Forever: Visiting the Neighbours

Blizzard has been pretty generous with handing out free trial codes for the first seven days of WoW Forever, which included three of them coming with every collector's edition. I had the genius idea of applying one of them to my own US trial account to play a bit of WoWF in another region as well and virtually visit some friends on the other side of the pond that way.

Specifically I ended up meeting up with the New Outriders, a guild that I hang out with when I occasionally play SWTOR on the American server Star Forge. My original plan was to make a sky elf hunter, but then I realised that while I had unlocked a few days of play time, my Skyborne unlock did of course not carry over and they were unavailable on my US account. After a bit of thinking about what class/race combo to pick instead (ideally something I wasn't planning to roll on my main EU account in the near future), I created a human hunter, even if that meant playing through the human starting zone for a second time in 48 hours.

The New Outriders opted to go for the normal PvE rule set, and it was definitely interesting to see the differences. For one thing, Blizzard had decided to play with the sharding dial after the first day, tuning up zone populations from pleasant to what I'd describe as distinctly unpleasant. Not literally unplayable but, well... unpleasant, with mobs either hyper-spawning so fast that respawns would appear on your head before you'd even killed the last mob you pulled, which turned caves into absolute death traps - OR, if the spawns weren't quite as bad, you were best off just finding a quiet corner and killing the same mob over and over again every time it respawned, because any time you'd try to move you'd just be too late tagging whatever other mob you wanted to approach. Again, I don't get why people think this makes for a fun way to play the game.

The difference in chat was also... oof. I don't know how much of it is normal vs. roleplay and how much is US vs. Europe, but I quickly had to leave both general and trade chat because they just devolved into people yelling at each other about politics or streamers. Now, general chat being unpleasant shouldn't be a shock - I usually have it hidden in SWTOR for example, and that's been my main game for the last decade and a half - but after the relative wholesomeness of the EU-RP chat the previous day, it was still disappointing.

I also had my own first-hand exposure to Asmongold's "roach army" and wow - I didn't quite believe people's tales, but they really are every bit as vile as people say they are. I'd foolishly assumed he would roll on the PvP server (the army of lemmings following him around everywhere should presumably be able to keep him safe from stream snipers) but no, apparently he decided to make the regular US PvE server his home. The first time I realised this was when I was sitting at a campfire and someone introduced themselves with "hello, fellow roaches" and when I looked up I saw that he was in a guild called "Olympus Jews". After that basically every time I came across the guild name Olympus in chat, someone was being either stupid, insulting, incredibly puerile or all three combined. It really is amazing how a single person could amass such a huge following of seemingly only the worst people, and I understand now why there is an addon to automatically ignore everyone who's in any of their guilds. I imagine that its effectiveness will be limited though, simply because people without the addon still feel the need to argue with them so I imagine there's no real escaping that without avoiding public chat channels altogether. I really feel bad for US players in that regard.

Anyway, once I'd left all the public chats I didn't have to deal with that anymore at least, only with the crowds. It was easy enough to do all the group quests as I just had to go to the right location and then spam invites at everyone else who was just standing around. (For some reason I always seemed to be the first person to have the incredibly novel idea to form a party instead of everyone fighting among themselves for the tag.) So that was efficient, but zero conversations were had.

I was surprised to find that there were some new quests that I had missed in Elwynn, in spite of how thorough I thought I had been with clearing out the zone on my paladin the day before. I suspect that I still might not have found all of them, as I saw a named elite bear north of Stone Cairn Lake at some point which very much looked like it must be an objective for something, but I have no idea what quest it is for.

Gameplay-wise, hunter vs. paladin was also a big shift - on my paladin I'd actually felt pretty powerful right away, able to take on multiple mobs at once almost from the beginning due to the ability to self-heal in combat. Now, I'm well aware that hunter before you get your pet is a pain - it always has been - but it was still a stark contrast in this instance. I already had to run away from fights gone wrong in Northshire, and suffered my first death to a bunch of murlocs. (My paladin is level 16 and has yet to die to anything.) I definitely depended on other people intervening and saving my hide a lot more than the paladin ever did.

