Taking a Peek at the Forever Beta

Only a few days ago I responded to a commenter that I didn't care about the beta, but I did preorder and have access to it. So naturally, after spending the last few days hoovering up every possible tidbit of information about Forever that I could find, I was very tempted to at least take a look at it myself. Not to play "properly" mind you, I'll still leave the actual testing up to others... but just to have a bit of a look around, you know? Check out those graphics updates and new UI options, to see what those look like.

The first thing I heard was that there were queues, up to 40,000 people strong from what I've read, though the highest I saw myself was 20k. A few days ago I saw a conversation about Forever's launch on reddit where someone claimed that "modern WoW doesn't have launch queues anymore", which made me chuckle at the time. Maybe "modern" WoW doesn't, but that person has clearly never been part of a Classic launch. And this wasn't even the real launch, just a beta test!

There were some issues with lag and disconnects, which were worse for EU players and which eventually led to me learning that WoW betas always take place in the US region. This surprised me only because of how strict they have been about needing to maintain the regional divide everywhere else, which made me think that there were some legal or technical issues that were simply insurmountable. So you're saying all I needed to do to potentially play with American friends is play a beta? Weird.

Anyway, needless to say, things were busy in the starter zones. Night elf, human and tauren were all bustling. I decided to take my tauren up for a run first to see the lay of the land and was delighted to see the new Plainsrunning racial in action. Unlike the original plan for Plainsrunning that was then dropped for Vanilla, this is not meant to replace a mount but instead lets you slowly build up to 30% movement speed increase as long as you keep running, which I imagine will be great for lower-level characters without a mount wanting/needing to traverse the world.

I also came across this new functionality, which they explained was added to help out hardcore players in particular, because it sucks to die when everything around you resets unexpectedly and you're suddenly surrounded due to no fault of your own.

You could argue that it's a bit immersion-breaking, but I think this is an important enough feature that it's worth it, and I'm actually hoping they'll add this to retail as well. I've had so many rage-inducing moments in retail when I was working on some kind of event that needs build-up, or fighting a tough rare or something, and then just as you're about to finish, with the last mob at 10%, everything around you just disappears because you've been phased into a different version of the world. Always hate that.

Anyway, to get back to Forever, the view towards the north of Mulgore was genuinely stunning because you could see all the way up to Mount Hyjal. I imagine the world will feel kind of different with Nordrassil always looming in the distance wherever you go.

That said, in places the updated graphics looked a bit... weird to me, in a way that I found hard to describe. I ran around Elwynn Forest and Stormwind as well to take some shots there, and then took pictures of the exact same scenes in Classic era to compare them. Take this shot of northern Elwynn Forest, just out of Northshire:

Forever

Classic Era

The shadows in Forever are obviously so much more sophisticated, but it also makes everything look so much darker. And I don't know, is Elwynn Forest of all places meant to be this dark? I'm sure there'll be people who'll answer "yes, it was always a little bit ominous" or something like that, but I always remember it as pretty bright and sunlit, so this change just seems a bit strange to me.

Or take this shot of Stormwind Keep:

Classic Era

Forever

I put Classic era first for this one to show that the top of the keep always looked like ass in Vanilla, it just wasn't that big a deal because with the shorter view distances it was always meant to just kind of be this vague silhouette that blends into the background. 

In Forever, the updated lighting somehow manages to give everything more definition, which looks great in the foreground, but it also has the same effect on the towers in the back, basically putting a big highlight on just how terrible they look. Which is awkward! I wonder if they'll do any extra work on updating stuff like that. Either way, it'll take some time to get used to.

I've had similar struggles with the models. I did play around with the SD/HD toggle a bit and it honestly made me feel a bit confused. I love all the old models, but with so much of the environment managing to look more high res somehow (even if it's technically the same old assets), they look a bit out of place at times. But when I toggle HD on, I'm reminded of how much I dislike the new models for some races (hello there, tauren). It's almost like I'd need the toggle to be per character instead of account-wide, so I can see the world in SD when I need a specific character to be that way, and HD when I'm happy to see the newer models. I'm guessing that'd be too complicated to do though. It's just something that'll take a bit of getting used to I guess.

Why WoW Forever? Let Me Explain.

