Though I play World of Warcraft‘s current retail version primarily, I had to dabble into World of Warcraft: Classic when it first came out. At the time, plenty of people were skeptical that such a dated game could hold interest for long. It was slow, they said. It was clunky. Full of rough edges that were slowly smoothed out over time as the game grew expansion by expansion.
And yet, I loved that slow clunkiness: the steady plod of my tauren’s hooves across the plains of Mulgore, the methodical thwacking she did with her mace and the long spell cast times, the quests that sent you all across the continent into dangerous areas…there’s a charm to old WoW that’s been lost in retail, and no, that’s not nostalgia talking. I never played the original game; I started at the very very end of Wrath of the Lich King, missing everything people loved about it and only really immersing myself after the cataclysm that was Cataclysm. No, I think I genuinely just like the vast strangeness of original Azeroth.
And plenty of other people seemed to, too. Because Blizzard kept re-releasing its old expansions, one after another, and the Classic audience followed. But as Classic slowly inched closer to the line of modern day past which old-school interest wanes, Blizzard found another way to siren call us back. For some, it was the brutal Classic Hardcore mode. For me, it was Season of Discovery, a sort of alternate-universe Vanilla WoW where everything was the same, but not. There were hidden runes to be found that unlocked new abilities, making way for new class specializations like mage healers or my beloved shaman tank. There were new quests, new bosses in dungeons, and by the end even new raids. It was Classic, but with a bit more. A Classic+, if you will. But eventually, that too ended.
With World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard has essentially turned Season of Discovery into its own game. I played about two hours at Blizzcon this weekend, splitting my time between retreading the same old tauren shaman starting quests I’ve done several times now, trying out the new Skyborne Elf race, and attempting a mid-level dungeon with other members of the media. The Skyborne Elves are nice enough: they give the Horde a less, uh, gritty class as an option and have a lovely starting area dotted with crumbling ruins and sweeping wind gusts. They’re blue elves. Not worth $30 to me, but fine I guess if you want them.
No, it’s the Season of Discovery flavor that I love, and it’s that I have received, and more. WoW: Forever is immediately familiar and unfamiliar. Visually, it’s simultaneously lovely and retro, with new lighting and water effects contrasting with the ancient scenery, the endless muddy textures and sparse tufts of grass. A canyon I’ve killed boars in countless times is the same as always, except it feels…dustier, somehow, with a dry haze in the air. I ran out of time before I could run to Thunder Bluff, which the trailer suggested may have experienced some changes, but it did look grand on its plateaus in the distance.
In gameplay, it’s permissive in interesting ways. Features like combining bags and UI customizations sneak their way in, while leaving other friction (such as having to buy all your new skills). There appears to be a compromise on the Looking for Group feature, allowing players to post requests to form certain kinds of groups and answer them, but refusing to bend on automatically putting random groups together for you. Transmogrification is opt-in: either you can use it and see it on others, or not at all, as desired. As a casual player, if you glance at WoW: Forever at any given point, you might need to take a beat to understand whether you’re looking at old or new WoW, before realizing it’s both and neither.
The original Season of Discovery unfolded its surprises very, very slowly and carefully, so much so that you probably didn’t notice anything was different for several hours of play. In Forever, the early quests I saw in Mulgore seamlessly weave new adventures with old ones. It’s not all grandiose new locations and storylines. Some of the new quests are as simple as sending you to a well to find someone’s mother, and get a quick profession tutorial that wasn’t there before. I ran a flame from one camp to another, hurrying so it wouldn’t go out, to honor the Sun God An’she. I’ve never done that before, and it didn’t change anything, but it did add a bit more to the world. Tauren specifically get Plainsrunner as a racial passive, originally a beta ability that never made it to retail now realized to help me scoot around a bit faster. Again: these initial changes are so small! If you haven’t played through this area a few times before, you might never notice.
The dungeon, The Drowned City, once again felt like a blend of it all. The opening areas of it looked like a slightly shifted variation on the old Zul’Farrak, but the further in we got the more apparent this was an even more twisty and strange place, with some corridors fully underwater and enemies like Naga and Murlocks instead of just endless piles of trolls. The battles were brutal in the way that Classic can be brutal: not mechanically hard, but requiring careful management of mana and threat. We had a time limit on this one and only managed to down one boss out of something like eight or nine, and wasted time getting chomped to bits by a shark in a pool at the center of a huge open courtyard that we probably weren’t meant to fight at the level we currently were. Hell yeah, that’s Classic!
I have some lingering concerns about what I’ve seen and heard so far. One of the best things about Season of Discovery was the hunt for hidden runes that allowed you to twist your character class into roles and builds that you might never have otherwise been able to, and WoW: Forever seems to be totally devoid of such systems. Then there’s the raid system, with the promise of 10, 20, and 40-person raids. 10 and 20 are fine, but I think moving away from requiring 40 whole people to coordinate their schedules is one of the better decisions WoW has made over the years. I wish I could raid with my retail guild here, but we’re between 15 and 25 busy adults with odd schedules, and we can rarely get an exact number together on a raid night. So I guess I just…won’t be raiding in WoW: Forever. Dang.
It was a quick two hours. Trying to wrap my head around the scope of what is essentially a brand new MMORPG in such a short time is simply not possible. At the moment, I’m really enjoying this gentle blend of two types of World of Warcraft I’ve come to love, and the promise of joy and strangeness and surprise in how I experience it. There will never be a perfect version of WoW that meets all my desires, or anyone’s really, as much as Blizzard keeps trying to come out with options that might get closer to satisfying some. But this specific new flavor is closer than anything yet to the way I most want to play WoW: slow and plodding across a vast and unknown world, dying regularly, often surprised. I think I’m more stoked for WoW: Forever than I have been about a retail expansion in many, many years.