When I finally did get my own pet, I travelled to Dun Morogh to tame a cat to name after a friend, which felt like a good capstone to my US adventures for the day.

I did play a bit more on my paladin as well, and got more confirmation that the sharding is still a work in progress, not just in terms of what the population levels should be, but also in terms of general stability. It started with me seeing some people fighting mobs that were invisible to me, while walking past a lot of others seemingly undetected. Later on, the bleed-through increased and several layers worth of mobs started to appear at once, though many of them would not react to being attacked and simply kept evading. I saw seemingly ownerless voidwalkers with "unknown" as their name attack things out of their own volition. At one point I met a sky elf hunter with a dead pet and revived it, but its health kept going down again like from an invisible dot. "The time plague is withering us all" the hunter commented, and I just couldn't stop giggling. Around the same time, a server notification came up to tell us that "there was a slight blip in the multiverse - we are in the process of de-blipping all zones now", which made everyone laugh. I suppose with how stable the launch has been in general, one can't really complain too much at this point.

Forever Starts Today

When the WoW Forever servers went up last night, I was fast asleep. I'm getting too old for launches at or close to midnight in my time zone, and I feel like I've seen enough of the crazy crowds that new server launches in WoW bring that I don't really need to live it all over again. There's a certain bonding experience to be had from sitting in endless queues with others and then being unable to play once you finally log in because there are too many people trying to kill the same eight zombies - but the novelty does wear off after a few times.

Still, when I got up in the morning I was all the more curious. From what I read, the launch was actually... unusually smooth? Which is to say that the servers only really creaked for a few minutes right around go-live, and even during the biggest rush, queue times were only around five minutes.

I'm still torn about what I want to focus on first, because at the moment I feel like playing all the alts... but for my first few steps I settled on my human paladin. I clicked "enter world" and leaned back in my chair to take in the good old human starting cinematic... just to have the visuals freeze halfway through, while the subtitles continued and the sound started over from scratch. What an odd thing to bug out!

Other than that, I was pretty impressed though. I mean, it was very early in the morning so I didn't expect things to be too busy at that point, but they really leaned hard into sharding for the launch and I dare say it was actually... pleasant? There were people around and there was some competition for things, but not to the point where it was annoying. Naturally, some ingrates with no object permanence immediately took to the forums to complain that the world feels dead when they don't have a hundred people piled on top of each other in their immediate field of vision. Don't listen to them, Blizzard! Actually being able to play the game is nice!

Anyway, I didn't expect to have much time to play today since I was supposed to be in the office, but when I checked the status of my local trains they were in complete disarray, which unexpectedly gave me an excuse to work from home, meaning I could actually play for a few hours in the morning, the evening and during my lunch break. I've never been happier about the crappy state of my commute.

Regardless, I obviously only got so much done on the first day, but here are some brief first impressions:

I'd already heard about it in the beta, but I really love the change that allows you to train gathering professions in the starting zone from level one. I lost count of the number of times I looked at various level one wolf and boar corpses in Classic and felt sad that I couldn't learn how to skin until later. My paladin became a miner, mind you, but it still felt good to get started on that earlier.

I enjoyed the new quests sprinkled in among the familiar fare, even if it led to surprising inefficiencies. For example I'd pick up two known quests to go into a cave and then later find that there's a new, third quest that I originally missed. Well, back in I go I guess! There are few things more vanilla than that.

I also opted for the classic setting without quest markers on the map. This presented an interesting dilemma when I got a bit stuck on one of the new quests. The instructions weren't bad, but I thought I had been in the right place and killed a lot of mobs without finding anything, so I was keen for some kind of hint - did the item drop from a specific mob I'd missed? Was it a clicky thing on the ground? I briefly considered opening Wowhead but then decided that it probably made more sense to stay in game and at least turn the quest tracking on temporarily to get a hint about whether I'd really been in the right area. It helped and I was able to complete that quest without outside assistance, and then immediately turned the indicators back off. 

