Part of World of Warcraft: Forever's charm is that combat is considerably slower than the regular version of the MMO. It's the kind of game where you'll spend 38 seconds hitting a scorpion because there are so few buttons to press in the early stages of your journey.

Classes in WoW's past were simple, but had small quirks to them that you'd pick up over time. Melee classes, for example, can squeeze abilities in between their auto attacks to maximize their damage output. You'd never care about this if fights only took 10 seconds, like they do in WoW today, but back then you had to use all that time in more drawn-out battles for something.

The WoW: Forever beta has reminded me how satisfying it is to play a class that isn't built like Whac-A-Mole, where the challenge is to hit the right buttons the moment they start to glow. There's a rhythm to WoW's old classes and I'm delighted to hear that Blizzard fully intends to maintain it in WoW: Forever.

Blizzard developers told TechRadar that they want "to err on the side of simpler classes, but with engaging depth," and that all of it will align with its guiding principle of staying true to the old MMO's "core design, pacing, and tone."

"The level of mechanical complexity found in the beta classes is indicative of our intentions," Blizzard says.

That suggests to me that Blizzard isn't trying to speed up the pace of combat, nor will it look to shore up a class' weaknesses by adding new abilities where there were none before. My level 15 paladin will never graduate out of spending most of her time smacking monsters with a hammer while she waits for her Judgement ability to come back up. I won't ever have so many abilities on my bars that I'll need to refer to an infographic to understand which one to press first.

A strict adherence to the methodical combat of yore also means dungeons and raids will follow suit. Blizzard says encounter design will remain relatively simple so that some of the challenge will be found in preparing for them via gear sets, consumables, and team composition. I am skeptical that this will convince me to go back to farming for crafting items before every raid like I did as an over-achieving teen, but I can still appreciate that someone could take the time to do that again.

All of this makes me excited to see how creative the developers get with items that let WoW's old classes bend the rules a bit. Players have already discovered a sword for mages that deals bonus fire damage on frozen targets, for instance, which opens the door for more opportunities to play classes in ways you would've never seen in WoW's early days. My guess is this is what will ultimately drive players to stick around and make new secondary characters as part of Blizzard's goal to keep progression in WoW: Forever incremental and "horizontal".

The developers of World of Warcraft: Forever would very much like it if you would create multiple characters, please.

There are a number of reasons for that, including that having lower level characters means you'll be well set up to welcome new friends to the game, as well as to experience the new leveling zones and dungeons and encounters coming in future patches, the developers tell us in exclusive interviews. So they're building in a bunch of incentives.

"There will be reasons to play alts and to unlock Legacy points, to have new journeys," vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas says.

The newest flavor of the juggernaut MMO launches November 4, and executive producer Holly Longdale says it's expected to be Warcraft's flavor of choice for people joining the game for the first time.

"If you're new, this is the one, right?" she says. "This is the lowest barrier to entry that we have going."

Part of the game is the Legacy System, which awards achievement-style points for major accomplishments that players receive in the game. Those points can be placed in talent-tree-style options that give players major quality of life improvements. Alts, additional characters, make stacking them up much easier.

Principal designer Kris Zierhut says he created elaborate spreadsheets attempting to guess what progression-minded players would choose as options for amassing those points, and creating alt characters to snag some of the easier low-level ones makes perfect sense versus aiming for all of the most-difficult points possible.

"There's less time investment," he says. "One of the things I love about that is, now let's say my brother wants to start playing the game. Normally I go, 'I got my level 60 character. Sorry—I can try to boost you.' Now I can say, 'You know what? I've got this level 20 guy I've been leveling. You can get there pretty quick. Let's group up and play together.'"

Encouraging alts is also one way that Blizzard wants to make sure you see all the new content they continue to add to Forever. Since the level cap doesn't change, a good amount of those new areas and features will be oriented toward leveling players.

