Returning to WoW: Forever twenty years later, and finding everyone else came back too

It’s late on a Wednesday, and I find myself at the keyboard and my computer in a familiar glow: the World of Warcraft launcher on screen. I’d already made my first three characters to save their names before the launch, including Sühne Blume, my undead girl Forsaken Paladin.

With the launch of Forever, Blizzard added a few untouched race-and-class combinations. It only took seven minutes of waiting right at the hour of the bell to leap back into Azeroth. Old Azeroth. I gave her slightly greenish skin, boar-tails, and glowing eyes – the full undead experience ready to become a paladin.

Logging into Death Knell brought me back to that old feeling of rising as an undead in the crypt. I emerged into chaos, players with blue nametags everywhere. The questing started immediately, talking to my Paladin trainer, walking among houses to kill skeletons and walking corpses. Everything old is new again.

WoW: Forever isn’t a museum. Blizzard is calling it a permanent third branch of World of Warcraft, sitting beside Retail and Classic.

It takes the original continents and the level-60 cap and builds outward: more than a thousand new quests, new and reimagined zones from the Riverglades to Mount Hyjal, nine new dungeons, revised classes, and a new playable race, the Skyborne (blue elves, to most of the people I heard in chat). I am running a special add-on that highlights the new quests with a different color so that I can find them and play them.

Unlike expectations of Classic, even through rose-colored glasses, Blizzard slapped on a fresh coat of paint: HD character models, quest markers, a one-bag inventory. They’re switches, though, not mandates. The “Classic” and “Enhanced” presets change how the game looks and feels without changing the rules underneath.

The more interesting changes may matter most socially: shared campsites, region-wide character names, and rulesets in place of realms. That last one means there’s no longer another server to escape to. Rulesets mean you choose what type of game you’re playing – PvE, PvP, RP, or RPvP – each one carries its own dynamics and social expectations in the world.

Those region-wide character names are also two-part: a first name and a surname. This changes how naming works from both Retail and Classic. It’s not uncommon to see characters in the world with a first name and the last name “Forever.” In my case, “Blume” is my last name because I name all my characters after flowers.

Campfires especially took me aback. They’re a new addition where players set down a fire that other players can sit around and receive 60-minute buffs. They’re somewhat similar to bonfires from Guild Wars 2, but they’re not an item – they’re a proper social mechanic. Players with different professions can also add tents, first-aid boxes, and other items around the campfire that add to the buff.

Players must sit around the fire for exactly 60 seconds; alternatively, they can kneel, lie down, or sleep and still receive the buff. Because it requires time at the fire and fires attract other players, they become impromptu conversation spots.

By Blizzard’s own account, Forever is the biggest launch in World of Warcraft’s history measured by peak concurrent players, and it brought back more returning players than any WoW release before it. Warcraft VP Holly Longdale added that it drew the most new players for a WoW launch in 15 years. However, Blizzard hasn’t published a single number behind any of those claims.

Ask almost anyone about the launch, and you’ll hear the same first word: smooth. Short queues, stable servers, little lag. The arguments start right after that, over what a return to classic-era Azeroth should prioritize.

The launch and the community entwined

Players immediately started using dungeons to level with friends, but Blizzard quickly moved XP gain to quests. In response, Blizzard raised XP earned from dungeon kills by 50% — but many players didn’t find it enough. The company appears to be struggling to find the sweet spot for leveling. The leveling experience should be smoother than Classic, but it’s not quite there yet.

Over three sessions in launch week, I logged nearly 3,000 public chat messages, and they showed a square that’s generous about the game and unruly about the world. A scam accusation in Trade turned into a twenty-minute mock trial. A pet-feeding question turned into “love you guys.” And the moments of real sincerity were the ones most likely to get a punchline.

Then there are the people. On a visit to Orgrimmar on my own Skyborne, a Tauren approached me and offered me one silver in a trade. I didn’t understand why until he messaged me to say: “You are my slave now,” and “Follow me.”

I am not on an RP ruleset, so this took me aback. Still curious about what would happen next, I followed him to a nearby building, and he took me to an upper level. Wide-eyed, fingers ready on my keyboard, and my elf girl looking up at the tall Tauren, I waited for an explanation.

He asked if I wanted to make more money. Curiosity already had the best of me, so I asked what the job was. To my surprise, he asked me to take “goods” to Stormwind. That day, I became a smuggler. I asked what the goods would be, and he said it was just “sugar.” I didn’t look too closely at the package, as it were.

Unfortunately, my smuggling job did not work out. He quickly took me outside of Origrimmar to meet his other customers who were sitting around a purple bonfire. There he decided to change the rules and told me to dance for them instead. I agreed. After about two minutes of dancing, he offered me another trade window with a whole gold and told me, “You are free now.”

However, he ended my indentured slavery with a request that I send him a letter. So I went into Org, found a mailbox, and wrote him a letter in the best role-playing fashion I could.

We are friends now, and he’s been helping me reach level 20 on my Druid so that I can get my cat form.

Amid my logs and attention to chat, I saw a community that arrived at a nostalgic relaunch but brought the real world with them. These included discussions of tech prices (RAM, GPUs, “AI overlords), market and midterm worries, work schedules, and a culture war being fought right in Trade and General – not your mom’s Barren’s chat.

Many of the comments arrived as jokes, using in-game races as costumes for anxieties about politics or to frame discussions about gay and trans people while questioning gender norms. Players clearly regulated by switching factions; one player noted that Alliance chat had become too toxic for them, so they switched to Horde.

Of course, the public square was filled with beautiful ads for new guilds, many of which have gotten witty in their recruitment. Most of them offered social amenities around adult life, especially for people with families and jobs: “for working adults who want to enjoy Forever without turning it into a second job”; “made by Dads, for Dads”; “mature adults, parents, workers”; and “real life comes first.”

WoW: Forever is here and people are flooding in the first week. It’s quite an experience standing at the entrance of Orgrimmar when the zeppelin comes in – there is a crush of demihumans rolling through in a wave each time, some of them falling from the sky to reach the doors sooner.

The question is: how many of these visitors are on free trials that end on November 11? It’s not uncommon for launches to be met with swelling membership and fanfare and peter out within weeks.

December 9 marks the official release date of the first-ever raids in Forever, arriving about a month after launch. These will include a 10-player called The Barrow Deeps, a 20-player at Hyjal Summit, and the ever-popular 40-player Onyxia’s Lair straight out of classic.

How many of these teeming masses will still be with the game in a month to enjoy those raids? It has certainly struck a chord with players looking for that nostalgia hit, but who also want the modern touch that comes with HD skins, beautiful weather, and a different social scene.

For everyone else, I’ll leave you with a quote from an anonymous Twitch user who put that feeling into words:

“For those of us who started in vanilla WoW 20+ years ago, this is like the retirement home we always longed for.”

Image: Blizzard