- Blizzard Entertainment has explained why World of Warcraft: Forever won't have Summoning Stones
- It says, "Easy, quick access to teleports shrink the world"
- Summoning Stones would disrupt the experience it's trying to build
World of Warcraft: Forever won't feature Summoning Stones because Blizzard Entertainment believes quick access to teleporting would conflict with its design intentions.
In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, where the WoW: Forever team also discussed the controversial addition of the new Skyborne race, Blizzard shared its design philosophy for creating an authentic "Classic Plus" experience; it centered around four design pillars, which include: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences, Approachable and Familiar, World as the Main Character, and Journey before destination.
These pillars help the team build on the "vanilla" WoW world while also staying true to the game's established "core design, pacing, and tone."
A feature like Meeting Stones, also known as Summoning Stones among the player base, wasn't an option in vanilla, but was a convenient addition to retail WoW, letting players teleport their friends to a raid or dungeon entrance.
However, Summoning Stones is something WoW: Forever won't offer. Blizzard explained that teleporting would minimize the scale of the game's world, which would clash with a few of its four core design pillars, specifically Nurture and Protect Social Experiences and World as the Main Character.
"Making sure any change we make passes the muster of those pillars is a must," the WoW: Forever team said. "And certain convenience changes can very easily erode one or more of those pillars.
"Summoning stones are one of those. Easy, quick access to teleports shrink the world, and marginalize part of the identity of a class like Warlock. Thus, it fails muster against 'Nurture and Protect Social Experiences' and 'World as the Main Character'."
It continued, saying, "We have a lot of different players with a lot of different preferences joining us for this journey, which is a great thing, and makes it all the more important to hold the line when it comes to our pillars."
Blizzard said it has 22 years of data on how quality-of-life or convenience changes impacted "the social fabric of the game." However, with WoW: Forever, the studio is "going down a different path," meaning every update it introduces is "going to be well-informed by that experience and regulated by our pillars.
"It’s a great place to be," the team added.
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