"We're releasing content around all of the different level bands," says lead game designer Tim Jones. That should also help people spend as much or as little time in Azeroth as they want, he says, because it opens up many different lines of progression. "It helps people rationalize being able to play the game differently, to be satisfied with sessioning their time in different increments.

"I'm a dad. After [the kids] go to bed, I have time time, and for someone like me, I can log in for 30 minutes or an hour. I can open my quest log, see I have a couple quests that will help me round out completing Elwynn Forest, or I can head up to the auction house, grab a couple materials and make a few incremental advancements in blacksmithing. That's a form of meaningful progression."

Developers are adding new items to professions, new leveling dungeons and new areas in future patches, lead software engineer Michael Nuthals says.

"When we think of future updates, we want to make sure we're creating content that everyone who plays the game has something to look forward to," he says. "If I love leveling, I've got a new path or a new quest chain or a new dungeon I can do."

"Your journey is never identical to what it was," lead software engineer Nora Mills says. "We're basically trying to entice players to want to create new characters, to roll an alt."

Vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas says Forever's emphasis on alts has the team considering options that might support that gameplay, including swiping things like warband banks from the modern game.

"Particularly with a Legacy system that encourages playing alts, taking out the extra couple of steps of having to mail items manually from your main to your alt—logging over, taking them out of the mail, I don't know that's in anyone's interest," he says. "An account-wide bank is something I could see adding in the not-too-distant future."

"As people decide to make their alts, they'll take different paths," lead game designer Tim Jones says. "We promise to consistently add new leveling dungeons and new leveling zones."

World of Warcraft: Forever seems, at first blush, like an antidote to the idea of a modern MMO. I see it in the (naturally, traditionally) insufferable trade chat as I potter about on my fury warrior—people turning up their noses at the idea of retail players. Cushioned as they are in their soft little bubbles, ptooie!

But as someone with a 9-5 job and other MMOs I play, I wouldn't particularly describe myself as a "hardcore" WoW player. Competent, sure. I've cleared high-end content in other games (like a Savage tier in FF14). I know how to push buttons and avoid mechanics—and I also like hard games in general. But I'm definitely not on that grindset, particularly not in a beta.

And while I do admire the folks trying to get best-in-slot gear for a month—there's something beautiful and ephemeral about the effort—I do have to wonder: Are we playing the same game? Because WoW: Forever's actually super casual friendly. And if you played it with the right attitude, honestly, Classic was pretty casual friendly, too.

Seasonal grindset

WoW's gone through what I'm going to frame as a water cycle of difficulty—its starting point, back in vanilla, is what we're going to call an "oldschool" mindset. A big, open world that required a lot of patience and cooperation to get around, littered with quests, where getting to level 60 was part of the journey itself. The water in this laborious metaphor.

Then we start moving towards Cataclysm, a halfway state—steam rising up into the clouds. Things are more straightforward, you've got people griping about "welfare epics", the dungeon finder has well and truly obliterated the social contract, people are finding new and inventive ways to insult your mom, and so on. However, you still need a challenge, a carrot on a stick.

Enter borrowed power grinds: Your artifact weapons, your Azerite armors, your Covenants. In a world where everything but the hardest of content comes easy and levelling is a brisk inconvenience, these systems are needed to keep players logging in every day. Eventually these systems go from beloved for their sense of progression to reviled for their meaningless tedium.

And, crucially, for the fact that a missed day, week, or month sets you permanently behind folks who're putting in the hours every single day. The clouds get heavy, resentment brews, and suddenly—bam! Max exodus, pandaemonium! And to fix it, we move into the downpour cycle: A seasonal structure.

Seasons are an antidote to borrowed power. You're no longer permanently left in the dust for an entire expansion, and their short lifecycle allows them to be filled mostly with secondary rewards—there's the gear treadmill, sure, but you can pepper 'em with less impactful things like cosmetics. But they have a catch.

At the end of a season, a lot of your meaningful progress is reset. Seasons are meant to be played very intensely, but there's a large, awkward gap in the middle where joining halfway kind of feels like a waste of time. Not to mention, the same kind of demotivation you had in earlier expansions where all your hard-earned loot was made meaningless by quest greens? That happens three times over, here, between each major patch.

