Three Worlds of Warcraft

I continue to be fascinated by the community dynamics around WoW Forever.

Were players of modern WoW worried about the future of their game when Classic first came out? I don't really know because I was paying little attention to it at the time, but whenever I did hear people talk about what was going on in retail during those years, Final Fantasy XIV seemed to be considered the more dangerous competition.

If there ever was any worry about Classic taking away interest and development resources from modern WoW, it seemed to dissipate fast. For several years, my experience moving through different WoW spaces was that players of modern WoW usually cared so little about Classic that they tended to forget it even exists, while Classic players didn't really care about what was going on in the modern game either. (Though if prompted to have an opinion, the latter were much more likely to be hostile towards the other game than the former.) Modern and Classic WoW were very obviously two very different MMOs with different audiences.

With WoW Forever appearing as a third pillar in the middle, things look very different though.

At least the fact that Blizzard has been updating the WoW website and the Battle.net launcher to split WoW into Midnight, Forever and Classic indicates that Classic is meant to stick around, even if players are understandably frustrated about the complete lack of communication about the future of the MoP Classic and anniversary servers. Classic will persist in some form, but the details are fuzzy.

The reason that there isn't more outrage about the lack of news right now is that the vast majority of Classic players are currently too busy being excited about Forever. They have a lot of criticisms about how this or that isn't "classic enough" (some reasonable, some less so), and I suspect that a certain percentage of them will be happy to turn their attention back to regular Classic in a few months time, but for the time being, Classic+ is here and the new hotness. This was to be expected.

What surprised me more was the level of interest from retail players. I mean, I never thought that Classic+ would be completely uninteresting to all retail players - not everyone playing modern WoW raids or runs Mythic+; there's still also a casual player base that just likes to putter about, quest and explore the world, and why would those players not also want to explore WoW Forever? Makes perfect sense.

But I've also seen a fair amount of outright jealousy and seeming fear that WoW Forever is meant to replace original WoW as the "main" game. I do kind of get the gut reaction behind that, not least because WoW has never had to take a backseat to another game the way it did at this BlizzCon. While I haven't watched most of them myself, I also heard that the panels about modern WoW were kind of underwhelming this time around. (I did see a clip where people were booing the dungeon selection announced for Midnight Season 3 - yikes.) So from that angle, a certain degree of sour grapes is understandable.

Some of the more extreme takes have been kind of funny though, like when people think Forever is going to mean certain doom for retail WoW. I say this as a SWTOR player, someone who's seen an MMO suffer actual public failure, as well as having people predict its death at least once a year for the past one and a half decades. Meanwhile WoW is printing so much money that they are actively branching out, but somehow that's supposed to be a bad sign? Come on.

Still, it's going to be interesting to see how the dynamics between the different modes will play out in the long run. For now, all eyes are on Forever, and its launch in a little over a month is bound to be huge. While I think its main target audience is lapsed players, both Classic and retail audiences will want to dip their toes in as well. After a few weeks to months, I expect things to fall off as players return to their usual haunts or just get bored. I suspect that this will be when Blizzard suddenly announces Wrath of the Lich King Classic for the anniversary servers and shines a spotlight on what's coming next for Midnight again. As long as some version of WoW keeps enough people's attention to bolster the overall sub count, it's probably all good.

But it'll certainly be interesting to see whether WoW Forever turns into an unexpected juggernaut or just an uncomfortable middle ground between different game modes that doesn't quite appeal to mass audiences. There are certainly risks there, but I'm extremely curious to find out.

First and Last Names in WoW Forever

One of the things that's going to differentiate WoW Forever from other versions of World of Warcraft is that every character in it will be required to have both a first and a last name. I don't think the devs did this to appeal to roleplayers - I don't think it was even meant to be a major feature, really. I suspect it was more or less a necessary side effect of their new "realmless" structure, because asking millions of people to come up with one-word character names that must be unique across the entire region was always going to be a nightmare.

I initially had two different reactions to this piece of news that are actually slightly at odds with each other. The first one was major relief. No longer do I have to be the first one to type "Shintar" (or any other name) into the character creation screen; I just need to have a different last name than whoever else chose the same first name, which should be extremely easy to achieve if you're going for an actual made-up name. This is particularly welcome as I don't know whether I'll get access to the early name reservations while waiting for my physical collector's edition. The only ones for which I expect there to be any real competition would be real world references, names stolen from fictional works, or names based on memes. 

