Perhaps these are going to be the versions for players with HD turned on. Pretty interesting that these three mounts are all HD redesigns of existing SD models.
Honestly this is what I’m suspecting. Of course the team used to producing HD style models will be able to have those ready sooner.
If you want Classic style you will probably need to stick to SD art style for your Forever game, because the HD models are going to be HD models akin to the ones WoW currently produce.
Thats actually a neat idea for a multi seat mount that I never would have thought of, dont think I've ever seen that done? (Unless retail has something like that?)
There is a jellyfish and a brain mount with a similar multi seat link thing I THINK.
Edit:
I remembered wrong. The brain IS the jellyfish and the 4 extra people you can mount up with the mount is only for the 4 people you did the puzzle to earn the mount with. So not exactly like this pack mount. https://www.wowhead.com/item=156798/the-hivemind the brain mount
All of the Dragonflight dragon mounts let passengers join the dragon where they become polymorphed into whelps that follow around the main dragon. Not quite the same.
I guess there's the drakthyr only "squadron" ability you can enable where when a nearby drakthyr party member takes off you can join them in the air and you just kind of fly along beside them.
as a proud TCG magic rooster owner since WotLK, this shit is certified ass ~ with the low fantasy of classic Forever will give more of a Pixar vibe than retail in no time, yikes
I'd still like new content and rebalancing, but I'm not ready to throw the rest of vanilla out with the bathwater for store mounts, blue blood elves and slightly different poor balancing.
100%, I think they're gonna rugpull the fanbase within 6 months and add a mount shop for sure. Mounts on the level of spectral steed coming for purchase soon!
Lol the worst case scenario for Forever is that it's still a better Retail without mechanics like flying.
Except it's not. Retail for all its massive flaws still has things that it does better than classic, like the interesting rotations and challenging bosses. The worst case scenario for wow forever is basically retail with less QOL, boring rotations and piss easy bosses. No reason to play it over retail if what you enjoy is the instanced PVE content, no reason to play it over classic era if what you enjoy is the open world/leveling/MMORPG content. Just a really shitty middle ground.
It does make me wonder about the intensions behind it all
Did they really want to make a Classic+, but higher ups told them to add a shop, beginner friendly, with limited resources so they had to reuse modern models
Or
Did they want to make a new version of wow and slapped a Classic+ label on it to lure classic and retired players into playing it
No cashshop in Era means they can't monetize a sizeable portion of their playerbase in the way they want to. Wow Forever is their solution to this; lure Era players to this new version, add cashshop, boom profit
No, they understand their task perfectly, it's just that giving us what we want is only a secondary goal.
Their real goal is to give us something we'll pay for, and as little else as possible that they can't sell separately.
They care about "the spirit of Classic" as something to pay lip service to, and draw us in.
They want it to be Classic enough to get that subscription money from those of us who won't pay for anything else.
But the thing with a monthly subscription model is, the amount of money they get from us doesn't increase if they make it any better. The game is good enough to pay for or not good enough to pay for and once the quality of the game is above where we set that threshold, every extra penny they invest in making that experience any better is a penny that could have been turned into two pennies by making another product to sell.
We're going to keep bitching and moaning about extra monetisation in Forever, and they're going to keep doing it anyway, because it doesn't cost them any subs.
Blizzard will, sadly, never give us a "pure" Classic+ experience. They'll give us as little as they can get away with for us to think it's worth the price of admission.
When there's only one pub in town, they can water down the beer as much as they like. The village drunks aren't going anywhere when it's still got more alcohol than the rainwater.
And this is why you can’t just move retail designers and expect them to adhere to classic design principles. They come with the art direction of retail and know nothing else as that was their world for x amount of years.
Either hire people based on their ability and knowledge on the classic design direction or don’t design anything new until the current artists are up to speed with how classic models and art is meant to be.
If it makes you feel better, the same thing happened to osrs borrowing rs3 artists. The community had to basically bully them into sticking with the art direction of osrs.
It worked out in the end, though, since we got some banger stuff from the same people later.
We have done a bunch of 'bullying' and they finally agreed to give us SD models for Skybourne AND sd models for thier druid forms. Originally there were no plans for that and they were just gonna have janky af SD/HD models running around in the world side by side.
I can't remember if its just a rumor, but i faintly remember hearing that there were no plans for sd or classic models AT ALL for WoW forever until they had streamers come check it out near the beginning of the year and ALL of them were like 'nah this aint it dawg, you gotta have classic models'.
So seems like the devs were not on the same page as us for a long time but to thier credit they HAVE listened to feed back: There is now classic mode and HD mode, and things that were new and did not have SD models for are getting SD models created. Lets hope the devs dont get lazy and keep it up!
Bullying corporations quite literally always works. You just need to bully hard enough. At the end of the day, they are a company selling something to customers. They need us MUCH more than we need them.