Seasons are designed to appeal to a "casual" player, but they just as often push them away—especially, as retail has experienced in recent months, because they're sometimes flush with so many things to do that it can become deeply overwhelming.

Which is why, I think, WoW: Forever has struck such a chord—because when you put the expectations of that loud, noisy seasonal structure against that oldschool design… which is asking more of you?

Retail, which bombards you with a dozen quests every time you log in—where you might complete five delves, three dungeons, and 10 world quests in an average evening of play? Or Forever, in which you jog around a forest for a bit, collect some pelts, and maybe run Ragefire Chasm if you've got the time?

Sure, when we get to level 60, the time investment for those big raids might start becoming a problem. But the actual experience of levelling in Forever—and, indeed, in Classic—is kind of chill. It was designed to provide you with little snack-sized adventures you could wrap up in 40 minutes, and if you came back a month later? Nothing changed.

What, like it's hard?

It might be easy to be fooled into thinking that, because you might die if you pull more than one monster in WoW: Forever, that it is somehow a more difficult game. I am here to tell you that Forever is not hard. As a matter of fact, Classic isn't hard, either.

I'm not the first person to make this observation, mind, but I'll reiterate it here: The difficulty of this old school design is more a question of patience and knowledge than it is mechanical skill. It's not particularly hard to use a bow to pull a mob away from its friends. It's not very challenging to have to hoof it from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff to learn how to swing a two-handed club.

Even in dungeons, where we might accidentally overpull and wipe a couple of times… c'mon man, let's not kid ourselves. You're spamming frostbolt. I hit Heroic Strike once every couple of business days. For the most part, I'm watching my orc slap a Worgen about, getting a brief and fleeting hit of dopamine whenever I see that dodge button fire up and can fire off an Overpower.

Everything takes a while, sure, and if you mess up, you're punished with a little tedium—and that's one of the big sticking points between a "casual" and a "hardcore" MMO, right? Time investment. But that only really matters if you care about the destination more than the journey.

For the hardcore people who want to hit level 60 in a week, navigating around the patience WoW requires (efficiency, routing, and so on) is a fun puzzle—and hey, more power to 'em! I'm something of a min-maxer myself, when the mood takes me.

But if you really don't give a crap about all of that, then the fact that the game requires a bit of time from you isn't actually an obstacle for a casual player. It's whether or not you get something enjoyable out of a short time investment, and because WoW's designers knew what they were doing 20 years ago? You absolutely still get that. You can turn in a couple quests and get a gear upgrade in an hour or two.

And, as Clay Stone, associate production director, pointed out to me earlier this week: Someone with a ton of responsibilities and obligations outside of a game might actually prefer the slower oldschool pace, anyway. He put it pretty well:

"It could be something with the times that we live in. It could be something with the amount of information and noise that we're facing all the time, the distractions of all the notifications on my phone that are glaring at me all day, but there's a real longing for that slower, more deliberate pace."

Which means that, yes—WoW: Forever is casual friendly. Very casual friendly, in fact, in the same way that something like Webfishing or Animal Crossing is casual friendly. If you aren't trying to minmax, what you have is a relaxing (dare I say cosy) videogame where you run around a fantasy world and hit a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds. Not a bad place to be if you've only got an hour to spare and need to decompress.

World of Warcraft: Forever has me in a chokehold, and it's partially because—well, it's relaxing. As my colleague at PC Gamer so succinctly put it: "Sometimes it's fun to hit a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds." Despite aping an era seen as more 'hardcore' to some players, Forever's lack of blaring and annoying seasonal grist is honestly refreshing.

Speaking with associate production director Clay Stone about why I'm certainly not the only one feeling that way (given the success of Classic, Season of Discovery, and now Forever's beta), he says it's a question Blizzard's been considering "for a little while.