My first grouping experience was with a warlock inside Fargodeep Mine who turned out to be a bit disappointed that I wasn't French. This prompted me to check my "preferred language" setting - the one that's supposed to put people who speak the same language into the same shards where possible - and I found that for some reason it was defaulted to French. I changed it to English but so far it's reverted back to French every time I've relogged. I tend to notice after a while as I find myself increasingly surrounded by characters with French-sounding names. Apparently it's a known bug.

In general, the company has been very pleasant. It's rare that I can read general chat in an MMO and not roll my eyes - but this is why I chose RP-PvE. People were excited and goofing off of course, but mostly in innocuous and sometimes even wholesome ways. Exhibit A:

After the clown fiesta that was the early name reservation and everyone posting their oh-so-"funny" meme names it was also nice to be surrounded by people with mostly setting-appropriate names for once. Oh, and the campfires really do work for socialising. It's not amazing, but it is nice.

What else is there to say? Oh yeah, graphics. I thought the stuff they presented at BlizzCon looked great, but during my own quick peek into the beta I admittedly wasn't that impressed. After a few hours of playing today I'll say that most of the time, it didn't feel that dramatically different from how Classic looked on high graphics settings... but there are definitely moments when the new light effects come in at just the right angle and make you pause. For a minute or so I got completely mesmerised by specks of light actually dancing on the surface of the stream in Northshire but found it impossible to get a proper screenshot of it. Likewise both sunrise and sunset in the Eastern Kingdoms cast some pretty spectacular shadows. I'm looking forward to spending more time in this version of Azeroth.

My 3 Biggest Concerns for WoW Forever

I've said it many times now, but I'm very excited for WoW Forever's release. That said, I'm still going into it with eyes wide open. I don't necessarily expect it to live up to its name by being a "forever" game. Primarily, I'm just hoping to recapture a little of that "new adventure" magic that I felt on Turtle WoW and to some degree even in the first weeks of Classic back in 2019/2020. If I can get a few months of entertainment out of that, it'll have been worth checking out. If I manage to make any new social connections, even better. If it ends up being even more than that... great, but I'm not necessarily counting on that.

As mentioned before, I didn't really play the beta myself (not counting simply making a character and running around a bit) but I consumed a lot of content about people's experiences on it, and I've got to say, my overall impression is still that it looks very promising. Where people had complaints, they largely didn't really faze me that much. (Which is not to say that they were bad feedback or completely baseless, just that for me, something like mob dungeon XP for example really doesn't matter much as I rarely do a dungeon more than once while levelling anyway.)

All that said, there are three what I'll call "areas of risk" that I suspect are more likely to make me sour on Forever in the long run than anything else. I hope they won't, I'm just saying that these are the things I'm most concerned about.

#1 - Megaservers and sharding

I've said quite a few times on this blog that I'm not a fan of megaservers, for a number of reasons. I don't like it when the open world feels permanently crowded for example, and I get the impression that most people's (including Blizzard's) idea of what feels like a good population level for a zone does not align with mine. I don't want to compete with ten different people for mobs in every single area. I don't want basic gathering nodes to be a rare treasure because every square inch of the map is constantly being scoured by farmers. I'm way less bothered by a server being quiet than by it feeling overcrowded. This has been a problem for me in Classic more than once.

In Forever though, there's even more to it than that. In Classic, we had layering, which meant that there were multiple versions of each continent running in parallel, but within the layer you were in, wandering the world was a seamless experience that involved running into the same people repeatedly and so on. (It's funny now to remember how adamantly some people were opposed to having layers even just for population management at Classic's launch, while in the present many Classic players will break into a sweat if their addon shows them fewer than ten active layers on their server because surely that's a sign that it's dying. The way the goalposts have shifted on that one is crazy to me.)

It's been kind of lost over time, but there were whole dev talks about this in the run-up to Classic in which they explained why they had to come up with this new technology because of how simply spinning up multiple versions of individual zones would break things and just wouldn't work in a Classic context.

