Ocarina stays close while WoW: Forever branches out

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and World of Warcraft: Forever treat classic games as more than nostalgia: one keeps its content and design largely intact, while the other uses classic WoW as a base for additions and changes. The two arrived on consecutive days, but their approaches to preserving the past point in opposite directions.

As Polygon's comparison lays out, Ocarina changes little about its content and design while adopting a substantially altered art style. Forever keeps the game's existing art beneath a new rendering layer, yet adds content and alters aspects of its design.

Both teams have talked about carrying forward design qualities they believe have faded from modern games. Eiji Aonuma said rebuilding Ocarina of Time could help developers learn the game's structure and development style, giving them ideas to use in later work. That possibility helped Nintendo decide it was the right time to revisit the game.

At Blizzard, interest in a Classic Plus version arose among developers as similar enthusiasm grew in the WoW Classic community. The WoW Classic team tested the idea during Season of Discovery before pitching it to leadership. Lead designer Kris Zierhut framed Forever as a thought experiment: what might the team that first made the game have produced with two more years to develop the game and add content?

Forever makes substantial additions and changes to the game’s design. Its planned fixed progression cap and ‘horizontal’ expansion aim to recontextualize WoW around the journey rather than the destination, and could offer a different form for MMOs and live-service games.