"We saw, certainly with the success of Classic and the response to that, it was more than just a nostalgic experience for some people. The fact that they didn't leave, you know? They didn't just play for a month. They fell in love with it all over again. Then we saw it again a lot with Hardcore in 2023. All of a sudden, now you had a whole bunch of people who'd never played the game before, but were coming in because of that slower pace, and the fact that Hardcore reinforced that slower pace for them."

But it's more than just about the pace of levelling—it's also about the wider structure, too. Retail WoW is a seasonal game, which certainly has both benefits and drawbacks. One such drawback being that if you miss the start of a season, you're kind of put off the whole exercise:

"We had so many players who didn't even play Season of Discovery simply because it was a Season, even though they had friends who were saying 'this is the best version of World of Warcraft that they've ever made!' But because it was a season, it felt ephemeral, and therefore [people thought] 'I'm not going to jump in'."

Forever, in many ways, feels like an extrapolation of Season of Discovery—the Classic+ of it all—in a package that's not going anywhere. Personally, I fear for my free time, because even knowing my beta character's going to be deleted, I just can't seem to pull myself away. And it is, again, because of that zenlike state—the modern world is busy, which makes hitting satyrs chill by comparison.

"It could be something with the times that we live in," says Stone. "The amount of information and noise that we're facing all the time, the distractions of all the notifications on my phone that are blaring at me everyday, but there's a real longing for that slower, more deliberate pace.

"And I think something that we've seen over these past few weeks, which I'm really happy to see, is that players who are coming into WoW Forever, whether they played World of Warcraft before or not, are trying themselves not to rush it. There seems to be a deliberate pushback on this 'go go go' nature."

That's not to say Stone's anti-go go go entirely, though. Even in the beta, I've seen plenty of folks min-maxxing or trying to reach for bis, which has its own charm: "We love them too. We think that they're great, and the endgame is going to be spectacular.

"But we're deliberately trying to build something with WoW Forever that answers that question of… 'Is it too late to start?' With an emphatic 'no' as much as possible." Horizontal progression, baby—it worked out for Guild Wars 2, and I'm excited to see Blizzard take a crack at it as well.

Questing through the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, I've been impressed by just how much has been layered on top of the game's Classic world—new quests and new dungeons, designed to slot in seamlessly to the more oldschool playstyle without causing too much friction. It's an impressive magic trick, and one I'm really excited to get stuck into properly come November.

Talking to associate production director Clay Stone, Forever initially had far more humble beginnings: "It's been an evolution, and I think that's probably pretty clear from all the classic titles we've done so far in the level of experimentation and breaking away from #NoChanges at the beginning."

While Mists of Pandaria Classic and Wrath of the Lich King Classic added small changes and adjustments, Stone says the ball really got rolling with Hardcore and Season of Discovery:

"Obviously, with that, it was a wonderful testing ground for us to be able to see what the limits were and what what players would accept as [something that] does or does not fit into the space, how classes could function, and certainly for us as a team, wonderful opportunities for us to be able to learn how to develop things or new content in that vanilla era space."

Season of Discovery was tremendously successful: "The response to it blew us away … Shipping that in November of 2023, and then seeing that immediate response to it was incredible. And that's really when the discussions began about, 'Hey, what what does a version of this look like that is not pitched as a season to players?'"

Said version apparently snowballed the more excited the developers became, says Stone: "There is a version of WoW Forever that really is that version of Vanilla with just a couple slight class changes. We give paladins a taunt, and presto change-o, you got Classic Plus or WoW forever … Our original pitch internally was: We'll do four new dungeons, and the next thing we know, we're doing six, and the next thing we know, we're doing nine.

"That appetite amongst the team, and much broader in Blizzard, to be able to deliver something much more substantial than perhaps even what our players were expecting, that that built and that that grew … The actual scope of what we're ultimately delivering with launch was something that built up over time."

Which was satisfying for the developers when the floodgates opened for the beta last month: "There were players that perhaps expected us to announce something much smaller, but I believe, at least based on the response that we've seen, we've exceeded a lot of players' expectations in terms of the overall scope of what it is that we're delivering, which has been really exciting for us."