Also, isn't it odd that people are now talking about it being "bullying"? To me that seems like an intentionally planted word, because in the past this was called "customer feedback". It's almost like corporations are heavily tied to all media and can use that to influence people and change narratives, such as giving something like "customer feedback" a different label with a MUCH more negative connotation. Sprinkle that among the media, and perhaps people might start to subconsciously build that connection which would benefit the companies and shield them from feedback...
You ABSOLUTELY can.
Picture this. You're a designer and you start a new job. That job will tell you the art style they want, you dont just go "yeah this is what I did at my previous job so I'll do that instead". This is not a designer problem but a management problem.
They literally could have used the Riding Turtle from the BC, the magic rooster from wrath, the spectral wolf with the classic armor and style, why do they insist on forcing retail models?
From what I understand the new chicken is a recycled china exclusive promotional item, so they are just recycling. Ironically I am just pointing out they could still recycle and have mounts that match the rest of the game.
I mean this could just be leftover content from the Retail build. Theres some intermingling going, like I'm pretty sure the base data (no models or anything) for the Retail races up to Haranir running around in the Forever client.
Well, the negativity towards it is good, so Blizzard can see the outcry to be fair.
You know there are people one level above the devs thinking about stuff like this!
spectral wolf feels like it might be a legacy reward later down the line. being able to carry two friends is pretty crazy so I assume it's not going to be easy to get
Yes and no, because there is no singular 'blizzard' that knows or doesn't know. Blizzard is a massive company owned by an even more massive company.
You have people like Aggrend and Clay who would much prefer a cash shop doesn't exist and fully understand what made classic great. I don't agree with everything they say but overall their vision is good.
But it's not entirely up to them. It's up to a bunch of guys we've never seen many of whom have never played a video game. Their qualifications are all business related. Most have probably never worked for a company making games before Blizzard. They don't answer to the gamers, they answer to the C-suite who answer to Microsoft's shareholders. And if they don't make the quarterly profits, they have to explain to those shareholders why they failed to do it. They don't want to have to do that.
These people are running numbers for WoW the exact same way they'd run numbers if they were selling toilet paper or frisbees. They just look at the revenue from selling mounts and see if they add a certain number of premium mounts at a certain price point then historically the data tells them they'll make x amount of money which will meet the quarter's minimums.
They neither know, nor care, about classic and it's artstyle. What they know is that people will buy this shit. And they're right.
Let's be honest. The only way they pitched allocating resources to even develop wow forever was that it would bring in money. It's all it ever is. Money.
I'll still be there to play it. But I'm not expecting it to be the best it could be.
I think the goal was overall the classic gameplay ideas, with a twist, plus modern art. I think the game gets a lot harder to develop for once you start trying to make more new SD models (compared to retail they dont even close to the amount of assets modern wow has for them to use) and I promise that was part of the pitch to the bean counters.
SD was pretty obviously never really intended even the toggle is half baked, including for HD. I prefer HD but I wish theyd pick a lane cause I dont see them being able to do both long term
The issue is that it isn’t about things being SD vs HD, it’s the art style.
Left is Vanilla, right is Retail, the middle would be an HD version of Vanilla that almost everyone would be happy with.
Retail’s models and art style are from 2014. Which also makes them old and outdated. An HD version of Vanilla WoW would be something new, fresh, and a huge improvement.
Yes, but also coherency. Having half the models be SD while others are HD is jarring. As is having HD models in an SD world. It just doesn't look good.
Retail’s models and art style are from 2014. Which also makes them old and outdated. An HD version of Vanilla WoW would be something new, fresh, and a huge improvement.
Damn that's a good point. But modern Blizzard isn't going to put in that kind of work.
Hopefully this is remenants of their old vision of the game (where they had no SD models) and will be SD:fied. That's my cope for the visuals.
The problem of there being a crazy amount of mounts would still remain though, but with how gaming is 2026 i'm afraid that's might be a lost battle already.
No idea how this could be SD-ified. It looks so out-of-place and attention-grabbing. To make it fit in with Classic it would need to be a completely different design.
They dont really know how to move this game forward whilst staying true to what they set out to achieve. They are not it. They have a great base - the actual game is already built, they just have to expand on it but they cant help themselves and will keep adding retail like features/cosmetics/approach to things.
Companies also get too big. Too much rigid structure. Even designers who get the classic vibe probably have no agency. What it needs is leadership that gets it, but that's rare.
Passion is really what's lacking, and it's hard to be passionate when you have little to no control over your own work.
And then there is abominations like the dracthyr from retail. Straight up dragonkin fetish. It's perverted.
Oh fuck off it has nothing to do with a “lack of talent” and everything to do with greedy middle managers refusing to take risks because they want to print money.
So tired of this middle management pencil pusher cocksuckery that goes on in the gaming community.