I was ready for the Classic+ announcement to spark a lot of different reactions, but the one I absolutely did not anticipate was befuddled bystanders going: "What even is this? Did anyone even ask for this?"

Not to throw shade at anyone, but as someone who's spent the last few years being immersed in a community where at least parts of it were basically clamouring for this non-stop, for many years, that reaction was just too funny to me. Just goes to show again that we all live in our own little bubbles and other people can have very different perceptions of the world.

Anyway, I already put some of this in a comment in response to Kaylriene, but I figured it was worth a post of its own here as well. Who is WoW Forever supposed to be for?

To establish a baseline: We can all agree that World of Warcraft in 2026 is a very different game from how it started out in 2004, right? Graphics, gameplay, systems, vibes - all of it has changed over the years, many probably think for the better, but at the same time there were people for whom all of these changes eventually became too much, which led to them abandoning the game. (This was me ca. 2014.)

Enter Classic in 2019. The old world, graphics and gameplay are back! So many of those players who left can return! And everyone lived happily ever after, right?

No, of course not.

First off, there were always people who missed the way WoW used to be, but still didn't want to just play through the exact same content in the exact same way again. Been there, done that, etc.

But even if we leave that aside, it's been seven years since the release of Classic and a lot has happened in that time too, with the original Classic servers progressing through several expansions again, and a whole fresh set of servers starting from scratch and then progressing through said expansions a second time as well.*

There's a lot of detail one could go into here, but in a nutshell, even without any gameplay changes from Blizzard's end, Classic has become a very different beast from what it was in 2019. With everything being so well-known and solved, there is a lot of focus on speedy execution and not much room for exploration and experimentation. Even if you were a brand new player who isn't trying to look anything up, if you interact with others at all, you'll find yourself subjected to expectations that you should know everything about everything (because the knowledge is out there and it's not changing) and that raiding is the ultimate and only goal.

(I've been finding it fascinating to read about Redbeard's experiences on the BC anniversary servers, where he had the express goal of just being casual and levelling, yet from the sounds of it had to repeatedly fight off attempts from friends to boost him and/or get him into raiding because wanting to do anything else is just incomprehensible to so many modern Classic players. This is extra ironic considering that too much focus on raiding used to be a complaint that I associated with modern WoW, but these days people doing nothing but raid log seems to have primarily become a Classic phenomenon, since retail offers so many more things to do outside of raiding.)

In other words, while modern WoW became a fast-paced game with a heavy focus on endgame, with regular catch-up mechanics... Classic WoW instead became a slow-paced game with a heavy focus on endgame, just without most of the catch-up mechanics. Where modern WoW can trigger fear of missing out due to its seasonal resets (do it now before it goes away or becomes irrelevant), Classic WoW's flavour of FOMO is fear of being left behind instead (gotta ride the crest of the wave and do everything while it's freshly released, before everyone moves on and I'll never be able to catch up).

This means that if you're someone with an interest in slower, Classic style gameplay, but are more interested in exploration and socialising instead of raiding, WoW has once again left you spiritually homeless.

This is the niche I believe WoW Forever is meant to fill, with its focus on expanding the world with new content to explore, some gameplay changes to combat stale metas, and more horizontal progression instead of slapping more character and item levels on top with every update that instantly invalidate everything that came before. It even has a legacy system that rewards rolling alts (nice to see systems from SWTOR still getting copied by other MMOs in 2026).

Will it actually work out that way? We'll see, because historically WoW has not been great at keeping players engaged with anything that doesn't straight-up reward more power. There are still going to be raids, and there'll undoubtedly be visitors from other modes that will expect things to work in exactly the same way as they're used to. I can only cross my fingers that Blizzard will manage to stick to their guns in terms of Forever's overall vision as advertised and that they'll straight-up tell people that the other versions of WoW are still there if they just want more focus on endgame with power progression. 

*Shout-out to the Classic era servers, which are the exception and have remained in Vanilla since 2019, never progressing into any expansion. They have a smaller but stable population and are a lot more friendly towards new players due to the smaller community and the fact that nobody is in a rush to get anywhere specific, but they do still suffer from the problem of everything being solved and never getting any new content.