A tension that will never go away as long as World of Warcraft: Forever exists is how true it is to the 2004 MMO. Blizzard signed up for this by creating an MMO that is trying to blend the old with the new so that anyone, regardless of their experience with WoW, can get into it.

That tension has been at its highest concentration with the new blue elves it debuted with WoW: Forever. The Skyborne have never existed in WoW before; they look almost exactly like the Blood Elves from The Burning Crusade expansion, but their lore tells us they're a faction of High Elves.

Some players love the twist on a race they've been asking to play for years, while others believe they tarnish the authenticity of an MMO that's trying to recreate the joys of playing the oldest era of the MMO. Even though the debate over the Skyborne will probably never be resolved, most players agreed that, at the very least, they looked way too new alongside WoW's crunchy old player models.

Blizzard said it would respond to the feedback about the Skyborne visuals before WoW: Forever launches in November and today it has done just that in a blog post promising to give them a retro makeover.

"Over the course of development, we have been aligning on the right range of fidelity and what feels like it belongs in the WoW: Forever world and what does not," Blizzard writes. "The team has learned much in the process, and that will continue to strengthen more with future content."

Blizzard says the Skyborne "didn't quite meet the consistency and cohesion we are aiming for," and will be tweaking how they look with the "HD" player models setting on. There's an example of their druid forms in the post and you can see how the feathers and fur have harsher lines and shapes that fit much better with WoW's original style. The old version used to look extremely smooth with a bright light blue gradient covering their bodies and now everything is much more muted.

The people who play with the "SD" models on to fully live like it's 2004 will also get visually updated Skyborne, but they won't come until early next year. Blizzard's work-in-progress image shows a bunch of elves who have had their smooth features replaced with jagged, low-poly shapes. They're basically Skyborne on low settings and I think they look great. Blizzard says they'll have another update on the models—and their SD druid forms—when they're closer to being finished.

I wasn't convinced Blizzard would be willing to technically downgrade a race that costs $30 to unlock, but I'm glad it did. It sets a precedent for how close it wants the newest stuff in WoW: Forever to adhere to the classic MMO, and, hey, maybe it'll convince some people to chill out and see how things go when it's out of beta on November 4.

If you want to make money in World of Warcraft, well… I cannot rightly say that we at PC Gamer are any good at it, based on the evidence given to us—but we are at least inventing new ways of money-making. And isn't invention the mother of necessity? Or was it the other way around? Who cares, we've got pockets to line.

I wrangled two of my erstwhile co-workers, Fraser Brown and Joshua Wolens, to see which of us was the best at making money in World of Warcraft: Forever's beta. Which felt like a fair testing ground, given both how populated it is and how un-inflated its new, fledgling economy would be. Here were the rules:

• We started as level 1 horde characters.
• We each had a nest-egg of 20 silver to get us started.
• Starting from our spawning points into Azeroth, we had to make as much gold as we could in two hours.
• There were some additional rules about auction house postings that didn't become relevant.
• No really. I spent a lot of time thinking about them and their implications for the challenge. None of us bothered.
• I'm definitely not mad about it.

Each of us entered with a different strategy. Well, two of us did (more on that later) to try and make the most bank. I, the Orc of Wisdom, would weaponise my 15+ years of roleplay experience to trade knowledge with the masses. Josh, the Majestic Celebrity, would try to wield his status as a games journalist and very famous person to his benefit—hamstrung only by the fact he had never actually played much World of Warcraft.

There was also Fraser, as Boeuf Beef, who did a secret third thing. I'll let him enlighten you about his masterful machinations myself.

This is a story of wisdom, courage, and bull-headed bravery—and, more importantly, it's a story of how those virtues could be mercilessly weaponised to siphon as much money from the economy as possible.

I've been roleplaying in MMOs for about 16 years—it is, in fact, what got me into writing—so rather than simply beg the masses for hand-outs, I would use it. I am, first and foremost, an entertainer.

