Transcript
Speaker: And so there's been some criticism of World of Warcraft Forever that I've heard several versions of over the last few days. That it looks too soft, it's too sentimental, it's too focused on wonder.
Speaker: that warcraft is supposed to be about war and somehow a dwarf stopping to look at the world picking a flower or a bear acting like an actual animal means Blizzard's forgotten what classic Warcraft was.
Speaker: And I think. I land almost completely on the the other side of this. because when i watched the cinematic i didn't see blizzard forgetting classic wow I saw something I honestly wasn't expecting.
Speaker: I saw Blizzard acknowledging what azeroth has become to those of us who have spend 20 years there. Not just a battlefield, it's a place. And maybe even something we can finally share with generations coming behind us in a a way that lets them.
Speaker: relive a lot of the excitement. and adventure that that we had. when we first showed up there.
Speaker: So welcome back to another podcast here. This one is... A bit of just a filler one because the topic came up that I really wanted to talk about. So I deviated from my. original plans, you talk some Warcraft.
Speaker: So I'm Gary Cook, and this is Epic Again. So before we go too far into this, I want to make something clear. This isn't an episode about telling anyone they're wrong for being skeptical.
Speaker: If you've played Warcraft for 20 years, you've earned some septicism. Blizzard has made decisions that I've loved. Blizzard has made decisions I've hated. And for me that. That point was around Warlords of Draenor, where retail started moving further and further away from the version of Warcraft that I actually wanted to be a part of and wanted to live inside of.
Speaker: And that's part of why classic mattered so much when it came back. It wasn't simply nostalgia. nostalgia for me it was the world leveling mattered and travel mattered and Seeing another player on the road mattered. You could spend an entire night doing almost nothing efficiently.
Speaker: and somehow still feel like you've had an adventure. So when Blizzard announced Warcraft Forever, a permanent level 60 version of the original Azeroth, designed to continue growing rather than move through the old expansion cycle again.
Speaker: I sat up and I paid attention. Blizzard is describing a permanent home where where the world is the main character, where the journey is the adventure. And it doesn't really matter when you get to the end because.
Speaker: The end is not going to move. There's not going to be a new goalpost for you. And social interaction is something that they want to protect and and and make a part of the game instead of trying to optimize it away. and and making the world feel like it's just a ah waiting lobby for the next adventure.
Speaker: And that's why ah some of the feedback around the the interest in Matic that's playing here surprised me. Because... I think. I think we're all arguing over the wrong things and and totally missing the point of it all.
Speaker: So the first thing I want to jump into here is the idea that That Warcraft was... never only about war. and I know that's going to send some of you to the comments already, but but let's deal with the obvious here first. It's called Warcraft. War matters. It should matter.
Speaker: Conflict should matter. The Horde and Alliance should have pensions. People should disagree. There should be dangerous places, political grudges, villains, battles, rivalries and consequences.
Speaker: Um... I don't want Azeroth to become the giant friendship. peaceful kumbaya circle that it's become on retail either. But there's a a big difference, I think, between saying Warcraft meets conflict.
Speaker: and saying every meaningful expression of Warcraft must be violent. Those aren't the same thing. and i If you think about what we actually did in the original World of Warcraft when it first came out.
Speaker: a lot of our time we spent fishing. It was spent. cooking. it was spent gathering herbs and mining copper and delivering letters on a quest and helping farmers.
Speaker: and we wandered into caves we absolutely should not have entered just because we wanted to explore and see what was out there. And we stood around an iron forge for no reason at all. And we took boats simply because we hadn't taken that boat before. We wanted to see what was on the other side of it yet.
Speaker: And we found little camps and houses and ruins that didn't matter at all to the end game. and didn't matter at all to the the war at large that was the backdrop of the entire thing and all those choir parts. parts of the game were incredibly important to us and they were a part of all of our stories and all of our adventures there.
Speaker: Because those little details that we got sucked into. those quiet parts, that's what made Azeroth feel like something where people actually lived. And the war mattered because...
Speaker: Now there was something outside the war worth protecting. It mattered because now you had things you cared about and these little side quests that made you care about characters. and and care about your faction and It made the For the Horde, For the Alliance mean something.
Speaker: If every dwarf. out there only glared and if every orc only exists to swing an axe and if every bear must spend every waking second roaring then that's not a world. That's just a loading screen for a battleground that you're waiting for.
Speaker: And that's where I think in the cinematic that the work picking a flower, it's kind of the point. One moment. in particular of that well that moment in particular seems to have become kind of the symbol of criticism and and how blizzard's going to screw this up and And everybody's upset because the dwarf from the original cinematic is picking a flower.
Speaker: And apparently that that has become evidence that something has gone horribly wrong. I kind of love it. I think it makes sense. Not because I desperately need to know this. Dwarf's preference in flowers that are going to catch its eye, but because 20 years has passed for us. And and when the...
