World of Warcraft: Forever world builder Matthew Armstrong explained who the project is being made for — the Classic audience — and why the team is walking away from the usual modern tools.

Matthew Armstrong, world builder on World of Warcraft: Forever, weighed in on a long-running community debate about who the project is for — Classic players or the retail audience. In his words, Forever is made for the Classic gamer and for the millions who once cancelled their subscription over changes they didn't like.

To capture the spirit of the original, Armstrong spent a year re-learning the art-creation techniques of twenty years ago. The team is deliberately giving up faster modern pipelines — out of respect for the people who made World of Warcraft back then. A separate Russian-language recap also notes that the team turned down a number of modern technologies, such as advanced heightmaps.

Armstrong describes his work through three mottos. One of them he puts this way: "convenience is the death of the journey." That's the centre of his statement: old inconveniences are being brought back into the game for the sake of immersion, and for the team that's a principled position — not a side effect of beta limitations.

In practice

• This isn't a technical post about the pipeline, but a statement of intent: the team is consciously putting old-school feel above convenience. Anyone waiting for a full set of modern QoL (quality of life) features in Forever should keep that in mind.
• No specific mechanics are listed in the statement — watch the blue posts and developer interviews: that's where you'll see exactly where the line between "classic" and "inconvenient" gets drawn.