World of Warcraft: Forever is a hit, and it isn’t even out yet. Blizzard developers keep humblebragging about how their servers just can’t cope with demand for the current beta, and they need to add more capacity. Some of them are, quite understandably, getting emotional about the outpouring of excitement for this reimagining of the classic game. WoW has never really stopped being popular, but Forever seems to have captured imaginations and made it more relevant than it has been in years.
Many of the players pouring into the beta are, like me, rolling characters in Forever‘s new elf race, the Skyborne. I wonder what proportion of them have chosen to play Skyborne in the beta because — like me, again — they are curious, but they wouldn’t dream of rolling one of these blue sky elves for real when the game launches on Nov. 4.
It’s not that I’m completely immune to the charms of a pretty elf race. It’s not my taste — I’m a troll and tauren guy, I like big, monstrous doofuses. But I played a Blood Elf rogue for a while that I have a fondness for, all deliciously haughty and evil. I get it. I’m not here to elf-shame.
I’m in the minority, anyway. It’s obvious why, when considering a new race for Forever, Blizzard came up with the Skyborne. The numbers don’t lie. Blood Elf and Night Elf are by far the most popular races in modern “retail” WoW, making up 27% of all characters created. Throw in the Nightborne and Void Elves, and WoW‘s elf constituency reaches 34%. People clearly love elves.
The Skyborne, who can join either the Horde or the Alliance, answer a couple of needs for the WoW fanbase. They give Horde players access to a pretty race at a point in the timeline when the Blood Elves had yet to reveal themselves and join the faction, and the only other Horde options are zombies, orcs, trolls, and cow people. (Forever is set before WoW‘s first expansion, The Burning Crusade.) Also, based as they are on the Blood Elf designs, the Skyborne allow Alliance players to inhabit their more delicate and yassified vision of an elven race for the first time. As the only component of Forever that’s for sale at launch — the game is otherwise just included in a WoW subscription — the Skyborne should be a good earner for Blizzard.
But there’s something off about them, from both an aesthetic and a lore perspective. They feel kind of perfunctory and tacked-on. They reveal just how difficult it is going to be for Blizzard to add new content to an old game — but not in the ways that I imagined.
The main reason I wanted to jump straight into the beta as a Skyborne — admittedly after I’d got a troll to level 6, just to see my old haunt Durotar in all its dusty glory in Forever‘s stunning new rendering — was to check out their starting zone, Zephras Isle. I wanted to see if Blizzard could really unlearn 20 years of changes in MMO design to create new content that felt like the classic game.
I had my doubts, but it turns out that Blizzard aced it. The questing is much less directed than in the modern game and branches out messily all over the place, leaving you to carve your own routes. The storyline emerges naturally from the environment rather than being told to the player, who is one of many ordinary heroes, not (oxymoronically, as in modern WoW) one of many Chosen Ones.
It’s grindy, in a way that is mostly satisfying but can be dull. There’s the de rigeur quest where you have to kill some unfortunate fauna for its meat that has a comically low drop rate. It’s also harder; you can quickly get into sticky situations if you accidentally pull too many mobs. On Zephras Isle, there’s a humble apple orchard full of stealthed bandits and patrolled on its edges by a higher-level monster where I came a cropper more than once. This is classic WoW, alright.
The problem is that the Skyborne themselves just don’t fit. They live on a sky island, because of course they do; it’s an easy solve for the conundrum of adding both a new race and a new landmass to a 22-year-old map without stepping on any of the subsequent geography and lore. Too easy, perhaps. The Skyborne are literally free-floating, disassociated from the world of Azeroth that they’ve arrived to join. With Mists of Pandaria‘s Pandaren, that was part of the joke of their unlikely existence, but with these fairly standard, classical fantasy elves, it just leaves them feeling designed by committee — which they may well have been.
Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter
A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no
commitment — just saving for later.
Sign up free
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
Players can sense this kind of thing — especially if they’ve been steeped in a world for two decades — and they called it out immediately when the Skyborne were revealed. They’re elves, but blue: a palette swap. They don’t feel organic to classic WoW. But what would?
This is the problem facing Blizzard: how to invent stuff for WoW that feels like it could have been invented 20 years ago, but wasn’t. The WoW: Forever team has to find roads not taken for the world and the story. And the developers need to find somewhere to put them that isn’t just floating in the sky or through some kind of portal, because one reason people are excited about Forever is to return to a world that feels like a single, contiguous space, not a fractured accumulation of add-ons.
I’ll be very interested to try out Forever‘s other new zones when they’re made available, and when I can grind my way up to them. After playing the Skyborne, I’m confident that Blizzard knows how to make new old WoW in a nuts-and-bolts sense. But the big-picture, conceptual stuff? I’m not so sure. It will be really hard to get right. But hey, a blue tauren would rock, right?