Speaker: original World of Warcraft cinematic was released, its job was very different. It didn't need to tell you these races are dangerous. um I'm sorry. It did need to tell you. You had to understand quickly what the story was going to be that you're getting into. So you had to know.
Speaker: which races are dangerous and and that the world is a dangerous place, that there's factions and magic and monsters. and and and welcome you into Warcraft. But the the new cinematic, it doesn't need to introduce Warcraft to us. We know what Warcraft is.
Speaker: We've been here for 20 years. Excuse me. We've killed dragons together. We've invaded entire continents. We've watched kingdoms fall and we've seen new kingdoms rise.
Speaker: And. Combined, we've probably killed enough boars to... cause a pretty measurable ecological disaster for all of Azeroth. um So showing that same character differently doesn't erase who he was.
Speaker: If anything, I feel like this is adding another dimension that shows, hey, this can you can continue on past. the basics past just going into conflicts. It adds dimension. Um. a warrior can stop walking for 30 seconds and a hunter can take notice of where he is and they a bear can behave like a companion rather than a missile with fur on it all the time.
Speaker: Um, and then when the danger actually appears in the somatic the rifle does come out And I don't think that's contradictory. I think that's life inside of a dangerous world that that that feels real.
Speaker: And I actually think that contrast makes Warcraft better because it it matches more how we play. because wonder and danger, they they strengthen each other and and give you something in the world to be a part of.
Speaker: Because when you log in into WoW, you don't always go out looking for a fight. Sometimes you log in just to level the profession up. So should you feel like you've... Forsaken. the core attributes of wow, because today's a professions day where you're just going to go out and pick flowers.
Speaker: It's... It's part of the world. It's part of the game. It's something we're all going to do. If you take alchemy as a profession. you're going to have times when you go out. and you just pick flowers.
Speaker: And that doesn't make that session. any less of a warcraft session than the session you did where you invaded Stormwind or you had a giant battle in Undercity. It's all part of the same world and and there's layers to it. and And I think these characters that we.
Speaker: we follow the story through should have the same depth that we can give our own characters in this world. um And then there's a line in it that I've seen a lot of people talk about, our home, Azeroth.
Speaker: And I've seen the argument that this doesn't fit classic WoW because it's Horde and Alliance and... they don't collectively see azeroth as home and and they're fighting to claim whose it should be and it's not shared Um...
Speaker: And sure, within the fiction, yeah, it's not. it's not saying that but i don't I don't feel like that's what it was saying at all is that. The home is shared between. the factions.
Speaker: Because the the factions definitely are not sitting around right now singing songs about universal unity amongst them. And... But they they do all still see Azeroth as home. If you are a Horde player, you see Azeroth as your home. You just want to expunge the Alliance from it.
Speaker: And if you're an Alliance player, you see Azeroth as your home. and you want to expunge the horde from it it doesn't change it it doesn't make it less one person's home than the other It's just it's.
Speaker: it is our home both factions you all live in the same place whether you're at war or not, it's still, the sentiment is still... still stays there. But from a marketing perspective, I think it was talking about more than just the the home of your characters. I think it was talking about us as the players.
Speaker: Azeroth is a shared place. It's a place we've all... been together, whether we know it or not, since 2004. And it's been the home for people that came then. It's been the home for people that came during the Burning Crusade. It's been the home for people that came during Wrath or Cataclysm or came back at Classic. or got into this season of Discovery stuff or joined in this.
Speaker: However you got here.
Speaker: it's It's still our home. It's still part of who we are. and Even if you stop playing for 10 years, you still know exactly where Goldshire is as soon as you log back in. And that's what 20 years of and MMO history does. Eventually the map stops being only the setting.
Speaker: it becomes somewhere you remember and and the landmarks on it stop becoming just waypoints on a a video game map in the cart. start becoming places where you have stories to tell about adventures you went on with your friends Um...
Speaker: And I think that is... And I think that brings us to something much bigger to to the idea of whether or not a a bare smile in a cinematic or not and and what that means for for this game that's coming out.
Speaker: But before we kind of dive deeper into that, we do have a new partner for the podcast. So we're going to take a quick break here. and have a word. from our partner and then jump back into talking about Warcraft forever.
Speaker: This episode of Epic Again is brought to you by W Energy. between work, family, making content, trying to squeeze a little time in Azeroth, gaming, painting miniatures and things like that.
Speaker: um energy is a must to keep up with that and still keep up with a four and a two -year -old So I'm excited to welcome W Energy as a partner of the podcast.
Speaker: um if you're looking for an energy drink mix for your next gaming session Check out Dubby using the link in the episode description. or just use Epic again as your checkout code to get your 10 % off.