I assembled a document full of snippets of wisdom—some reworded adages and sayings, others my original work—and decided to leverage them around WoW: Forever's new campfire feature. For those not in the know, anyone with a cooking skill can set down a campfire, around which may be set various fixtures. Sit around the fire for a minute, and you'll get buffs.

This made for a pretty cheap initial investment of seven silver and 66 copper: Enough to train my cooking skill as well as some simple wood and tinder. All of which was available on the jog up to Razor Hill, which was very pretty. An auspicious sign, I thought, for my journey.

With the ability to make campfires in hand, I parked myself somewhere people would be forced to interact with me by game mechanics alone: The top of a zeppelin tower. Being the only convenient route to the Undercity, home to the new Ruins of Lordaeron dungeon everyone was keen to try, passengers would be forced to stand around while I gave them my spiel.

Originally, I was going to set a static price for my wisdom—but at the last minute, I decided to change my tact to simply requesting whatever people could spare. I am, after all, a humble old orc simply looking for a hot meal and a place to stay. Durotar nights get so very cold.

And, listen—I'm guilty of my fair share of cynicism of the MMO populace, but the two hours I spent up here were nothing short of delightful as the WoW community played ball. Here's a short-list of the characters I encountered:

• A druid, who could not give me money, but did give me meat.
• An absolute mensch who gave me one entire gold piece.
• An elf who was very mean to me, but hit my ramblings about the vigors of youth with "And the daftness of age is clear upon your face", which is unfortunately a solid dunk.
• An undead named Glenda, perhaps my one true love, who replenished the fire for me when it ran out.
• A tauren who gave me 5 silver, then whispered to me that he didn't want wisdom, he just wanted to tip me for my good roleplay.
• An orc rogue who straight-up mugged me (note: threateningly opened a trade window). She got so into the RP that she panicked when the zeppelin was leaving and managed to fall off the tower instead.
• A cat burning themselves on my fire. TheOrc OfWisdom said this was concerning, to which someone else quipped: "Don't worry. They've got nine lives."
• An undead who told me I couldn't park here, and that it was "time to move". Then then proceeded to bust it down. TheOrc OfWisdom took a break to bust it down with them.

I had a lovely old time—and one that was very profitable. My final score—minus my initial silver stipend—can be found at the bottom of this article.

I don't know what WoW is. I don't know what my abilities are. I don't know where this zeppelin is taking me and I don't know what the buttons in my hotbar do. I don't know what any of this shit is and I'm fucking scared.

What I do know: I'm incredibly important. My name is on something like 68 million articles on PC Gamer dot com, making me a rough hybrid of Scarlett Johansson and George Herbert Walker Bush in fame and significance. Play to your strengths, they always told me, so off I went to ignore circa 99% of WoW's actual mechanics in favour of simply impressing my incredible renown on other players and asking them for money.

My other strength is slander, so at the same time as I harangued people about my own importance, I also let them know that my two opponents were dreadful. Just utter bastards.

This worked alarmingly well. Did you know you can just ask people for money and get it? I might try this out in real life. Just a few minutes in, my very first beg netted me some silver pieces and well-wishes.

The issue was not the effectiveness of my tactics but my complete unfamiliarity with the videogame 'World of Warcraft'. I quickly realised that I had genuinely no idea what the relative value of these coins were. Is a silver piece nothing? Is it a billion dollars? Am I the richest man in MMO history already?

Likewise, simple mechanics hamstrung me. Did you know to actually get into The Undercity there's a whole elevator system? I didn't! So instead I just sort of roamed around the top part for a while, unsure what kind of zone I was even in. This was, on reflection, not a lucrative use of my time.

The highlights of my adventure? I'll be honest, I mostly just had a pleasant time ambling from town to town and asking people to give money to the world's most important man (me). This did backfire once, though.