Yeah the team isnt what it used to be. The people there now just dont have the talent needed to maintain a classic esque experience. Honestly at this point you would probably get better results if you prompted ai to expand the classic game compared to the crap blizzard puts out
We just want the brutal, bloodthirsty stuff that WoW was based on in vanilla. Not the silly cartoon stuff that retail is now. There's no savagery in the rubbery cartoony stuff. WoW Forever shouldn't be designed for toddlers.
I looked at Hyal in the Map explorer and there are some gruesome set pieces there. Dead bodies with tubes coming out of them. At least that seems pretty classic.
Fun fact! the art work on the left was made by Chris Metzen the same person who brought us Skyelves. The artwork on the right is from Hearthstone. ALSO: Warcraft in 1995 was so brutal that we had the orcish ship units say "Arg?" "Aye, matey?", "Ahoy." etc, while the ogres had actuall fart jokes as there dialog. Warcraft did not begin with vanilla, it began with the RTS. It has always been goofy and has always been accented by darker story beats.
To follow up with specific criticism for anyone who cares (hopefully devs)...
The wolf looks like it's wearing night elf style armor. Give it spikes and skulls. Make it sharp and dangerous looking.
The turtle isn't the problem. The smooth rubbery design is. Make the eyes and the beak sharper. Make it look like if you got too close to its face, you might lose a finger. Make it look dangerous.
Same thing with the rooster. It looks like it came out of retail.
They don't want to spend money on new artists and new assets that fit the classic art style so they're being cheap and lazy and just importing existing retail models
I usually roll my eyes at all the bitching and whining in this sub but this is something that’s unacceptable. It’s like if Jagex took RS3 models and put them into OSRS, it would look totally out of place
conceptually they're cool, a spectral wolf, a turtle and a rooster. Aesthetically they are putrid. They're all retail models with that disneyification look or whatever we're calling it. Truly out of place.
As an art director, I hate the WOD wolf model with a passion. It's proportionally the most off of all the wolf models in game, it's so dopey looking. Its eyes are too far down on its head. I wish they'd gone with this skeleton instead, which resembles the classic wolf more. With revisited textures to fit the Classic visual language, of course.
I'm not against them streamlining the art direction towards something with slightly more visual fidelity, but they really desperately need to stay away from cartoonification. The turtle is an egregious example. Creature models should remain menacing-looking.
Its genuinely so weird. Like im not an artist and I dont have experience with a struggle like this, but im 100% sure I can go on fiver and hire some dude to make 3d items that look exactly like they came from classic wow. Im not sure if the blizzard staff is just like trying to flex their skills or something? But like who is okaying this
Look at the style then look at Chinese rpgs aesthetics. These are intended for a particular market notorious for their love of cash shop items in games.
Dunno why blizzard have a thing for making retail assets for wow forever. 90% of the retail players will drop wow forever once the first raid tier is over. Then go back to moaning about how blizzard made retail Disney before dropping £20 on a cute mount in the store. Wild stuff.
People don’t get that games are a product of their time and the culture of the developer that made them
The Blizzard of the early 2000s that made WoW is gone. Most of the employees that made it are long gone from blizzard. The few that remain might have lost their touch.
The reality is that if the blizzard of the 2020s was that good at making MMOs we’d all be playing WoW midnight right now and not be eagerly anticipating a modified re release of the game they made 22 years ago.
The fucking foamboard cosplay looking tier sets and now this shit. With the rate they're adding things that clash with classic's graphics and art direction, I'll have quit before the game is even out.
For fuck's sake Blizzard, everyone said you couldn't be trusted to do Classic+ and here you are proving them right before it's released.
I keep telling people, I dont trust blizz to resist their retail roots in forever. Will be a constant battle for us to wage because if they're left to their own devices, they will retail the hell out of this game in short order.
I could live with the ghostly wolf. Make the turtle not have disney eyes and for the love of god delete that chicken mount and fire whoever came up with it.
I have fond memories of the El Pollo Grande mount, but it came out in 2009, and this is definitely not that model and it's definitely not vanilla-style.
The art should be easy. They need to get a polygon count and a color palette count on Classic Mounts. Then allow themselves a +10% margin on new designs. I don't know why they insist on putting this retail looking stuff into a classic version of the game.
What the fuck does "classic looking" even mean anymore if the visuals aren't rooted in 2004 fidelity visuals. These could easily fit into Retail.
Does "classic looking" just mean relatively plain? If so then why do we even need Forever? Retail has plenty of plain assets.
Why does Forever even supposedly need "plain" assets to begin with, when it features gnomes who ride robot chickens and until they nuked it lived in a sprawling underground sci-fi city?
If Classic looking isn't synonymous with 2004 then it doesn't mean anything and the game will just become Retail as the standard shifts and shifts.
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u/Korfusan 18h ago
Bro they literally have rooster and turtle mount that look much older than those.