WoW Forever has been out for a week now, and my own journey so far has surprised me, though it really shouldn't have. I thought that I would feel a lot more internal pressure to focus on levelling one character first (watch out for people telling you that you "should" get a character to 25 first to unlock legacy points because it's "optimal") but it hasn't been as bad as I expected. Sure, sometimes I sigh when I look at my Battle.net friends list and see people in their thirties or forties already... but then I just move on.
I noted in this post that "I [was] 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 that's pretty much exactly what happened. It wasn't even a conscious decision, just a natural consequence of my excitement. I saw the changes in Elwynn Forest and went "ooh, I wonder what things are like in Dun Morogh" and promptly rolled a gnome. I found myself missing Teldrassil and hunter life, so off I went down that track for a bit. Then I kept running into questions around the Skyborne and figured that it was really about time I made my own if for no other reason than to see their starting zone and gain an understanding of how travel to and from that place works.
So my highest level character after a week is "only" level twenty. Looking back at the 2019 Classic launch, I didn't hit 30 on my first character until a month in, so I guess I'm not even doing that badly in comparison. Back then I just didn't have a friends list of other active players to make me feel perpetually behind.
I saw this meme on Discord and while I don't have as many alts, it immediately spoke to me.
That said, the matter of social connections hasn't come up as much as I expected either. I was a bit worried that different people might pull me in different directions but that hasn't actually been the case. Turns out I don't actually have any friends, hah! (I'm joking, but only partially.) I was disappointed to find that several former guildies from my 2020 Classic (roleplaying) home had decided to switch to regular PvE in Forever, which immediately ruled out any reunions with those particular players, but oh well. I march to the beat of my own drum I guess.
I also formed a guild with some guildies from SWTOR, but to be honest we're only a week in and I'll be very surprised if more than two of them (at max) stick around for the long term. It's just a very different game and I don't get the feeling that they are vibing with it.
So I fully expect to be largely on my own again for most of my levelling journey, and we'll see whether I meet anyone along the way. I just have to be okay with that.
As for the game itself, I'm having a blast. It's long been a meme that modern Blizzard doesn't understand the appeal of Classic but at least from everything I've seen so far, the team working on Forever actually understands it really well. I heard a lot of talk during the beta about how much professions have been updated for example, but all the changes I've seen are actually pretty subtle, improving the flow ever so slightly in ways that you can only understand if you've extensively engaged with those systems in Classic yourself and can tell where even a small push of the lever would make a big difference.
Likewise, the new quests fit in seamlessly, and often in places where I used to think "there should have been a quest for this". In the night elf starter zone for example, you get a quest to fetch a spider egg from the back of a cave, and guarding the area is a named spider. Yet when you kill it in Classic... nothing. In Forever, it drops a fang that you can hand in. I was like: yes, give me something to feel good for bothering to kill that named mob! Straight-up improvement.
There's also a new escort quest in the Ban'ethil Barrow Den, which actually made me double-check that it was really new and I hadn't somehow missed it in the past. On Turtle WoW I had noticed that for all the vanilla inconveniences they preserved, I never saw an escort quest in all their new content, almost as if the Turtle devs had decided that vanilla escort quests were too annoying even by their standards. Not so the Forever devs! They went right ahead and added a Classic-style escort quest to what's probably the most dangerous part of Teldrassil, and your escortee is just as much of a maniac as you'd expect an escort NPC to be. I did this quest grouped up with another player who told me at the end that they'd never done a WoW escort quest before but that they understood all the memes now. Absolute gold.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more to say about all this new stuff as time goes on, but these are my first impressions a week in.
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