Speaker: your order from them. So a huge thank you to W for supporting Epic again. and helping us keep the creativity going here. But now let's jump back into Azeroth.
Speaker: So. For years, one of my biggest frustrations with World of Warcraft has been this feeling that Blizzard creates incredible places and then leaves them. New expansion, new content. new continent, new systems, new capital, new threat. Keep moving, keep going, keep growing, keep fighting.
Speaker: And the old world just becomes somewhere you fly over. and And that became increasingly noticeable to me around the WOD error and afterwards. I didn't want Azeroth to keep...
Speaker: constantly becoming smaller in my rearview mirror while something new and shiny was put in front of me. I wanted to go back into the mountains that. we couldn't reach before and open the gates that have never opened and and see the places that.
Speaker: became familiar and we had attachments to and and finished stories and... and telling these stories in the places that I had a connection to and not trying to force this connection to. to new things that didn't matter to me at all.
Speaker: And I think that's kind of literally the pitch of forever that they gave us. And Blizzard says they're going to keep going deeper on the original Azeroth instead of moving away from it. They're adding new and reimagined regions, filling unfinished corners of the world. and weaving in thousands of new quests through level 1 through 60.
Speaker: they've announced new places we're going to hyjal and chandra loss and the river glaze and zephyrs island And they're adding nine new dungeons, new raids, a new battleground. so to me this is this is a much bigger deal to me than whether or not We got one new fancy announcement about a new race or a bear smiled and it's cinematic.
Speaker: Because the thing that I've wanted for years. is not to replace Azeroth, not to replace my memories, not to replace the things that I grew up with, but to to build on them, and to tell new stories.
Speaker: and to create new adventures there for me to go in. And that doesn't mean the war is gone. um
Speaker: And that's why I really don't get the argument that this comma or cinematic means Blizzard is... removing the conflict and watering down our classic experience of Warcraft. I mean, if you look what they're actually building, there are new dungeons full of content.
Speaker: conflict, new raids, new battlegrounds. They're building on old grudges. They're talking about Forsaken, trying to... Reclaim Lordaeron there. building in new faction choices for people with the Skyborne races.
Speaker: Was it my first choice? No, I think there was definitely... better ways to go about it than than that and you're definitely going to still get some ideological differences hopefully on whether you join the hoarder alliance with them and i hope they do a better job with it than they do with the pandoran because it never really felt like a choice that mattered when you were doing the pandora because there wasn't good motivation for why one faction went to Horde and one faction went to a Alliance. It was just, we want to be friends with everybody. so
Speaker: Just pick who you want to be friends with more and and go play over there. I hope they give us a lot more ideological distinction and and reasons for why. half of this new race is going here and half of this race is going over there.
Speaker: Personally, I would have preferred to see High Elves come to the Alliance and maybe Naga come as a horde race or something like that. that that that feels more in line with the the old world we all know.
Speaker: But to me, that one new race doesn't destroy. all the other good things that they've told us about. Um... And... but they're They're explicitly saying to us that conflict, cooperation, and discovery are all a part of forever.
Speaker: And that's part of what they they want to build and grow on, that that the war isn't gone, that. and that that you're going to be a part of it and explore all the different ways it impacted and affects. There.
Speaker: the world that we all know and love. Um. And really. War shouldn't be the only emotion that Azeroth is allowed to have. I think it's healthier if we're gonna have this persistent and MMO.
Speaker: to have. other types of stories and other types of content to go and explore in these new quests and these new missions and things like that. Because if forever is really supposed to last. Forever.
Speaker: then you need more storytelling tools than what that. close -minded narrow view that everything must be about war and conflict and edgy and gritty. has to offer because if all we're saying is you have to always be Alliance angry. Horde angry. Everybody fight again.
Speaker: then there's no need for then then why are we what's the point you're just You can't sustain that forever. There needs to be local conflicts that don't.
Speaker: fully impact the bigger war. There needs to be political conflicts and cultural conflicts and old enemies and new threats and new enemies. and moments where maybe slight cooperation makes sense for just that. split second.
Speaker: and moments where it absolutely doesn't. It's it's a world, and and I think their goal here is to make it truly feel like a world. And I think that. that to me is really exciting and and maybe it's just because my background is the rp player in Warcraft and will probably be an RP player going forward when I come back full time to it.
Speaker: but I feel like it it absolutely matters. to have this depth to the world around us. Um... And then... This is probably where my perspective has changed the most.
Speaker: from when i first started playing warcraft as we kind of wrap up this this episode here And that's I'm not the same person I was 20 years ago. I'm a dad now. and suddenly Blizzard talking about forever.
Speaker: as a place for past, current, and new players, it lands differently with me. because my kids are going to grow up with these worlds around them. and And there's something genuinely exciting about the possibility that years from now.
