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Door staff@engadget.com (Igor Bonifacic) - 03 Nov 2026
After 13 years at Blizzard, Michael Nuthals faces what might just be the toughest challenge of his career yet: working on a familiar but different and highly anticipated version of World of Warcraft. As lead encounter designer, he's part of the team working on WoW: Forever. Announced at BlizzCon earlier this year, Forever is a sort of remaster of WoW designed to expand on the game's "Classic" era. It takes players back to Azeroth, the setting of the original 2004 game, before Blizzard over the course of 11 expansions took the game in the direction that it did. In the process, it imagines a "what if" scenario.
What if Blizzard had continued to expand Azeroth, instead of sending players to the Orc homeworld of Draenor and beyond with The Burning Crusade and later expansions? In Forever, there are more than 1,000 new quests for players to complete, many of them designed to continue story threads that were left unresolved in the original game. Additionally, there are new areas within Azeroth for players to explore — including Mount Hyjal, the site of one of Warcraft III's pivotal battles — in addition to fresh dungeons and raids. Blizzard has also rebalanced the game's classes and items, and built an entirely new global illumination lighting pipeline to make the game feel more atmospheric. Controversially, Forever will also feature a new race, the Skyborne Elves, who weren't in the original game.
The challenge Nuthals and his colleagues face is one of expectations. Nearly right from the moment Blizzard rereleased the original World of Warcraft in 2019, players have been asking the studio for a "Classic+" experience that expands the original game. The tricky thing is that, before Forever's announcement, every player had a different opinion on what an expanded rerelease should look like. Seemingly the only consensus was that the game shouldn't play anything like modern "retail" WoW. Realistically, there was never going to be a way Blizzard would find a way to please everyone with Forever, but it's still trying to create something fans both old and new can appreciate.
"I see it more as an opportunity — an opportunity to engage, to listen and show that we're listening," Nuthals says when asked about the weight of those expectations. With Forever, Blizzard recently concluded the largest beta in World of Warcraft's history. This is despite the fact players had to purchase one of Forever's premium bundles, which start at $60, to take part in the experience. Nuthals says Blizzard received "a lot of feedback" during the beta. He later admits one of the challenges of making Forever has been letting go of habits he learned working on the current version of WoW.
"Some of us had worked on the modern game for a long time, myself included. I come from modern, and it's almost like unlearning what you have learned," said Nuthals, who began working full-time on WoW ahead of 2014's Warlords of Draenor expansion. "We needed to understand what the DNA was [of WoW Classic], what the philosophies were, and to do that you just had to put it under your fingers and play." One way Nuthals and his colleagues did that was by revisiting the original game each week. Every Thursday morning, he and the rest of the encounter team would replay a classic dungeon like The Deadmines before jumping into one of the new dungeons they've created for Forever, such as Ruins of Lordaeron. Afterwards, they would ask themselves if those two dungeons felt like "they could live hand in glove?" and were connected.
"That was the development process," explains Nuthals. "We thought about what we want Forever to feel like, and we wanted it to feel like you wouldn't even know — like it was made in 2004. That was the vibe we were going for." Nuthals also credits the work Blizzard did with Season of Discovery, which was an offshoot of WoW Classic that saw the studio experiment with new class abilities, progression systems and dungeons within the confines of the original game.
"With Season of Discovery, we were pushing boundaries, exploring what Classic encounters could be. For Forever, we really looked back at the original Classic encounters and wanted to capture those, so we could provide a really authentic and nostalgic experience as players do these new raids," Nuthals said. As part of that process, the one thing he and the team kept coming back to is something Nuthals describes as the "strength, dexterity and intelligence" triangle of encounter design. Strength encounters reward the player for all the gear they've accumulated and their skill with their class, while dexterity ones test how well they can move and avoid hazards. Finally, intelligence-focused encounters test your understanding of a fight's mechanics and how much planning you've done.
"What we're trying to do with raids and dungeons is move toward gearing and planning, because Classic players really love that," said Nuthals. "'I overprepare, then I come in and crush the content.' That was the vibe we really wanted to hit." Part of how that philosophy will play out involves Forever's much advertised "horizontal" progression. With the new game, the studio has said it plans to keep the level cap at 60, meaning there won't be massive jumps in player power when the studio drops major new content. On paper at least, Blizzard appears committed to rewarding those who engage with and explore the game deeply.
"We're seeding the world with all these new items and things to chase, and in the future, having one of those items might pay off," said Nuthals. "We're thinking about those opportunities as we architect future raids and decide what bosses to introduce: making sure you feel smart for having pocketed something that comes in handy later. It feels good to use all that cool gear you went out and got."
Nuthals also said in the future Blizzard hopes to add new dungeons and zones, and that "not all of them will be max level." He added "there are areas players know about and want to explore, and there are opportunities for us to tell new stories in this space — taking what might have been a one-off quest name or something you found on a piece of paper and developing that story."
