The design politics of studios in the early 2000s will always fascinate me—not the unsavory stuff, I am glad that is well and truly binned—but rather, the little elbows and feet put on other designers in studios where there wasn’t a clear, clean pipeline or a mandate.
Such was the case with Blizzard where, as revealed by principal Kris Zierhut in a recent Polygon interview, there was a little cheeky in-fighting over the power of crafted gear. Zierhut, who joined the company in 2005, was reflecting on the corrections the team wasn’t allowed to make during the “no changes” era of Classic in 2019. Corrections that are now possible with World of Warcraft: Forever:
“The only design direction that really existed was: Don’t change anything … I was there when we made some of these decisions. I had those discussions with Tom and Jeff and Scott. And I knew some places where we made mistakes.”
One such mistake, as the article gets into, is the role that crafted gear had in vanilla WoW—this isn’t to say that crafted items were never on the list of best in slot recommendations, but professions were actually meant to give you good gear from the word ‘go’, with a series of clear outlines for how powerful gear could be.
The problem? Some designers bumped up their gear’s power on the sly. “Eric Dodds, the crafting designer, was always very responsible and followed the rules, and other people cheated a little bit.”
This is, with over 20 years of hindsight and distance, really funny. The concept of a team of developers quietly bumping up their stats like they’re in some gear equivalent of The Big Short—yeah man, just give those boots a few more points of stamina. Dodds isn’t gonna know a thing, the sweet fool. But we know the future of WoW is dungeons, dungeons, dungeons, baby!
Anyway, having played the beta, I can confirm that this is indeed addressed. There are a lot of really good blue items that’re soulbound which you can craft for yourself if you’re, say, a blacksmith or a leatherworker—items that absolutely compete with questing and dungeon items. Crafting is absolutely worth it for your levelling journey.
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