Skyborne Are Fine

Not everyone was as pleased with the WoW Forever reveal as I was - which, to be honest, was to be expected. They did manage to hit a lot of the right notes, but considering the sheer amount of crazy theories and expectations people had expressed by now, disappointment from some corners was very much unavoidable.

People are entitled to their opinions on that and I'm not here to argue why anyone who doesn't care about WoW Forever should like it - but there is one topic I'd like to take a closer look at: the most frequent criticism I've seen so far, even among those who are generally positive about the whole thing: that people don't like the Skyborne a.k.a. the sky/wind elves.

I do get the initial knee jerk reaction, because even I said in my last post that their reveal seemed quite weird. Here's a trailer that manages to hit beat after beat of nostalgia with familiar characters and locations - and then there's that sudden moment of confusion: Where's that? Why is there a blue elf? Who is she? What is she?

For me though, once they got to the part where they explained what we'd just seen and what WoW Forever is meant to be, it all made sense. Oh, so they are high elves that made a pact with the elemental wind lords to live in Skywall? That's fine, that totally sounds like something Chris Metzen would come up with. Let's go!

So I was somewhat surprised to see how many people instead dug their heels in and doubled down on that initial negative reaction, telling everyone that sky elves are bad. I feel like a lot of the discourse around this is honestly quite muddy, but after some browsing, I think I've distilled it down to four basic arguments, which all come from slightly different directions.

They just don't fit

The main argument here seems to be that the lore explanation for this addition is too far removed from original vanilla content. Sure, elves in general exist, the elemental wind lords are a known force, but... there's never been as much as a whisper about these particular elves! They haven't shown up in retail in over twenty years either! (Though at the same time, I've seen people argue that they look like "something out of retail", presumably because the poster hasn't logged into retail in at least a decade - let's hand-wave that contradiction for now.)

Their models are basically recoloured blood elves, so at worst they look like something out of Burning Crusade, which is not that far removed from Vanilla aesthetically. As for how well their lore will actually fit in - I feel like this is something we won't actually know until we play the content. Could it be done badly? Sure. But it could also be done well, and there's no reason to just assume that it will be bad.

I kinda get the grousing about a lack of connection to existing lore, but at the same time, the whole point of Classic+ is to let us discover some new things. People can't help how they feel, but I do think this immediately highlights the extreme tightrope fans expect Blizzard to walk in terms of what they are and aren't allowed to add to this mode. Don't you dare be too creative! Zero surprises please!

I want elves, but not these elves!

This segment of the player base likes elves, but they need to have the right label. "Why couldn't they have just given us high elves?" For the same reason they didn't give high elves to the Alliance back in 2006, but instead opted to give blood elves to the Horde: population balance.

I'm old enough to remember when Horde was considered the "ugly" faction, with Alliance being considerably more popular. Before Burning Crusade came out, I remember someone telling me that the Horde needed the blood elves added to even out the population imbalance - and it worked! Blood elves remain the most popular race to this day, even with all the additional options modern WoW has added over the years.

If they took Vanilla as a starting point and added high elves to the Alliance, population balance probably would've been shot forever, sorry. This isn't some hypothetical by the way, it was absolutely the case on Turtle WoW for example - they just didn't have to care, because they made the auction house and all grouping cross-faction anyway.

There are some variations of this that try to acknowledge the above problem by coming up with some sort of workaround to have different elves (as long as they aren't these elves), but every single one of those then just introduces a different problem or thing to complain about, e.g. "They could have just done blood elves again!" → "How lazy to make Classic+ just Burning Crusade all over again."

Elves suck, period.

World of Warcraft has always included elves, but in Vanilla, you didn't have to group with any if you were Horde at least. Again, I remember a time when people complained that the addition of blood elves "ruined" the Horde because it brought all the airheads who just want to play a pretty character over to the other faction. You can probably still find people who think that today!

And as petty as it may be, I kind of feel like this is probably the most genuine and heartfelt complaint, and the one I have the most sympathy for. No, I don't think elf aficionados are dumb and childish (and not just because I've played some elves in my time), but I actually do think there's some truth to it that the Horde's vibes definitely changed when the blood elves were introduced, and having pretty blue elves in Orgrimmar may well do something similar. Sorry if this is an absolute deal breaker for you. You get to stick with Classic era. You're probably also part of an absolutely tiny minority, though.