Forever's realmless structure instead has... exactly that thing that the Classic devs originally wanted to avoid at all costs. I'm not sure about the correct term for it - sharding? People keep calling it layering even though that's not what it is, but from a player's perspective it basically seems to behave similarly to cross-realm zones in modern WoW, with the only difference being that there are no named realms; it's just one big pool of players that gets split up or merged by zone, depending on how many characters are active there at any given moment.

The problem is that this adds invisible "seams" all over what's meant to be a seamless world. I've seen people complain about chatting with someone on a boat, and then after the loading screen their friend is gone and they are surrounded by an entirely different crowd. I've seen a video of someone standing at the gates of Orgrimmar and watching character after character vanish into thin air right in front of their eyes as they exit. Another one showed a Horde raid on Ironforge, but the moment the Alliance defenders chased the attackers out the door, they vamoosed into the aether. Neat escape trick for the attackers, but immersion is something else.

This isn't as bad in retail because you'll rarely watch big crowds crossing zone borders there, but that aside, I'm also kind of used to "things suddenly phasing in and out of existence" just being part of retail's jank nowadays. Because you spend so much time travelling by flying mount at high speeds without paying close attention to your immediate surroundings, it doesn't bother me as much there. In a Classic world though, it feels really bad. And it worries me because I don't think it's something that will be fixed.

Sure, maybe the devs will be able to apply some band-aids, such as moving some shard borders to places where people are less likely to watch and notice their buddies vanishing. Maybe they'll manage to find a fix to keep travellers on boats and zeppelins together. But I don't think the overall problem is going to go away, because it seems to be a core part of their intended infrastructure for the game, and I don't see them making any changes to that at this point.

#2 - Community

I already think that the community aspect of Forever will suffer from the megaserver structure and being surrounded by too many people that you can't keep track of or remember. And yes, I know what they said at BlizzCon about the system being supposed to be smart and group you with players you've met before, but if you'll excuse me: I'll believe that when I see it. From reports I saw from the beta, the sharding system struggled enough just to keep people in the same group together sometimes. I know beta is beta, and hopefully what goes live will be better than that, but I'll still be very surprised if it's even remotely as good as Blizzard claimed it would be.

Aside from the general "too many people in one place" problem though, there's also the issue of toxicity and (lack of) moderation. There was some discourse about Asmongold and his followers being a real scourge on the beta and that they should've been banned. I can't tell you how justified that was, and I consider myself lucky that the US/EU split will keep him and many other streamers away from normal people over here, but let's simply put it like this: Blizzard's moderation and customer services haven't had the best reputation for a while, and this is going to be a huge stress test for them. I consider it a real risk that big streamers in particular will be allowed to run roughshod over everyone in their way because they provide publicity for the game, regardless of what kind of picture that paints of the community, and I hope I don't need to explain why I think that would be bad. The realmlessness of it all also means that there's no escape route for players wanting to get away from a certain crowd other than switching play style entirely.

#3 - Continued development direction/progression

Finally, for as much as people have been clamouring for Classic+ for years, I think part of the appeal of Classic for some at least has also been how predictable it is. You roll a warrior and already know at character creation that you've made the "right" choice to be top dps forever.

As the beta progressed, I started to see some videos along the lines of "I was going to make [class A] my main but they nerfed it so now I'll roll a [class B] instead" and all I could think was: Do you think whatever the final state of the beta is will be the state of Forever... forever? Because I think they will continue to make tweaks to things over time. How will it make you feel if the race or class you rolled and rushed to level is suddenly not the best anymore?

That particular example isn't going to be a problem for me, but I do worry whether we could end up in a situation similar to retail where my talent points are reset every other patch, along with new abilities being added and old favourites getting removed - just while adhering to a different design philosophy in terms of how those abilities should work. I'm honestly not even sure what the "correct" answer is here, because classes in Forever shouldn't be completely static if it receives continued development, but I also think that too much change too quickly would kind of go against the spirit of the thing.

Related to this, there is also the spectre of endgame progression. At BlizzCon, there were comments about horizontal progression and how you won't have to worry about falling behind because everything stays relevant, but the devs quickly backpedaled on that because of course they will be new raid tiers and of course they'll give stronger gear than the previous tier because why else would anyone do anything?