In dialogue with one player, Zippie Skadoo, I referred to him as a "good man" (or maybe "good friend," I forget). It turns out this was not acceptable. Zippie Skadoo quickly educated me that he was, in fact, bad to the bone, on the verge of going berserk, and might be inclined to assault me.

So that could have gone better.

Elsewise? I reckon I could have won this thing had I not wasted time in A) The Undercity and B) taking a boat or something to another continent and getting repeatedly killed by panthers for a bit.

Lessons for next time, I suppose, when Majestic Celebrity once again graces… Azeroth(?) with his presence.

I've been playing WoW off and on since 2004. So you'd think I'd find this challenge a doddle. Nope! This was, and I am not prone to exaggeration, the worst two hours of… if not my entire life, at least this month.

OK, so, I didn't have a plan. Or rather, my plan was to tell everyone I had an amazing plan, in the hope that an amazing plan would just pop into my brain. It did not. What actually happened was I rushed headfirst into insanity. It's a good thing the video accompanying this is short, because I really don't want the world to see the extent of my madness.

At one point, I just started making animal noises.

After failing to prepare a plan, I decided to simply skin a bunch of critters and make money that way. Perhaps selling them to generous players. Easy, right? Obviously not, or I'd still have my sanity. I have listened back to my full recording and plucked out some choice quotes.

• "I'm flagging and it's only been half an hour."
• "What am I doing with my life?"
• "I feel time just slipping away."
• "My screams of anguish have woken both my dogs."
• "I am so angry."
• "I am filled with rage."
• "I am filled with rage. I am filled with rage."
• "This is my supervillain origin story."
• "This is Hell. This is Hell."
• "I have lost my mind."

So, yeah, I had a great fucking time. And then I had to listen to my two-hour descent into madness. Which, let me tell you, was not fun! I got to relive the experience of wasting time and money when I should have been making money.

At one point, I spent about 20 minutes trying to complete a single quest, which I should add only promised a reward of two silver. I never really dipped into WoW Classic, so I forgot how unforgiving OG WoW was. I'm not used to being a weak baby who will die as soon as a large bird or boisterous pig-man so much as looks at me. And I was already tired and annoyed by this point. I could have moved on. But I was determined to complete this stupid bloody quest. And I did it! I got my two silver.

Why was I even taking quests on!? I should have just stuck to murdering and skinning critters.

Anyway! I had a horrible time, made less than 10 silver, and because I'm not a very nice man, the knowledge that Josh and Harvey had a lovely time only makes me feel worse.

The final scores...

At the end of our two-hour stint, we'd made a combined two gold, 49 silver, and 20 copper, after subtracting our 20 silver stipends. Which isn't exactly that much for a combined six hours of work, but given we were all starting at level one? I'm not that upset.

It's somewhat telling that Josh managed to produce roughly the same result by simply telling folks that he was trying to beat "two bastards" in a competition. Still, I chalk this up to WoW's community being refreshingly funny and willing to play ball: I had a lot of folks whispering to me during my wise vigil with kind words, which honestly brightened up my time as TheOrc OfWisdom considerably.

What did we learn? I think, unfortunately, that begging in an MMO is surprisingly effective, provided you're insightful or "famous" enough. Maybe stick to selling copper bars, or something.

Even though I was way too new (and low level) to understand how PvP worked in World of Warcraft's early days, I knew by osmosis that it was made for tryhards. WoW PvP was not only a massive grind, but a competition against other grinders for a unique title that no normal person would even dare to go for.

WoW: Forever borrows a lot from the classic game, but the torturous PvP system won't be one of them. In a new blog post, Blizzard explains how it has simplified the system overall to avoid asking players to derail their entire lives for bragging rights.

Those old titles are still there—High Warlord for Horde players and Grand Marshal for Alliance—but you won't be racing to keep your place on an invisible leaderboard every week. Instead, it's going to be pretty straight forward: Anyone who plays a lot of PvP will get rewarded eventually.