They cost money, which is evil.

Now this one is interesting, because while I don't want to judge anyone who might feel that way, I do also get the vibe that this is the most "bad faith" of all the arguments listed here, possibly pushed by private server players who just hate Blizzard and anyone who gives them money, ever.

The reason I say this is that there was never going to be a world in which Blizzard introduces a second version of WoW that receives continuous development while not expecting to make any additional money from it. There had to be some kind of new income source on the horizon.

I suppose the obvious alternative could've been to charge a "box price" for WoW Forever, but in my opinion that actually would've been much weirder, considering that Blizzard waived the box price for regular World of Warcraft in BfA eight years ago. Having Forever be the only version of WoW that requires a purchase beyond the subscription to even access would've been strange.

I think the way they've done it, with Forever being part of the existing subscription and the sky elves being an optional extra purchase is actually about the most benign way an MMO can do monetisation. It means the barrier of entry to convince your friends who are already part of the WoW ecosystem to at least try it out is very low, and if you don't care about sky elves, you don't have to pay for anything new at all. Wins all around.

We'll see what other ways to monetise they'll come up with in the future. Could there be some bad ones? Sure, but this isn't one of them.

---

Ultimately, I think this "controversy" is going to end up being a storm in a teacup - there will be a lot of people who'll enjoy playing as an elf (I'll definitely make one to check out the new starting zone if nothing else) and even those who grouse about them now will mostly find that it's not enough to make them stay away or spoil their enjoyment in the long run. If anything, I feel like this being the biggest complaint that most people could come up with shows how well Blizzard has managed to hit the mark with everything else.

Classic+ Is Real: Warcraft Forever

I was hoping to watch the livestream of the BlizzCon opening ceremony only briefly to catch the WoW news but soon realised that they were doing their usual thing of starting with the smaller games, to leave Warcraft and the biggest announcements until the end. I knew we were in for something major for Classic when they actually did the retail bit first... and then had to watch the rest on my second monitor, being very distracted in the process.

Not gonna lie, that trailer nearly made me cry.

To start with the classic shot of the dwarf hunter and his bear, but then having them go in a different direction, through beautiful fields.

Dalaran in the bubble that then opens up.

An undead paladin! I don't even care about playing one, but it was like an in-universe way of saying that there'll be new class/race combos.

The beauty of classic Mount Hyjal, with the music swelling...

... and then, sky elves? Okay, that was a bit weird. There had been some datamining related to this months ago, but I thought it was going to be a retail thing. Either way, not a deal breaker.

There was also a features trailer:

New zones, new dungeons, new raids, a new battleground. New race/class combos, new talents. A toggle for whether you want to see the old models and animations or the new ones.

Other important bits were mentioned during the presentation, but I'm not sure I even caught everything. The level cap will be 60 and we'll stay in Azeroth. Transmog will exist but you decide/toggle whether you want to see it or prefer to see everyone in what they're actually wearing. Any future direction will be influenced by community feedback. Launch will be on November 4th.

Will it be perfect? Probably not, but what is? This is way closer to my personal idea of what I wanted out of a Classic+ than I ever dared to hope (I wasn't really on board with the idea until I tried out Turtle WoW and saw how lovely it was). I haven't been this excited about anything WoW-related in a long time.

Final Pre-BlizzCon Thoughts

We're a week away from BlizzCon now, and I don't think I've ever looked forward to it with this much anticipation. I've always enjoyed the spectacle and the big announcements - even in the years when I wasn't playing WoW, I still had a look at the trailers they released every year. And while 2017's WoW Classic announcement was probably the single most exciting piece of news I've ever gotten out of BlizzCon, most of us weren't looking forward to that one at the time, because we weren't really expecting it.

This time, it feels like the Classic community has been holding its breath waiting for what's to come for a long time. Some of us only for a few months, some for years. Whatever the truth is, we'll find out next Saturday. Please, no more "this is what Classic+ should do" videos in my YouTube feed. And give the people in the WoW Classic subreddit something real to talk about, instead of them trying to wring deeper meaning out of things like the Blizzard store changing its CSS.

