season, a lot of your meaningful progress is reset. Seasons are meant to be played very intensely, but there’s a large, awkward gap in the middle where joining halfway kind of feels like a waste of time. Not to mention, the same kind of demotivation you had in earlier expansions where all your hard-earned loot was made meaningless by quest greens? That happens three times over, here, between each major patch.
Seasons are designed to appeal to a “casual” player, but they just as often push them away—especially, as retail has experienced in recent months, because they’re sometimes flush with so many things to do that it can become deeply overwhelming.
Which is why, I think, WoW: Forever has struck such a chord—because when you put the expectations of that loud, noisy seasonal structure against that oldschool design… which is asking more of you?
Retail, which bombards you with a dozen quests every time you log in—where you might complete five delves, three dungeons, and 10 world quests in an average evening of play? Or Forever, in which you jog around a forest for a bit, collect some pelts, and maybe run Ragefire Chasm if you’ve got the time?
Sure, when we get to level 60, the time investment for those big raids might start becoming a problem. But the actual experience of levelling in Forever—and, indeed, in Classic—is kind of chill. It was designed to provide you with little snack-sized adventures you could wrap up in 40 minutes, and if you came back a month later? Nothing changed.
What, like it’s hard?
It might be easy to be fooled into thinking that, because you might die if you pull more than one monster in WoW: Forever, that it is somehow a more difficult game. I am here to tell you that Forever is not hard. As a matter of fact, Classic isn’t hard, either.
I’m not the first person to make this observation, mind, but I’ll reiterate it here: The difficulty of this old school design is more a question of patience and knowledge than it is mechanical skill. It’s not particularly hard to use a bow to pull a mob away from its friends. It’s not very challenging to have to hoof it from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff to learn how to swing a two-handed club.
Even in dungeons, where we might accidentally overpull and wipe a couple of times… c’mon man, let’s not kid ourselves. You’re spamming frostbolt. I hit Heroic Strike once every couple of business days. For the most part, I’m watching my orc slap a Worgen about, getting a brief and fleeting hit of dopamine whenever I see that dodge button fire up and can fire off an Overpower.
Everything takes a while, sure, and if you mess up, you’re punished with a little tedium—and that’s one of the big sticking points between a “casual” and a “hardcore” MMO, right? Time investment. But that only really matters if you care about the destination more than the journey.
For the hardcore people who want to hit level 60 in a week, navigating around the patience WoW requires (efficiency, routing, and so on) is a fun puzzle—and hey, more power to ’em! I’m something of a min-maxer myself, when the mood takes me.
But if you really don’t give a crap about all of that, then the fact that the game requires a bit of time from you isn’t actually an obstacle for a casual player. It’s whether or not you get something enjoyable out of a short time investment, and because WoW’s designers knew what they were doing 20 years ago? You absolutely still get that. You can turn in a couple quests and get a gear upgrade in an hour or two.
And, as Clay Stone, associate production director, pointed out to me earlier this week: Someone with a ton of responsibilities and obligations outside of a game might actually prefer the slower oldschool pace, anyway. He put it pretty well:
“It could be something with the times that we live in. It could be something with the amount of information and noise that we’re facing all the time, the distractions of all the notifications on my phone that are glaring at me all day, but there’s a real longing for that slower, more deliberate pace.”
Which means that, yes—WoW: Forever is casual friendly. Very casual friendly, in fact, in the same way that something like Webfishing or Animal Crossing is casual friendly. If you aren’t trying to minmax, what you have is a relaxing (dare I say cosy) videogame where you run around a fantasy world and hit a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds. Not a bad place to be if you’ve only got an hour to spare and need to decompress.