Speaker: I don't have to explain Azeroth to them by saying, well you really had to be there to understand this part of the game because now it's just you you're leveling through it so fast, it doesn't have the same impact it had for me.
Speaker: but maybe we can actually go there. together and maybe i can start new characters with my son or daughter And we can walk out into that starting zone and we can. take too long going somewhere because one of them saw something interesting over on the hill and they just wanted to go exploring and we ended up in the wrong zone and Had to figure out. How the heck do we escape as level 10s from these level 30 mobs that are chasing us now?
Speaker: Or they wanted to just go try a dungeon out. So we went and did that and we got lost and we went to find a rare. and we can argue about which direction is going to be the best direction to go on the road for our next adventure.
Speaker: Or just have one of those. completely inefficient knights is father and kids, and that becomes a story I remember. of laughing why we didn't accomplish anything we tried to do, but accomplish something completely different that we enjoyed.
Speaker: Forever's design pillars to me actually support those kinds of moments and that excites me. And Blizzard saying that leveling remains important. There's no flying and there's no scaling. They're just deliberately preserving it that preparation matters, communication matters, cooperation matters, social interactions are going to matter.
Speaker: and And that to me is great. They're adding modern conveniences like controller support and visual presets and opt -in transmogs without making those things mandatory. And that's not necessarily, I feel like, Blizzard watering Classic down. that's That's Blizzard building a bridge into it.
Speaker: ah Those of us. than for those of us that that that are getting older. Maybe that's exactly what Classic Plus should be. not a museum preserved behind glass that we just look at and admire and talk about.
Speaker: Um... How amazing. It used to be. but a living version of the world we love that we can now share with others. and help them experience the same things we did.
Speaker: um for a new new generation. Now, I don't want this to turn into... I am completely coping. and living off of copium here.
Speaker: and that everything Blizzard announced is automatically going to be amazing. is I am absolutely not in that boat. Um, there are monetization decisions that are worth questioning.
Speaker: their design decisions that we'll need to see in practice if they actually can fulfill it. And I understand why people look at the elf race and say, really? that Great. I understand why people are nervous about modern systems creeping into classic.
Speaker: and I understand the concern that convenience can slowly stand away. the friction that made classics so special for all of us. Those are legitimate conversations. And Blizzard itself seems aware of that tension.
Speaker: and And they stated philosophies that quality of life choices can change the way players meet each other and make memories. which is why they're saying additions will be measured against the spirit of the original game.
Speaker: And that's cool. That's awesome. You can say that all day, but now they have to prove it. And then there's a difference between proving that and. being mad because they decided to launch this with the dwarf picking a flower.
Speaker: I think we need to to be mad about the right things. of If they don't deliver, if they do things that... Just make this. diet retail then then that's when we need to be upset at about it but i don't think a cinematic that shows the dwarf has depth to his character is necessarily the... the right time to start getting mad.
Speaker: So the thing I'm most excited about to kind of wrap this episode up. isn't a raid. it It isn't a race. It's not the new Galactica. the new graphics or getting to go back to to the world.
Speaker: Again, like we did in Classic, it's it's the word forever. Blizzard is saying that this isn't supposed to be a season or another. temporary experiment that dabbles in classic things.
Speaker: They're describing this as an evergreen Azeroth. that they intend to keep expanding over time. and it launches in november and i'm going to be in the beta starting september 17th so check it out And if they actually stick to that. and stick to this evergreen thought of of building out the old world and not progressing it to see you lose sight of everything. That's enormous.
Speaker: Because maybe we can finally stop asking. When does classic actually end and start asking? the questions that matter. of where could this world go?
Speaker: For the old players, we get to come home. Not exactly as it existed in 2004. We already have that. we get something I think that's much more interesting, a version of Azeroth.
Speaker: that kept going. and And maybe our kids get to walk into it beside us now. And they'll have their own first dungeon and their own stupid death in a cave. and their own character they become irrationally attached to.
Speaker: and their own place in this world. And years from now, maybe Azeroth means something completely different to them than it did to us. But... we get to share in that moment with them now. And it it gets to be a moment that's connected to to our experiences in a way that retail currently never can be for them.
Speaker: So I don't feel like this is any kind of destruction of classic ah Warcraft. I feel like... If Blizzard gets this right, this this might be... the reason that Warcraft actually does get to live forever in in a way that we can all be a part of and and be proud of.
Speaker: So yeah. in the end I think a dwarf can pick a flower. and the world won't end. And I think we all need to accept that. that that's okay. And and for this to to work and for this.
Speaker: classic plus idea to work I think a dwarf picking a flower is exactly what we need I'm excited to get into the world. I'm excited to see you all there in it. So. I will see you all in Azeroth.
Speaker: And I can't wait to hear your guys' thoughts and opinions as we... ah as we dive deeper into this. in the coming years and months.