However, that initial relief was almost immediately followed by a different thought: I've got to come up with last names for all my characters now? Dang! Pretty much since the dawn of time, all my characters only ever had first names, with the exception of the first character I ever created on a WoW roleplaying server. I was rolling there for a friend's sake and had no real intent to RP myself, but I had no idea what the experience was going to be like and was worried that some stranger might quiz me on my character's background and reveal me as a fraud. Once I realised how ridiculous that whole notion was, I quickly forgot about my hunter's last name again.

But now all my characters will need last names... and while it's nice that I have no set expectations to fulfil on that front, since I'm someone who also cares quite a lot about her characters' names, it's also going to be a bit of work.

I basically identified four different approaches to the matter that I could potentially take:

The first one is what you could call an attempt to cheat the system a bit - if your name of choice has multiple syllables, you can simply split it in two. So I could be Shin Tar for example. That feels very clever to me, and might work particularly well for something like a troll, who canonically don't have last names anyway, but it's obviously not going to be suitable for every situation.

Then there's the option of treating the last name field like a legacy name in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is to say giving all my characters the same last name and using it as an easy way for people encountering me in the world to recognise the same person behind several alts. I do like that as a concept, and I do display my legacy name in SWTOR most of the time, but I don't think many people actually pay attention to it. As far as I can tell, most other players tend to hide theirs. And of course, it just wouldn't really work very well from an immersion point of view. Elves and dwarves wouldn't have the same kind of last name for example.

Thirdly, one could turn the above on its head, and simply use the same first name for all characters, and just give them different last names. That also works for recognition, and as long as your first name is something relatively neutral, it could be somewhat more immersive than option two. I have a couple of guildies in SWTOR who like to give all their characters the same name with just one letter changed - there's never any confusion about whose alt that is. However, I can't quite picture this approach working for me. I can see myself reusing a name once or twice, sure, but the same thing every time? No, I imagine my characters as different people, not just as masks I put on, so they should have their own names too.

Which leaves me with the last and hardest option.. to come up with actually lore appropriate surnames for every character I create, and I think I'll just have to bite the bullet on that one. At least it's an excuse to spend a bit of extra time thinking about each race's lore. Also, based on the beta, Blizzard actually put a bit of effort into the random name generator so that it actually spits out last names that fit each race, so if I get completely stuck, I can always use that randomiser for inspiration.

One More for Sausages!

Let's take a momentary break from all the excitement about WoW Forever to talk about... Brewfest. I've repeatedly said on this blog that I often forget about WoW's in-game holidays nowadays, but sometimes when I do remember them, I end up being positively surprised.

So when I noticed the other day that Brewfest had come around again, I went "hmm..." - Brewfest has never been among my favourites as I don't drink in real life, but at the same time it had been so long since I last checked it out, I figured a lot must have changed since then and that it would surely be worth at least a quick look.

And indeed it was! Good old ram racing was still a thing (though I needed a bit of a refresher on the best way to do it) but there were quite a few quests that were new to me as well, such as two that mentioned dracthyr, which made me think they must've been from Dragonflight, but apparently they were only added in War Within last year.

At the full hour all hell suddenly broke loose and an event reminiscent of the Earthen theatre "broke out", with players signing up to gather ingredients, prepare food and drink, or serve the former to revellers in the area. It was delightful! The only slight disappointment I had on later revisits was that the "optimal" strategy to maximise the score seems to be to sign up to just gather lots of cooking ingredients without actually cooking and serving them... not that this stopped me from still doing the latter for fun.

However, the best thing to me was the "Brewfest Chowdown" sausage eating contest, apparently added in BfA. I had actually seen references to this before but had thought that it was just a joke, not a real thing. It's basically a little mini game that requires a total of four people to chomp down plates of sausages as quickly as possible. There are no achievements for this or even a daily quest; the only possible reward to earn is a toy that you can acquire after winning first place five times.

At first I was honestly a bit confused. So this is... a group thing? And there's no automated group finding for it? How do you get other people to join you? However, I found one guy in the manual group finder eventually and got my first go at the game this way, which ended up being just too funny to me. Later I just sat down in one of the chairs by myself and /yelled at people in the vicinity to come eat sausages with me. I haven't talked this much to randoms in the open world in modern WoW in ages. When my character was too full and had to sit out, I'd happily watch other people go as well and spectate while whooping and cheering for them. What a silly little activity to add just for fun. Once again, I'm positively surprised by a modern holiday event.

 

My Forever Social Conundrum

As part of being excited for WoW Forever, it was natural for me to start thinking about questions such as what I'll want to play and how... which quickly made me realise that I'm actually facing something of a conundrum in terms of what I want out of this game.

