At BlizzCon 2026, Blizzard Entertainment revealed one of its most highly anticipated projects, World of Warcraft Forever. The third major iteration of Blizzard’s landmark MMO will give Warcraft fans the “Classic Plus” version of WoW they’ve been pestering the developer about for years, even in the wake of 2019’s World of Warcraft Classic.
World of Warcraft Forever is WoW in a time bubble, without the creep of major expansions and changes that have altered the beloved MMO over the past two decades. Forever will have new content — zones, quests, dungeons, and a new playable race — plus quality-of-life improvements that make the game distinct from the original World of Warcraft. But the developers behind the latest version of Blizzard’s MMO are thinking very strategically about how to preserve what was great about WoW in its earliest years. They want to keep players curious, surprise them, and let them play World of Warcraft at their own (leisurely) pace.
At BlizzCon, Polygon spoke with Tim Jones, lead game designer, and Nora Valletta, lead software engineer, about how World of Warcraft Forever came to be, what the dev team’s ambitions are for the throwback MMO, and how friendly the legendary game will be for newcomers. Read our full discussion below.
World of Warcraft Forever is currently beta testing and launches on Nov. 4 on Mac and Windows PC.
Polygon: You announced 1,000 new quests. With the design changes that have happened over the past 20 years in World of Warcraft, how is quest and dungeon design being approached in World of Warcraft Forever? Are people getting into the 2004-2006 headspace? What’s the approach?
Tim Jones: I think we have gone to great lengths to analyze what makes the era and Vanilla world special — the simplicity of objectives, of creature design. In that analysis, I think we have developed a set of core principles that apply to our game, the pacing of combat, and the complexity of quest design. In creating any quests, we look at Wetlands, for example, and we see a portion of the world that we say, “Hey, maybe there’s a new objective that could exist in that location of the world and we want to create objectives there.”
We want to make sure that whatever content we add feels like it could have always existed in 2004. We like to use the term “found photographs.” Ideally, if a 2004 player time traveled to now and was playing through the zone, it would feel like the objectives are simple and the creatures are the appropriate difficulty for the zone. We’re not trying to complicate things unnecessarily but really stay true to that original vision of Vanilla WoW when we make these choices.
People who might’ve played in their teens, early 20s may not be able to sit and play WoW for four hours these days. Is that a consideration as well, in how you’re approaching forever?
Jones: People have to adjust their mind space for the Vanilla game. I think if people can be satisfied with logging into their character, opening their quest log, and say, “Hey, I have 30 minutes, I have an hour, I have an hour and a half to play, I can get a couple quests done or I can go to the auction house and buy some materials and level up my professions a bit.”
There’s so many ways to have incremental progression on your character that’s meaningful. The leveling experience and the leveling journey, it’s long for a reason. We want players to have the ability to take it slow, not feel rushed. Our level cap is 60, and it’s going to stay at 60. Some people want to rush to the end game because they’re really excited about jumping into the raids, but that’s really not what WoW Forever is about.
The leveling journey is so important. It’s one of our core pillars: “journey before destination.” That’s what makes the hardcore game set so beautiful is that it forces people to make that conscious decision to play the game in the moment. That’s what we really hope that draws new players into the game is feeling like they can get a quarter of a level and level up some professions, progress through Elwynn Forest and get ready to move on to Westfall and for that to feel satisfying — for them not to feel rushed because there is no rush. We are in this for the long haul. We want to continue making content across all levels for the long haul.
Nora Valletta: I actually fit that demographic you described. I also don’t have four hours every evening to necessarily sit down and play. And one of the things I do, at least in versions of [World of Warcraft] Classic where you have that slower gameplay loop, is I’ll log in, maybe check my auctions, maybe farm some herbs. Sometimes just simply logging in and deciding you’re going to do that one quest. There was a time I was like, “I’ll just do this. I’ll finish this one quest in the Wetlands.” As I was leaving town, I saw someone trying to gank somebody else — I was on a PvP server — and I was like, “Well, I was gonna do that quest.” It just became like a 20-minute PVP session for me. And then I logged off there. And that’s fun.
