World of Warcraft Forever is a new version of Blizzard’s venerable MMO that’s simultaneously very old and very new. It’s based on the game more or less as it was in 2004 (well, 2006), but it’s not just a throwback — that’s what WoW Classic is for.
Forever, which was wished into being by fans who conceived it as “Classic Plus,” has new content: new zones, quests, dungeons, a new playable race. It’s got some quality-of-life improvements, new features, upgraded visuals. And while it ignores most of the improvements and changes in design philosophy made over the last 20 years in the main game, it also has a few radical modernizations which have yet to come to “modern” WoW, including one which probably never will.
One of the most fascinating and paradoxical side-effects of the approach Blizzard has taken with Forever is that it promises to be the easiest and most welcoming way into WoW for new players, casual players, and returning old hands since the game launched — despite the ornery friction of its old-school gameplay. Here are a few reasons why.
1
You can play it on a controller
Forever is the first iteration of WoW to get official controller support. Blizzard has had decent accessibility options in the game for years, and there are good controller mods out there, but this is the first time WoW will have native, plug-and-play gamepad controls and UI, tested and finessed by the developers.
This obviously hugely expands the contexts in which you can enjoy the game: kicking back on the sofa, or playing on a PC handheld. You don’t have to be at a desk, leaning in. It will also make the game far more approachable for new players, like my 9-year-old, who has always been drawn to WoW‘s world but struggled to learn mouse-and-keyboard controls. (Needless to say, players like this are not that likely to be fiddling around with add-ons.)
2
There are no servers
Network infrastructure isn’t the sexiest topic, but this is one of the most consequential changes in WoW Forever — and one that would be impossible to implement in the modern game. When you make a character in standard WoW, you need to join a server, which dictates the players you’ll share the world with. This restriction has been relaxed in various ways over time, but it’s still a fundamental block to being able to find your friends and play with whoever you like.
WoW Forever is “realm free,” in Blizzard’s words. The entire playerbase is only segmented by playstyle: Normal, PvP, Roleplay, and in the future, a Hardcore permadeath mode. (The game’s original strict faction segregation between Horde and Alliance, one of its most immersive features, returns, too.) Blizzard will ensure you consistently see the same players in the game, fostering a sense of community, but all other artificial barriers are lifted.
If your friend plays WoW Forever, you can play with them. Hardly cutting-edge stuff, but it sweeps away one of WoW‘s most frustrating and antiquated features and makes it so much easier to enjoy with others.
3
It’s “horizontally expanding,” with a permanently fixed level cap
This might be WoW Forever‘s central design idea, and one that makes it philosophically different from almost every other MMO, including its parent game. Blizzard has vowed never to increase the level cap past 60, but to expand the game over time “horizontally” instead, with new stuff for players throughout the level bands to enjoy.
This means the catch-up anxiety and confusing defamiliarization players feel when logging into — or thinking about logging into — MMOs after a long time away disappears. It’s a perennial problem with live-service games, and Blizzard has bent over backwards to try to assuage it with various tutorial and catch-up modes in standard WoW, but it’s always a headache. A game made of 12 distinct versions stacked on top of each other is unavoidably bloated and contradictory. WoW Forever will remain WoW Forever… forever.
4
It has been unsolved
Most of WoW Forever will be deeply familiar, but Blizzard says it’s put special effort into “unsolving” the game — meaning making it, if not exactly an unknown quantity, a less-than-completely known one. As well as adding new content that hasn’t already been done to death. This means redesigning the classes, refreshing the loot table, and rethinking how itemisation and stat bonuses work, so players can discover new builds and new synergies.
The idea is to somehow imbue a 20-year-old game with a sense of discovery that will encourage players not to just optimize and min-max themselves into oblivion. We’ll see how long that lasts, but it will be a truly fresh start, at least.
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5
It looks nostalgic, but new
WoW Forever‘s visual approach is unusual, even for a remake or remaster: It doesn’t mess with the original, low-poly art assets at all, but drastically updates the rendering tech with regard to lighting, fog, and water. The idea is to preserve the original art style, which Blizzard considers timeless, while ladling on a rich atmosphere and making it look less dated. You can swap between the original low-poly “SD” character models and more detailed “HD” ones, but even the HD models have been painstakingly retrofitted with the classic game’s animation routines, so they don’t look out of place.
The effect is at once retro and contemporary, like so many indie games, or Square Enix’s HD-2D style. It’s arguably cooler and more distinctive than modern WoW‘s lush look. And it’s definitely more appealing to most modern players than the stark 2004 vibes of WoW Classic.
6
Old-school means tough, but it also means chill
This point is more of an arguable one. It’s counterintuitive to claim that Forever‘s old-school gameplay, with its slow combat, leveling, and travel times, its lack of matchmaking for dungeons, and its general obtuseness, is more approachable than the slickness of modern WoW. But, in a way, it actually might be.
It’s definitely not easier. But could end up being less pressured and overwhelming. It’s a harsher world, but also a simpler one, unburdened of its own history. It’s a place where you can just be. During Forever‘s reveal at BlizzCon, Blizzard repeatedly stressed that it wanted the game to be about the journey more than the destination, just as World of Warcraft was at launch.
Suffice to say this is not how MMOs and live-service games have developed over the last 20 years, and not all of the effects of that development have been positive. If Blizzard truly can turn back this clock, that will be the most refreshing thing of all.
World of Warcraft Forever begins beta testing on Sep. 17 and launches on Nov. 4.