It's the final day of the beta test for World of Warcraft: Forever — Blizzard's new reimaging of classic, 2004-vintage WoW — and the servers are buzzing. In the village of Goldshire, a busy scrum of players has gathered, eager to tackle Super Hogger, a new, kaiju-sized boss version of the famous low-level elite gnoll. Outside the gates of the city of Stormwind, there's a festival atmosphere.
Streams of players pour back and forth across the bridge, some of them three times their normal size. I'm standing amid this hubbub as a silent, invisible observer. The Forever development team has invited me to an in-game tour on the live servers.
I'm asked to roll an Alliance character; I hold my nose and do so. The team magically boost me to level 30 (the beta's cap) and make me invisible to other players and in-game monsters. My guides then teleport me around the game's vast map, including into new zones not yet unlocked in the beta.
It's like being invited behind the curtain by the Wizard of Oz. This is no siloed development environment; it's a live server being enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of players. We walk among them like gods, unsuspected, and cast our eyes over lands they cannot yet see.
It's never occurred to me before that, when I'm lost in an online game world like WoW's, its creators might be right there alongside me, silently watching. My guides for this strange, magical experience are Tim Jones, lead Classic designer, and Kris Zierhunt, principal game designer on WoW: Forever. Jones worked in Blizzard's testing department for a long time before joining the development team of WoW Classic, the 2019 recreation of the game (almost) exactly as it was at launch in 2004, which has since moved through several later expansions.
Zierhut, for his part, started working on World of Warcraft all the way back in 2005. "I was the first designer hired after they shipped the original game," Zierhut says. "I always loved how it was back in the beginning, but didn't love as much what it became," he confesses.
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