Jones: And you’re not going to be “behind” for engaging in those things. If it takes you a hundred days to get to level 60, that’s totally fine. There’s meaningful progression through our legacy system that people can jump into and roll alts if that’s their thing. You can grind a reputation.
I’m a dad. I have a seven-year-old and a five-year-old daughter. And when we’re play testing in our internal alpha, I put the family to bed and then I can game for a couple hours. I can’t necessarily play in a competitive raiding guild like my younger self might have wanted to, but it’s still fun. It was fun questing in the world, grouping up occasionally.
I’m curious about the lore considerations of expanding this era. Is there anything you’re intentionally staying away from? This is its own contained space, right?
Jones: Yeah. We’re in a time bubble. Timeline-wise, we exist in a space between Warcraft 3 and The Burning Crusade. The Molten Core hasn’t released yet. We’re perpetually living in the year or so that was the original Vanilla game. So there are things that are true: Arthas is still alive. Illidan is still alive.
When we’re thinking about lore considerations, there are a couple different categories of content. There is the expected content that we can explore. There are places in the world that everyone knows exists, like Mount Hyjal. People know it’s there, so it’s not necessarily a surprise; people expect it. But it’s exciting and new. No one’s ever been to that part of the world during this period of time. So there’s something exciting about that. Or it’s even new, but feels like it could have been there the entire time.
Valletta: The Riverglades is a really good example of that.
Jones: Yeah. The lore that we’re using for the Riverglades, we go back to the stories of Warcraft and Warcraft 2 like the sacking of Stormwind. We take elements of campaign missions from those old games — When the orcs were retreating and the humans were chasing after them, could they have gone to this location on the eastern coast of Eastern Kingdoms? The landmass was always there in the Vanilla game, so how can we turn elements of preexisting lore into a new and exciting space for people to quest in?
But we also want to reserve a space for the unexpected and the exciting, where places like Zephras Isle and the Skyborne come into play — where those aspects of the game are still rooted deeply in lore.
The Skyborne are highborne exiles from Eldre’Thalas and there’s a very interesting story about how they defied Prince Tortheldrin when he was trying to summon demons through Dire Maul. So we craft a new story around that that fits in the Classic world, that answers some mysteries that people have been wondering about, but also creates new mysteries that we can continue to explore for years to come.
We’re not saying that Arthas never became the Lich King or Jayna’s secretly a dread lord, and we’re also making sure that geographically speaking, the continents keep their silhouette. It’s important that there are things that remain static in the game. But we have room to surprise and delight our players through familiar and unexpected types of content.
These constraints are really interesting. It seems like it gives you a lot of opportunity to do things that you wouldn’t normally do.
Valletta: There’s actually a lot of rich opportunity to explore, not just like grand scheme stories, huge events, and big catastrophes, but more down-to-earth stories and situations that the people inhabiting this world experience, that can be smaller bite-sized relatable stories on a human level. That’s something that can be very powerful. I think that’s part of the power of this world that we’ve crafted, and it’s something I really look forward to when putting on my player hat in Forever.
Jones: I like the word that you use, constraints, because the Classic team has grown accustomed to operating under certain design constraints. We’ve been crafting content and trying to build new content that’s appropriate for our Classic versions of the game, our anniversary games, seasonal variations of the games. As we have grown as a team, in responsibility and trust of the company to take on bigger and bigger projects, we get more resources and support from the rest of the company. We still have to learn how to operate under the constraints and the rules of Classic.
We’re constantly testing our own content and measuring against our core principles. If we recognize that we’ve gone too far in one direction that doesn’t feel Classic, we rip that out. We pivot. That’s the beauty of the Classic team.
The player base has been asking for something like Forever — or “Classic Plus”— for a long time. Why was now the right time to do it? Was this a combination of internal wishes or was this mostly a player response kind of thing?