Worst case, even if Camelot turns out to be a bit of a bust, I'm hoping we'll also find out more about the future of other modes of Classic soon after (even if that stuff doesn't make the big announcements). As I wrote back in June, I have a lot more questions on that front to which I'd like to get answers.

Interestingly, retail is less clear in terms of what announcements to expect this time. I have no doubt that there'll be some, but it feels a bit early to start hyping The Last Titan -  Midnight's only been out for six months! In the past, with new expansions coming out every two years, the annual hype cycle would basically alternate between the actual release of an expansion and announcing the next one about a year in advance, but since they've been trying to make an eighteen month cycle happen with the Worldsoul Saga, it kind of complicates things.

The increased focus on story and the fact that the Worldsoul Saga is meant to be a trilogy also means that it would make no sense to focus on whatever's going to happen in the final part when we don't even know yet how Midnight is going to end. Maybe they'll go for several mid-sized announcements instead: what's coming in 12.2, what's the next Remix going to be, maybe just a teaser for Last Titan, giving us glimpses of the revamped Northrend or showing us what Iridikron has been up to.

The Remix question is probably the most fun thing to speculate about on the retail front. I was originally thinking Wrath of the Lich King to get us in the mood for Last Titan, but considering that the anniversary servers are also supposed to continue into Wrath Classic next year, that might be a bit too much Northrend at once? Most people seem to think that a more modern expansion like BfA or Shadowlands is more likely, usually because they see Remixes less as a nostalgia trip and more as an opportunity to do a lot of item collecting in a short period of time, and apparently both of these had a lot of collectibles that people loathe to go back for in the regular game. We'll see.

And of course, there's the off-chance that they announce something else Warcraft-related that's not about WoW itself. The timeline from the purported leak discussed a few months ago included a Warcraft RTS, an anime and an Arthas ARPG, but even if these projects are real, the earliest any of these were meant to be released was late 2028, so it might still be too soon to talk them up.

Hope You Like Snakes

Midnight got its first major patch almost two weeks ago now, and I'm kind of conflicted in terms of how I feel about it.

I've enjoyed what I've seen of the story so far, but now I'm once again in dodgeball mode trying not to have the post-raid ending spoiled for me while Blizzard withholds story mode for another week and everyone who raids or is happy to just watch the raid-end cinematic on YouTube with no context is mindlessly posting spoilers left and right.

In general, patch 12.1 is all about snakes and venom (green goo). I've rarely seen a patch that is this hyper-focused on its main theme - maybe Undermine and goblins, but I think even that didn't go in quite this hard. Everything is about snakes here: The new island is inhabited by snake people and there are even ore nodes that erupt into fountains of green goo. The new delve variants are snake-themed, the new prey bosses are snake people, the new nemesis is a snake guy. Snakes, snakes, everywhere! I feel kind of bad for anyone who hates snakes or has a phobia of them.

I love that the Coiled Isle is immediately off the coast of Zul'Aman and can be flown to directly with no loading screens. I tried to fly there early in the expansion just to be ejected, but was immediately intrigued by that, so I'm happy that we actually get to explore it now.

As for the activities on the island itself, I'm unsure whether I like them or not. You get a quest early on to do three "cursed surges" but for a long time the husband and I couldn't even figure out what they were. Turns out they are short zerg events that spawn once every 45 minutes at different locations around the island, so they are very easy to miss if you don't already know what you're looking for.

The biggest activity hub is Atal'Utek, the giant vault under the island, and I've got to admit my first impression of that was that I found it extremely overwhelming, with all the different map markers and always a timer counting down to something or other. You can only use your ground mount, but there are some neat ways to get around more quickly beyond that; you just need to be good at figuring out how to best use them, which I definitely haven't yet. This week, there was a bit where I was supposed to go up a level to reach an objective so I ran to one of those feathers that throw you up into the air, but on the way I aggroed several mobs so I couldn't click on it because I kept getting interrupted. It took me a while to kill them all, and by the time I was able to grab the feather, the objective upstairs had disappeared.