What originally enchanted me about World of Warcraft back in the day - and also worked its magic in Classic to some extent - was the vastness of the world and the social interactions: seeing the same people repeatedly and making new friends, but also just sharing funny moments with random strangers and silly pugs. Pretty much all my best and most memorable moments in WoW have involved other people in some fashion.

So naturally, I'll want to lean into that in Forever too, right?! Well, yes, but... then I think back to Classic Burning Crusade and remember that my worst moments in WoW also involved other people. I don't want to keep harping on about this because it feels stupid to act as if I was "traumatised" by something as frivolous as a video game, but the events of Burning Crusade Classic really left a mark on me. It wasn't all bad, but the bits that were bad, felt very bad.

I don't ever want to relive the experience of an MMO making me feel like I'm in a race that I can never win. I don't want to try and keep up with people who selectively no-life the game until they've ticked all their boxes and then log off, not to be seen again until the next raid. That's why I gave the anniversary servers a wide berth from the beginning, because I knew they were going to be full of exactly that kind of experience.

WoW Forever promises to be different of course, but will it? One can certainly hope that the way Blizzard has been promoting it will attract the right kind of audience, but I have no doubt that the usual suspects will also be there on day one, racing through Forever as if their life depended on it, whether it's streamers for whom it literally is their job to play all day or merely their followers. Ironically for me, this means that at least in the beginning, I'll be better off playing the game in a more guarded way, just doing my own thing and not paying too much attention to what anyone else is doing.

Real life should help with that, as I happened to already have a holiday booked from which I'll return only the day before Forever's launch, which means that I have to be back to work the following day and will likely be too busy and too knackered to spend too much time thinking about WoW. November is also a busy month at my job in general, so I don't expect it to be the ideal time to binge on any form of entertainment. Which is to say that while I do expect to be playing from launch, it'll probably be in limited bursts.

With all the new content present from the very early levels, I'm also kind of tempted to go for my own horizontal progression right from the beginning, rolling up lots of different alts to see the changes to all the starter zones, and then levelling them up via different paths to see what new things there are to explore in different levelling zones as well as the new low-level dungeons that have been added. That would also naturally make it harder to keep grouping with the same people repeatedly.

That said, I can't deny that I'm feeling quite excited by the prospect of seeing some of my old guildies from Classic again. (I'm aware that at least a few of them have expressed an interest in giving Forever a spin.) I'll just have to make sure to remain steadfast and not let anyone rush me at the beginning. After all, that level cap isn't going anywhere.

Meme Monday: WoW Forever Memes

I'm going to steal Redbeard's Meme Monday format for a day, since he seems unlikely to be using it for this particular subject. I've been browsing a lot of reddit and social media for more WoW Forever reactions and while there's a lot of utter insanity out there, there've also been some pretty funny memes, a few of which I wanted to share here.

This was basically me for most of last week. I don't remember the last time I was this happily excited for such a long period of time that it interfered with my normal day-to-day operations. Fortunately I've managed to calm down a bit since then! Originally seen on the Classic WoW subreddit but it was deleted for some reason.

Fortunately I don't need to have this conversation with my husband. When I did share my excitement about WoW Forever with him, his reaction was just a slightly resigned "I'm not going to see you for a while when that comes out, right?" Also from the Classic WoW subreddit. Of course, not everyone is this resigned about being sucked back in:

Posted on r/wow under the title "My friend's reaction when I ask her to resubscribe". 

Meanwhile, the following was posted under the title "Meanwhile in Ironforge" (again in r/wow):

  

As much as I loved the trailer, that made me chuckle. You've got to be careful with altering the timeline! (In the original World of Warcraft trailer, the dwarf hunter went on to fight a tauren instead of wandering off.)

Speaking of changes, I was amused by this take on what's probably going to be the most popular new race/class combo:

FaroraSF posted this on the WoW subreddit but also on her Bluesky. This is the same creator by the way who made the excellent video about exploring Dragonflight on foot, which I recommended back here. She's gone on to do the same in War Within and Midnight since then.

Finally, not an image meme, but a humorous post that tries to answer the question "Why the Skyborne don't appear in Retail WoW [Most Plausible Theory]". That is 100% going to be my head-canon now until/unless they get added to modern WoW after all (which wouldn't surprise me in the long run, though I guess for now they are meant to be one of Forever's unique selling points).

Actually, let's throw in one last thing if we're already deviating from the format anyway, because this video just popped up on my YouTube feed and made me laugh - a reaction to WoW Forever from someone who loved WoW back in the day and bounced off Classic:

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.