Valletta: I’d say it was a combination of both player wishes and our team’s wishes. The Classic team spun up in 2019, so it doesn’t have a very lengthy history, but the team has evolved so much over time, because it started out as We’re going to release these time capsule-like experiences for players to [revisit] the content very close to how it was back in the day. […] Our ambition started to grow over time and as the community became more and more excited about the Classic content they were experiencing, there was a feedback loop.
Season of Discovery was very much [an example of] What if we got a little crazy with it? and did a bunch of changes to see what it would be like in a Classic environment with all these different adjustments. We found that the player response was just overwhelming. We were so excited to see people jump in and enjoy Season of Discovery, so we thought There’s something here. There was a deep hunger there. We felt it, too. So what would it be like if we did do something big, permanent, and that’s enticing enough to last forever.
There’s also a bunch of people who don’t play World of Warcraft. How much did you factor new players into this? What are the considerations for that audience?
Jones: I will say, I think Vanilla Warcraft is one of the best ways for people to jump into WoW. There’s a beauty in how the game onboards you without explicitly tutorializing the game. There’s a deliberate pace that the game implores where you log in, you customize your character, you log into the game, and you’re immediately looking at the first quest in front of you. The game is deliberately simple and it exposes you to systems at a very gradual pace. That’s the beauty, like, we were talking about before, the pacing of the game, the slow journey.
The beauty of WoW Forever being in the limelight right now is that I think we’ll get a lot of new players who are like, “OK, this is new. I can jump on the ground floor. This is a fresh start on a game that isn’t seasonal. It’s not fleeting, and I can take my time playing it and not necessarily feel overwhelmed or like I’m falling behind.” I really think that WoW Forever is gonna be an amazing starting point for anyone who wants to try, young and old.
Valletta: It’s a lot like walking a tightrope. We might be inclined to think, “We’re going to make sure there’s no friction at all in the onboarding experience. We’re gonna explain everything to them. You’re gonna walk up to a questgiver, and there’s gonna be a pop-up that’s like, “Hey, this is a quest.” You might be inclined to do something like that because you’re removing friction for them to learn how to play the game. But at the same time, if you have that, it’s also robbing [players] of the opportunity to [learn]. Sure, they might just Google it, but they may actually ask other players for help, and that’s an opportunity to make a relationship. And that is a cornerstone of WoW Forever.
Jones: “Protect and nurture social experiences.”
I wanted to ask about that. How is that being enabled in WoW Forever, the nurturing of social relationships? What does that really mean, design-wise?
Jones: I think the camping system is an amazing way that we are protecting and nurturing social experiences. After players leave their starting zone, there’ll be a quest that someone can get where they learn how to construct a campfire. It requires people to invest in a trade skill and level up that trade skill a couple levels. They can then come back and learn a recipe to contribute an object specific to that trade skill to the campfire. What that means mechanically is that people need to sit around this campfire object for about a minute and then they’ll gain a buff that will help them in their leveling journey.
What we’ve seen this in our internal play tests, is players like, “I’m questing in Tanaris, and I just picked up a bunch of quests in Gadgetzan. Oh, hey, Josh is questing in Tanaris too. Let’s set down a campfire and we can buff each other with it.” We have to take a moment to stop for a second. Classic does this beautifully where there are moments of rest where you can reflect or talk to other people. Flight points do this amazingly. We’re not just teleporting people around the world. It might take a couple of minutes, but it gives you time to check in on guild chat. Or in the case of camping, when you’re sitting next to someone for a whole minute, then it’s like, “Oh, hey, what are you doing? Are you doing the Murloc quest? Me too. Let’s party up. Let’s do this together.”
On the engineering aspect, we’re doing our best to catalog on the backend who you’re interacting with: What people have you joined a party with [or] done quests with in Westfall? Did [you do] a Deadmines run? We keep track of who those people are that you’ve run into on your journey, so when you’re level 40 questing through Desolace, you’ll run into that same person. We’re strategically grouping people together on the server, so you will run into those people and have those serendipitous encounters. And maybe that random person that you quested with turns into a guild mate. Maybe you will go to BlizzCon together next year. We’re really trying to be strategic with both of our design and engineering solutions to protect and nurture social experiences in WoW Forever.