I think it was in a BlizzCon or adjacent interview where I heard Ian Hazzikostas once again reiterate that gear upgrades need to be thirty percent (or whatever the exact number was) stronger than the previous tier or else people don't bother with them, and that their internal metrics prove this. Sadly, I think this is just one of those holy cows that Blizzard still can't let go of, even after all the other bold changes they've made since Dragonflight. I'm not saying his metrics are wrong, but a) I thought a major point with Forever was to attract people who aren't already playing your game and b) you have no idea how many players take a look at those "needed" item level jumps and just nope right out of the whole thing before even passing go.

Games with horizontal progression are a thing, and I get that WoW has not traditionally been that kind of game, but I thought they were genuinely trying to dip their toes into new waters with Forever. Instead it now sounds more like they want to treat progression like in every other version of WoW, and if it becomes a problem further down the line, they'll figure it out. I saw Ion's talk about letting go of the idea that every system needs to be future-proof and that sometimes they just want to focus on what's fun now, but I don't think your new game's entire progression system is a good example of how it's OK to just wing it. I don't ever want to see Forever needing an item level squish that makes all low-level food and potions restore literally zero health like happened to retail this year, just because the devs can't stop themselves from constantly increasing the numbers at the top by huge amounts.

Anyone feel like taking any bets on how the above will shake out? Or do you have a completely different feature that you're worried could make or break WoW Forever for you? Feel free to share in the comments.

Waiting (For) Forever

I'm not sure it's really apparent from me making a post on here once or twice a week, but I'm still very excited about WoW Forever and have been consuming content about it ravenously. I'm trying to avoid direct spoilers/too much detail about things like quests and dungeons, but otherwise I've been game for almost anything: dev talks, first impression videos, reddit discussions, you name it.

Personally I've continued to not play the beta other than to log in once or twice to play around with the character creator. Hot tip for fellow SD model enjoyers: make sure to also check your character's look in HD. While it's unfortunate if the cute or heroic face you chose in SD looks derpy in HD, HD does sometimes have extra options like eye colour or eyebrow shape that aren't tied to any of the SD drop-downs and which are simply randomised if you don't make a selection. So you can adjust those to make your HD appearance look a bit more palatable without affecting the way your character looks in SD.

I did think about playing properly a couple of times when the yearning got a bit too much, but I always remembered quickly that the beta is only temporary and that was always enough to stop me. I want to save my energy for the real thing.

Also, my physical collector's edition arrived yesterday. I wasn't home but my husband was, and when it arrived he texted me that the box was massive. As I'd never bought a physical collector's edition for an MMO before, I wasn't sure what to expect.

When I got home he urged me to open it immediately as he'd gotten quite curious after hours of waiting and wanted to see the contents. It was quite a Russian doll affair of boxes within boxes, but eventually we had everything unwrapped. My husband immediately got annoyed with the dwarf statue, thinking I'd been ripped off because the dwarf wasn't holding his rifle properly, but fortunately it only took a small push to pop it back into its proper place. I think it looks pretty cool actually.

Otherwise my favourite physical item was probably the mouse pad, mostly because I've actually been in desperate need of a new one for a while and just couldn't be bothered to replace it. This gave me an excuse to finally bin the remains of the old pad and clean up the rubbery residue for a fresh start.

I'm also happy that I'll now be able to log in for the early name reservation. I was always doubtful of that as for Midnight I'd heard some horror stories on social media about physical collector's editions being delayed in the mail and people missing out on early access perks. 

The digital bundle also includes a copy of Warcraft 3 Reforged and the new Forsaken Kingdom campaign - I've never played any of the RTS games, but maybe I'll give this one a go while waiting since I've heard people rave so much about the new campaign...

Otherwise, I'll keep enjoying myself in retail for now. It's weird but in some way the announcement of Forever has also made me look at the modern game a bit differently and I've been enjoying it more recently. Funny how that works.

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.

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.

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.