The whole place just makes me feel a bit weird. There is definitely something fun about joining a zerg and running from one objective to the next like a crazy person, but the mob density is also quite high and if you want to go in a different direction than wherever the zerg currently is, it can be tedious. For some reason I also really dislike descending down underground through these long tunnels where you can only use your ground mount (even if you're given a speed boost while in there). Have I finally reached my limit for underground zones? I've been worried about any major content updates putting us in caves since at least Dragonflight, but they were never as oppressive as I feared. I originally had no concerns about these vaults, but they make me feel weirdly penned in and I don't currently enjoy going there. We'll see whether I'll adjust.

In general, the arrival of the patch has also made me feel a bit melancholy. New content should be a reason to be excited, but I'd just gotten a bunch of my alts into a place where I was happy with them and I was starting to think about some alternative projects, but here we are back to the next gear reset and grinding time. I know I don't have to engage with that... but the game definitely makes me feel like I should, and it just feels a bit bad. I don't think I will ever grow to like modern WoW's seasonal model, even if I've learned to tolerate it for the most part.

A Second Look at Housing

For all the fun I've been having with Midnight, its main new feature, player housing, has largely fallen flat for me. I made a few posts in which I talked about why, and then I moved on, because I'd rather focus on the many things that I have been enjoying.

However, I did want to use the release of 12.1 as an opportunity to take another look at housing and how it's been coming along. To be clear, nothing has been done to address the major criticisms I had with the system, but my opinions on some things have at least become a bit more nuanced.

For example, while I still don't care much about decorating, I did eventually go and decorate my house a little bit. I do enjoy collecting decorations regardless of whether I plan to use them or not - I'm the same in SWTOR; there's just something satisfying about claiming new decos and adding them to my stash. And after accumulating a certain number in WoW, it felt only natural to actually place at least a few of them. It's nothing exciting, just a basic house with some simple furniture, but I have started to feel at least a little bit of a connection to it. Even though I've reached housing level 10 from my various housing-related activities, I've stuck to the single room because I don't like the Tardis aspect of the whole thing and this way my sense of how warped the whole house is isn't too bad at least.

I do visit the neighbourhood at least once a week because in a typical case of Blizzard logic, after being extremely shy about giving the houses any utility whatsoever because they didn't want anyone to feel "forced" to use them, they also added a repeatable quest that rewards currency to gear up and requires you to go to your neighbourhood and do some simple task there every week, such as helping someone find some lost animals. It's just funny to me.

I will say that I really like the variant of the quest that asks you to attend a gathering of at least five players in a player house, because it's served as an opportunity for everyone in the guild to take turns visiting other people's houses, and there are nice spontaneous random groupings for it as well. One week when I couldn't get it done with guildies, I ended up joining a party via the group finder where someone was showing off their insanely detailed wizard tower interior - I quite enjoyed hanging around for a bit and having a look around. I also took a screenshot of my character sitting in their custom-made bathroom.

 

In general I do appreciate how much joy people who really like building and decorating purely for the sake of it get out of the system. Nobody in my immediate circle of friends is really into it, but I don't need to cast my net very wide on social media to come across players who are having an absolute blast with their house. Just take a look at the WoW Housing subreddit and get ready for your jaw to drop. I do at least get a bit of happiness by association out of that.

Oh, and remember endeavours? It did indeed not take long for Blizzard to nerf the requirements for public neighbourhoods to complete their endeavours, but the devs basically swung so hard the other way that they now basically seem to complete themselves. I just have to remember to check in at some point to collect my free housing coupons.

I do like how they make the neighbourhood look a bit different when your visitors change, though the randomisation aspect of that may still need some work. While some people were complaining that they'd already seen all the available endeavours and were now bored of them, the Grummels camped out in my public neighbourhood for three months in a row, meaning I didn't get to see anything else for a quarter of the year. When the system finally switched to Ethereals I had some fun with the jumping puzzle they added, and I'm kinda enjoying the Amani-themed one that's going on right now as well. The weird circular gift-giving thing with Griftah made my head spin a little but I was proud that I was able to figure out all the relevant neighbourhood NPCs organically. 

I reckon overall, housing is probably shaping up to be a success for Blizzard - the "usage" metrics must be decent thanks to the weekly quest for gear rewards, and I'm sure all the decor they've added to the shop has made for some nice supplementary income for the game. Housing enthusiasts in MMOs always seem to be quite happy to spend on the cash shop without complaining too much.