It’s crazy how fast classic+ discourse has turned into classic vs retail tribalism lol.
There are bad actors on both sides for sure, but I definitely have recognized the disingenuous retailers who are actively just trying to make this game retail to the point of self detriment because they want others to be unhappy.
Anecdotal but it's in game too. Seen way too many arguments already about speed of leveling/needing mounts at level 20/skills at trainer costing too much etc.
They're gonna be getting a shit ton of opposing feedback this entire time, don't envy them
This just makes one understand why blizzard decided to just ignore players. Dont get me wrong they did drop the ball on retail, its not a bad game per se but they just completely abandoned the original vision to make something different but still, I just cant really blame them for ignoring this community full of manchilds acting like know it alls
It’s beta and the dev’s have asked for feedback and ways to improve because as they reiterated many times, the game can be tweaked and changed with community feedback.
These popular criticisms have merit and deserve to be discussed but majority of responses are reductive and intentionally obtuse because they don’t care about that persons concerns/have a different opinion.
Where are these retailers trying to turn WoW Forever into retail? Cause the closest I can remember to seeing anything remotely close to it was one guy complaining about traveling being to slow.
However, people complaining about complainers are fucking everywhere.
Look at the replies my guy, some of them are straight up mask off saying it’s meant for retail players and classic players need to go back to era, whilst telling them their criticisms are invalid/don’t exist.
How far do I need to scroll for that cause I normally that a pique at most threads in the WoW Classic subreddit that gains a lot of traction around WoW Forever and I just don't see those comments at all.
The main complaint is the art style disconnect and people complaining about Skyelves.
You called out the tribalism but then immediately fell into it.
The few posts like that I have seen either get no interaction and/or are downvoted heavily. The only positive response to a "retail idea" was about public mob tagging and even that had some debate on both sides.
There will always be shit stirrers and its easy to point to them and act like everyone you don't like is one of those people but that simply is not reality.
I mean, it is a complaint, it's just done in a meme format so you won't get all butthurt about people actually criticizing the game, but keep zooming, zoomer.
There's a large percentage of people who just love elves no matter what the online discourse is on social media. People had similar complaints about Blood Elves and then they became (and still are) the most popular Horde race.
Yeah people forget that the vast majority of people are just in the game enjoying the things they enjoy without the need to validate their choices with strangers on socials.
They created a reskinned blood elf because they were popular; they wanted something popular to sell, so they went with the most popular race in Warcraft.
That's why we didn't get high elves or blood elves - because people wouldn't accept those getting locked behind a $30 DLC, but a 'brand new' race? Oh people will spend $30 on that
After playing through some of the intro to them, I like them and they’re more interesting than high elf quel thelas exiles would’ve been. Which I’m sure we will get after we get around to introducing the blood elves in the future. The only gripe is the implementation of fitting them in with their modern assets straight up. The whole half hd half sd thing is the problem.
We're still going to get them at some point, probably.
In the Q&A they said one of the reasons they didn't do high elves for the launch was that they felt Quel'thalas needed to be much bigger than a starting zone and that when they add it to the game, it'll be done right.
Yeah that QA kinda turned my opinion around when they mentioned they would have to have high elves load in and spawn in northshire abbey and that felt really weird.
I love 99.9% of forever and I played skyborne starting area as well, everything felt pretty normal and good… until i got to the end.
Imo once I got to the final quest where the avengers show up and save our whole race from a big bad. I couldn’t help but feel very unimmersed and like I was leveling a retail character through some past xpac. Also don’t particularly like that their druid forms are way flashier (and forced hd) than the classic morphs, makes me feel like I’m playing with a shadowlands ardenweald druid.
I was on the fence for skyborne at first, but after playing ~10 levels of their starter zone this weekend, I'm a full convert. They put a lot of writing and flavor into making them feel like a "real" race and fit into the Classic world. Even seeing the NPCs from the rival faction with an orange name felt very Classic-y.
I've said this a few times on this sub before, but I'm glad Blizz ripped the bandaid off by making our first non-Vanilla race something unexpected. I do wish they blended a little better with the Vanilla world (though they'd fit perfectly in TBC), but I don't hate them as a concept. But like you said, they could've done a better job with their character & gear assets as well as their integration into the story.
The „better than SM loot“ thing is misguided, because spells have all been neutered, so spellpower is needed in greater quantities.
