// PC GAMER — GAMING
WoW: Forever's update schedule will be 'a little more laid back' than the main MMO
Developers say the plan is to release updates a few times a year to match the MMO's classic spirit.
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A major draw for World of Warcraft: Forever is how much slower it will be compared to the modern version of the MMO. Traveling across the world takes longer, quests take longer, and even fighting enemies takes considerably longer than most players have gotten used to.
This slower pace is basically the whole point of having an MMO set in the original era of WoW. It's an opportunity to experience what it might've been like if Blizzard never sped things up over the course of several expansions.
WoW: Forever will still evolve over time, though. Blizzard plans to regularly update it like the rest of its games. And unlike each version of WoW: Classic, it can pull from all of WoW's history to keep things going in perpetuity.
According to a recent interview with IGN, WoW: Forever's update schedule will accommodate how much longer it takes to do things. Principal game designer Kris Zierhut says it'll be "a little more laid back" than the modern game.
"So we've done a lot of experimentation to see what is the correct rate, and we're fairly convinced the correct rate is something closer to once every four months or 17 weeks or three times a year, whatever you want to call it. That is a cadence we have in mind for releasing new content," he says.
Many of the developers on the WoW: Forever team already experimented with releasing new stuff every eight weeks while running the limited-time Season of Discovery mode and Zierhut says, "It felt way, way, way too fast."
Major updates for WoW: Forever will be timed around new raid tiers, giving players several months to work through them. But raids won't be the whole focus. Blizzard intends to add new things to do for characters under max level, and some portion of every update will "unlock two or three months in or one month into that," Zierhut says.
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