One question I didn't get a chance to ask Nuthals is what Blizzard will do if players, upon reaching 60, drop Forever and move onto other games. It's one thing for a studio to say it's committed to doing things differently with an MMO that doesn't take prey on player FOMO, and an entirely different thing to actually stick to that philosophy. We'll see how the future of Forever starts to unfold when the game arrives on November 4.
What if Blizzard had continued to expand Azeroth, instead of sending players to the Orc homeworld of Draenor and beyond with The Burning Crusade and later expansions? In Forever, there are more than 1,000 new quests for players to complete, many of them designed to continue story threads that were left unresolved in the original game. Additionally, there are new areas within Azeroth for players to explore — including Mount Hyjal, the site of one of Warcraft III's pivotal battles — in addition to fresh dungeons and raids. Blizzard has also rebalanced the game's classes and items, and built an entirely new global illumination lighting pipeline to make the game feel more atmospheric. Controversially, Forever will also feature a new race, the Skyborne Elves, who weren't in the original game.
The challenge Nuthals and his colleagues face is one of expectations. Nearly right from the moment Blizzard rereleased the original World of Warcraft in 2019, players have been asking the studio for a "Classic+" experience that expands the original game. The tricky thing is that, before Forever's announcement, every player had a different opinion on what an expanded rerelease should look like. Seemingly the only consensus was that the game shouldn't play anything like modern "retail" WoW. Realistically, there was never going to be a way Blizzard would find a way to please everyone with Forever, but it's still trying to create something fans both old and new can appreciate.
"I see it more as an opportunity — an opportunity to engage, to listen and show that we're listening," Nuthals says when asked about the weight of those expectations. With Forever, Blizzard recently concluded the largest beta in World of Warcraft's history. This is despite the fact players had to purchase one of Forever's premium bundles, which start at $60, to take part in the experience. Nuthals says Blizzard received "a lot of feedback" during the beta. He later admits one of the challenges of making Forever has been letting go of habits he learned working on the current version of WoW.
"Some of us had worked on the modern game for a long time, myself included. I come from modern, and it's almost like unlearning what you have learned," said Nuthals, who began working full-time on WoW ahead of 2014's Warlords of Draenor expansion. "We needed to understand what the DNA was [of WoW Classic], what the philosophies were, and to do that you just had to put it under your fingers and play." One way Nuthals and his colleagues did that was by revisiting the original game each week. Every Thursday morning, he and the rest of the encounter team would replay a classic dungeon like The Deadmines before jumping into one of the new dungeons they've created for Forever, such as Ruins of Lordaeron. Afterwards, they would ask themselves if those two dungeons felt like "they could live hand in glove?" and were connected.
"That was the development process," explains Nuthals. "We thought about what we want Forever to feel like, and we wanted it to feel like you wouldn't even know — like it was made in 2004. That was the vibe we were going for." Nuthals also credits the work Blizzard did with Season of Discovery, which was an offshoot of WoW Classic that saw the studio experiment with new class abilities, progression systems and dungeons within the confines of the original game.
"With Season of Discovery, we were pushing boundaries, exploring what Classic encounters could be. For Forever, we really looked back at the original Classic encounters and wanted to capture those, so we could provide a really authentic and nostalgic experience as players do these new raids," Nuthals said. As part of that process, the one thing he and the team kept coming back to is something Nuthals describes as the "strength, dexterity and intelligence" triangle of encounter design. Strength encounters reward the player for all the gear they've accumulated and their skill with their class, while dexterity ones test how well they can move and avoid hazards. Finally, intelligence-focused encounters test your understanding of a fight's mechanics and how much planning you've done.
"What we're trying to do with raids and dungeons is move toward gearing and planning, because Classic players really love that," said Nuthals. "'I overprepare, then I come in and crush the content.' That was the vibe we really wanted to hit." Part of how that philosophy will play out involves Forever's much advertised "horizontal" progression. With the new game, the studio has said it plans to keep the level cap at 60, meaning there won't be massive jumps in player power when the studio drops major new content. On paper at least, Blizzard appears committed to rewarding those who engage with and explore the game deeply.
"We're seeding the world with all these new items and things to chase, and in the future, having one of those items might pay off," said Nuthals. "We're thinking about those opportunities as we architect future raids and decide what bosses to introduce: making sure you feel smart for having pocketed something that comes in handy later. It feels good to use all that cool gear you went out and got."
Nuthals also said in the future Blizzard hopes to add new dungeons and zones, and that "not all of them will be max level." He added "there are areas players know about and want to explore, and there are opportunities for us to tell new stories in this space — taking what might have been a one-off quest name or something you found on a piece of paper and developing that story."
One question I didn't get a chance to ask Nuthals is what Blizzard will do if players, upon reaching 60, drop Forever and move onto other games. It's one thing for a studio to say it's committed to doing things differently with an MMO that doesn't take prey on player FOMO, and an entirely different thing to actually stick to that philosophy. We'll see how the future of Forever starts to unfold when the game arrives on November 4.