Take Chain Lightning for example: 505 - 563
dmg before on max rank, now it’s 113 - 133 AND they all scale less from more SP beyond that.
On mobile, so don’t take the values at face value but you‘d need like 1000 SP to do the same damage with it you previously did at 60 with 0 spelldamage.
Imagine if the Beatles were one-by-one replaced with new members, then those members were replaced with more new members, and now they're a successful arena rock band of Gen-Z musicians. They actually aren't even a band anymore, but a brand/act that's owned by a major record label. But fans of classic Beatles were like, "We'd love more Beatles albums in the Sgt. Pepper/Revolver/Rubber Soul etc. style." So Beatlescorp is like "We hear you, we're going to release a whole new set of material just for you, as though the Beatles never became an arena rock band but instead continued in that experimental psychedelic direction." But then you listen to the album and you're like, "Yeah, this is kind of like that, but there's still crazy reverb on the drums, self-indulgent guitar solos and wailing vocals just like your new stuff..."
It's a disappointment, but should anyone be surprised? As much as video games are about numbers and drop rates and metrics, they're just as much a creative field as any other collaborative artistic endeavor. The directors, the devs, the artists of today, they simply don't have the same chops that the team from 20 years ago had. The artists don't want to design three sticks taped together, or the managers don't want it, or the execs veto it. There's plenty of good ideas, they've clearly studied TurtleWoW and Ascension and the like, conducted focus group studies, etc. But they simply can't help themselves. They're the company that makes retail, that considers Mists of Pandaria "classic."
Imagine pitching a game now where the main selling point is that for a new player it will take in excess of a hundred hours for your character to not look like a broke hobo. Classic is designed with concepts that are pure anathema to the modern devs, they are physically incapable of carrying out the classic vision.
I actually think there is something deeper to this point, I've been reflecting on it the past days and tried to create a theory - "Why do the modern devs think slaying celestial godlike beings is what defines the hero, not the small actions?"
Traditional Western ethics, especially in its Christian and Aristotelian forms, treated character as the product of repeated ordinary acts. Virtue was not first proven by a single confrontation with a certified enemy. It was formed by habit: how one spoke to a neighbor, kept a promise, gave alms, endured duty, restrained appetite, or showed mercy when no audience was watching. Think of Lord of the Rings, a story created with a Christian moral imagination, by Tolkien, where Frodo and Sam have to endure small hardships - the decisive moral acts are endurance, pity, and fidelity, not the slaying of a god, which only comes at the end. The older pattern asks: What kind of person are you becoming through ordinary conduct? Character is prior. The large deed is evidence of habits already formed.
A prog-left professional developer team in California would more likely live in a culture that more often asks: Which side are you on, and which structures of harm do you oppose? Moral worth is demonstrated by correct recognition of the enemy and by participation in a public confrontation with it. Daily kindness is not denied; it is treated as insufficient, private, or even as a way of ignoring scale. “Treat your neighbor well” can sound, in that register, like a substitute for naming oppression. I think its why pop portrayal of comic book characters, particularly in Marvel movies, now have fewer small moments of personal struggle to deliver character growth, but many more fights with catastrophic level gods, where beating them sets the narrative that the character has progressed or is on the 'good side'.
It might be possible to see how modern WoW grapples with the idea of 'picking the pumpkins, slaying the bandit, fixing the cart, in order to become the hero' and instead opts for 'slay this otherworldly narratively defined evil from the get-go, in order to affirm you are indeed the champion of Azeroth'.
Haven't fully fleshed it out, but think there might be something in there.
tl:dr; The devs fail to realise character growth is often small actions, not simply slaying narrative 'evil', because that's the environment they live in.
I don't think the OG devs had any real concept of Christian phronema, but I do think that society has shifted and the idea of instant gratification has become more and more prominent as technology has evolved.
There's a big idea in software called User Experience (UX) theory which is largely driven by the idea that the less friction a person experiences when engaging with a system, the better the system is. Through this lens, a lot of classic is "bad" because it creates friction, and retail has been hugely influenced by these concepts - travel time, repetitive mob grinds, talking to people to form groups - in the Retail mindset, the friction is a problem. In the Classic mindset, the friction is the game - but the modern devs have been literally trained to treat friction like the enemy.
