Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment
I’ve played an awful lot of World of Warcraft in my time, but it’s sometimes hard to say that I’ve loved the experience. I started all the way back in Vanilla WoW and it rewrote my brain chemistry. I’m not even that obsessed with the concept of Classic – my favourite expansion was Mists of Pandaria, and I was still enjoying myself through Battle for Azeroth.
However, like many long-term players, my experience fell apart around the ill-fated Shadowlands expansion. I was teased back into Midnight earlier this year and found very little to recommend. In almost every aspect, World of Warcraft was simply eclipsed by other MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV. However, with World of Warcraft: Forever, everything feels exciting again, and it’s mostly not even just nostalgia.
Massively multiplayer joy
A good chunk of why WoW: Forever has really captured me is the other players, which is a good factor of what I feel I’ve been missing in retail WoW. I’m playing on the Roleplay servers, and it’s just full of people who are excited to play and chat. Not always in character, of course, but that doesn’t really matter! I like it even when it’s just Tauren mooing at each other.
It’s an infectious atmosphere when everyone is nattering about something, either locally or in the area-wide general chats, but where I feel the most connection is with WoW: Forever’s new campfire system. If someone puts down a campfire, people can contribute items they’ve made. Then when you sit by that campfire for a minute, you get buffs based upon the unique items.
It’s a wonderfully social experience, even when no one’s actually talking. You can have up to three items around a campfire, but can only offer one yourself, so you need a group of three to get maximum benefits. It encourages co-operation, and the buffs are so good it’s always worth stopping for a bit.
My favourite part, though, is something so uniquely human. When lots of people are sitting around a campfire, they find their own place. You could technically sit in the same spot as someone else, it wouldn’t matter, but every single time I see people trying to find a gap for themselves around the fire. It’s extremely charming.
This is the best time to really take on WoW: Forever, then. People are excited to level, and there’s so many of them all in the same place. When I first travelled to the Undead levelling area I was astounded by just how many people there were, and that shared experience is just utterly magical.
Slowing things down
WoW: Forever’s slow gameplay enhances this social element by keeping people in the same area for a long time and encouraging them to keep coming back to major cities to upgrade. You need to go back to the cities to sort out your new class abilities, or to mess with your professions, which feel essential for surviving the sometimes brutal combat Forever showcases.
It’s not complicated combat by any means, but enemies always hit harder than you expect, and love to mob you. You’ve got to be careful to avoid dying, especially in the mini-dungeons scattered around the map, and your gear progresses slowly.
The best way to survive is to band together, and anyone you see is a potential ally. If you set up campsites near major quest locations, you’re basically setting up a beacon to try and find yourself a friend; it’s great.
I’m adoring the slow pace of World of Warcraft: Forever, where the journey is the point. You can remove all the quest markers, leaving you only to navigate by quest text and what you can see with the enhanced draw distance. If you really need to, you can quickly turn the quest markers back on to navigate, which I think is better than having to go look it up somewhere else.
It keeps you within the game and teaches you how to navigate – which is good because you’ll be retracing your steps quite often.
What are we, some kind of Classic Plus?
Really an awful lot of what I love about WoW: Forever could have been said for Classic, but I never cared for Blizzard’s wheeling out of old expansions again and again. It feels too on the nose, somehow too cynical for me, yet I have instantly clicked with Forever, which could be seen as even worse nostalgia-bait.
Part of it is that WoW: Forever feels like a game that can tap into decades of experience of what has and hasn’t worked. Take the pacing and low-stakes engagement of Classic, but throw in the quality-of-life improvements that I do believe are necessary. Keep that feeling of a world that opens up slowly in front of you, but actually put new stories in that world rather than just repeating the hits.
It’s really all it took to fall in love with World of Warcraft again, at least for a while. I don’t know if Forever will keep its player base at the same level it does now, and I don’t know if the world will eventually grow quiet and dull.
Right now, I’m excited to see what’s around the next corner, and see whole new zones, and trying not to look up anything so as to spoil the illusion. I fear I’m going to be here for a hot second, and I couldn’t be happier.
FAQs
Kind of! WoW: Forever is a spin-off of World of Warcraft that takes the original game world and tries out new things with it. It will feel very familiar to WoW players, especially those intimately familiar with WoW Classic, but its got enough remixing to be a new experience.
Yes, WoW: Forever launched on November 4th, 2026.
No, to play WoW: Forever, you need an active World of Warcraft subscription, though you don’t need to buy anything else beyond that.