Narratively, the evolution of marketing and the pursuit of profit has caused a push for bigger audiences. No longer is a niche male nerd audience enough - the game has to have something for everybody. On top of that, with Blizzard's history, there has been a big shift to move away from their toxic masculine past. The game can't be a male power and war fantasy, they wish they didn't call it Warcraft.
Interesting - particularly the UX theory part! I'd never thought about the frictionless UX stuff from software systems, apps, mobile phones etc also being applied within games.
You've a lot of valid points there, I think that's fair.
I do still personally believe that the framework we've had for most compelling narratives within games and media since the early 2000s is based on various subtle re-tells of long established recurring Western ethics. So I'd maybe theorise the reason we find the current versions of games (obviously including modern WoW) narratively suck, is that due to many of those reasons you outline, we've ended up with games which deviate too much from those ethics.
I’ll be honest, at first I was like “damn this guy’s smoking the dank fadeleaf,” but I actually think you’re onto something regarding why modern morality in gaming has shifted. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but I agree there’s something there.
I don't think it's that deep, there were fights with godly beings threatening the world even in classic wow.
It's just the classic thing of raising the stakes so each sequential enemy vanquished is mightier than the last, which of course leads to all them becoming samey and stale at the end, like it happens in comics, happened in the marvel movies, shonen anime, it's the hedonic treadmill.
That's why it's best you start the journey by clearing a cellar of rats.
As a huge diehard Beatles fan (and a professional musician), I love your comment! Especially reverb on drums hahaha, even more so given the fact Ringo is regarded as the first drummer to ever put towels and rags on his drums, in order to get them more muffled and dry.
And you wrote it very nicely!
Funny that you mentioned arena rock - just the other day I was talking with my fiancee and a friend about how Beatles kind-of invented (or at least established some pillars of) arena rock, at least in the English spirit of that term/style. Especially Paul's big anthem-like sing-along songs like Hey Jude, Let it be, Live and let die (John and George also had some of their own).
I think everyone’s missing the point that the skyborne, and likely this entire game, are probably not for you, they’re trying to bring in new audiences and bring the game into modernity. They thought they could do this on the sly without us noticing, but it’s incredibly obvious and poorly executed. Anyway, it’ll make them a fortune, and maybe people despite all the moaning actually don’t care as much as they are making it out that they do, and will still play, and Blizzard likely knows that, so maybe they know exactly what they are doing and did it well.
I mean, blizzard fans are nothing if not a captive audience. Everyone who was going to leave due to stuff like this already has. I was one of those that left until classic 2019, but then I left again when it became clear blizzard didn't care about botting, RMT, and the health of the in-game economy. Now I'm just here, hoping to see if anything changes this time around. Maybe they learned, maybe they hired devs that are actually passionate about classic. Doesn't seem like it. I won't resub for this.
And I see several people here who think that the claim that "it doesn't feel like a classic game" is some kind of extreme take, but it's not.
If you just simply look at class logic and combat mechanics (in terms of damage calculations, scaling, resources, etc), it is following tbc, wotlk and cata mechanics and logic.
It is not following vanilla/classic logic - that's not to say that everything must follow original vanilla logic everywhere, but it is very clear that this game is hovering around the wotlk/cata area in terms of how classes function.
So it's probably not far off that devs think "MoP is classic" - and this is not including the severe shift in art and design direction which is very mixed/hybrid in this game.
You know, I haven't seen anyone say that they actually like skyborne and want them in the game. Lots of arguments for why they aren't that bad, but none for why they are actually good.
Negativity tends to drive people to comment more than positivity, and most players are not on Reddit. Especially not on this subreddit, which has just become miserable.
Got my Dwarf shaman to 20 so I started a Skyborne Hunter today.
He's only level 6 but I am so far enjoying both the zone and the lore I've run into.
Someone said that it feels more like a TBC starter zone than strictly classic and I'd say that's a spot on description.
I'm looking forward to playing more tomorrow after work.
I do think it's hilarious that of all the races, the Skyborne probably have the weakest combat racials so they certainly can't be accused of being a P2W race.
I actually like them a lot after playing their starting zone. I think a lot of people dislike them because they're new, and they're "not really blood/high elves," but when taken at face value they're very cool and my druid in the live game is definitely going to be one of them.
The problem with the new gear being so good is that if everything is good, then nothing is good as good becomes the new baseline.
Getting weapon upgrades in classic felt amazing. It was a (small) sense of accomplishment to replace that shit weapon you started with, the green you've been stuck with for a few levels, etc. Now, we're getting great gear much earlier* and upgrades don't feel as good as they could. I honestly think blizz lowering base spelldamage on casters and replacing it with loads of SP gear will eventually start to make upgrades feel meaningless.
you dont need to be level 14, there's literally a blue level 10 craftable item that gives 5 main stat and 5 stamina
the powercreep is here to stay, and thats only level 10, i cant imagine how overpowered people are going to be at 30, 40, 50 and 60
prebis 60's in blue's are going to be insane if this is any indication, let alone 60's in all the best loot in the game. if i had to make a guess they will probably be 2x or 3x more powerful then their classic versions.
full steam ahead to retail minus we go. chugga chugga, choo choo
Meanwhile Xaryu literally showed people a one for one comparison of him clearing on the same level, same packs, worse gear (On Live) and that this talk of OP gear is nonsense.
I don't hate the Skyborne being added to the game.
I hate the fact that their introduction just means proper alliance High Elves will never be added to the game now.
Yes, you can make Skyborne look like High Elves but thats not the point.
It should've just been High Elves and Blood Elves.
I know this is Reddit and for some reason the Skyborne are quite popular here.
But the Classic+ community poll with hundreds of thousands of people voting is pretty much clear on this.
Only like 20% of people wanted a new made up race, 60%+ wanted blood and high elves.
By any chance, did you see the Q&A? When asked about why Skyborne instead just high elves, the answer was 'Why not both'? I'm paraphrasing obviously but they basically said that they didn't want to just make high elves that start in northshire because they have bigger plans for them (and Quel'Thalas).
No idea if those potential high elves end up being neutral or not though.
I wouldn't be so sure High Elves will never be added.
There's probably going to be content released featuring Quel'thalas and all that's happening there right now in the timeline, and it wouldn't surprise me if we get Blood Elves and High Elves as a second neutral race. It would be an incredibly easy win for Blizzard down the line.
If the skyboard is the biggest problem, I'd say, we're in a pretty good spot. Plus me, and all my friends have already said that we refuse to group with any blue blood elves, so blizzard, creating in-game racism is the type of immersion I'm here for
Them being neutral is the worst part imo. I know it’s not feasible at this point with launch being so close but in an ideal world blizzard would push their launch back for skyborne and give them wholly to horde and give alliance another race. Maybe Draenei or something. Player character models SHOULD be unique to factions.
To be fair they have rebalanced things already. So you can't just look at a piece of level 14 gear and compare it to level 30 gear. Caster's for example have had their base damage reduced on their spells in exchange for gear being made more impactful for them having lots of spell damage. Druid Wrath for example went from like 200 damage down to 60 base damage at max level.
I think they want to maintain the difficulty and pacing of classic,, it just needs more tuning. They've also done a lot of things to make it more difficult like new boss mechanics even in the low level dungeons.
Blizzard told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Still might resub for the first time in 5+ years because I’m off work for November and probably December and never played Classic (started in Vanilla but never hit max lvl before TBC)
Feels a bit straw man to say people were demanding old school graphics. So many of us in classic all the way up through classic wrath have been asking for the modern models and xmog for classic+ since we were still at classic vanilla.
Thank you for making this. I've been here for days mourning the death of a game that never lived. This frog has finally brought me peace. Also any longer and I'd have run out of room on my block list. Take care, everyone. I'll see whoever's left in-game when WoW enters public domain in ~2099
Leave it to plebs nowadays to look at a product, realize 90-95% of it is great, but then reject it because it isn’t “perfect”. If this means I don’t have to deal with people like you in WoWF because this stops you from playing, THANK. FUCKING. GOD. 🙌
60% great, 15% could be fixed and won't, remaining 25% is so tone deaf and terrible that these changes even being seriously considered should tell you this project is compromised and has no more legs than SOD but we're all pigging out at the trough same as always and will delude ourselves into thinking otherwise because we have no self-respect or self-control.
If it wasn't for the closed beta testers complaining and 1 Blizzard employee actually fighting for it, we wouldn't have even gotten the SD/HD toggle, which tells me all I need to know about the future of Forever.
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u/protozoomer Sep 20 '26
I have to applaud the effort to actually make this and not just a normal complaint post