You'll have a currency and a point-based progression system to worry about. Honor is the currency you'll earn for killing enemy players, completing battlegrounds, and finishing PvP quests. Blizzard says it has normalized Honor gains across all the different battlegrounds so that none of them are more efficient than the others. As you do all of those things, you'll earn Rank points that unlock 14 tiers of rewards, which include powerful PvP gear and those flashy, prestigious titles. Rank points will have a weekly cap, too, so you can't just marathon to the end over a weekend.

All of this will be wrapped up in a PvP season that will reset once a new one starts, presumably to let Blizzard add a fresh set of rewards encouraging players to do the climb all over again. Every season will have weekly tasks that will give you bonus Honor and Rank points as well as a Legacy Point, Forever's account-wide meta progression system.

While I'm sure the most hardcore WoW veterans will scoff at the idea of normies running around with fancy PvP gear and titles, I don't think it would be responsible of Blizzard to ask people to stay up for multiple days trying to maintain their place on a leaderboard. Back in the old days, the system incentivized people to share their accounts with friends or guildmates just to keep up. The new system, while still a grind, follows Forever's general ethos of capturing the spirit of the old MMO while making it realistic for people who can't spend every waking moment of their lives logged in.

A new map-viewing tool of the WoW: Forever client has just dropped, and this thing is so gosh darn nifty. It's not perfect, and it can take a while for textures to stream in, but as long as you have the files on your computer, this map viewer lets you zip around Azeroth with your mouse wheel like an omniscient god. Please enjoy me marvelling at this fact.

RuneScape developer Jagex descended upon Birmingham (the British one, not the Alabama one) over the weekend with its annual RuneFest. As part of its RuneScape keynote, it showed off a trailer for its upcoming Dragon Slayer 2 quest which, er, featured a player character with six fingers and a bizarre sneaker-like sole on their very not-sneaker armoured shoes.

It didn't take long for posts on social media to point out what was undeniably generative AI, and an incident which, unfortunately for Jagex, came very swiftly after another genAI controversy surrounding its clothing collaboration with 100 Thieves just days before.

Despite the trailer being for RS3, Old School RuneScape's Alec 'Mod Sween' Sween took the lead on releasing a statement on the 2007scape subreddit addressing the situation. "We're aware of the concerns raised about the Dragon Slayer 2 trailer and have taken it down, while we investigate this urgently," he wrote. "This trailer was produced by a trusted external partner who had explicitly confirmed that GenAI would not be used. But, among other things, there's a sixth finger and, well, that's pretty hard to explain away. For that we apologise."

Similar to his statement after the 100 Thieves incident, Sween reiterated Jagex's stance. "Our position is clear at Jagex: we don't use GenAI to create our games, artwork or creative assets, and will not knowingly allow it to be used on our behalf. This is the second time in quick succession that concerns about generative AI have arisen through partners we trusted, and for us that highlights an issue with our own processes which we must address."

Sween said that the developer is "overhauling" the review process, and in the meantime will "work with and commission creators from the community to make sure that the story of Dragon Slayer 2 is told to the standard befitting of such an update."

I can't help but feel a little surprised that a video this blatantly riddled with generative AI slipped through the cracks—the six fingers are clear as day, even if you manage to miss everything else—and in a response Sween said that the team "should have caught these things," adding: "We didn't do well enough and can't simply place the blame elsewhere."

For Jagex's sake, I hope the phrase "bad things come in threes" does not also apply to generative AI videogame controversies.

Despite the immense volume of similarities between Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft, the team working on the upcoming collab rulebook knows that you can't translate everything 1:1. Half of the MMO is about fighting the same bosses over and over until you finally get a good piece of loot. The grind isn't made for tabletop players.

During a recent presentation attended by PC Gamer, principal game designer and project lead James Wyatt says D&D: WoW is more about "paraphrasing" the MMO within the framework of the tabletop game rather than trying to emulate its mechanics. The entire world of Azeroth and the MMO's many expansions (up to Midnight) are fair game for players—the book opens with a big temporal hand-wave from time dragon Chromie—but the smallest details have been shuffled around to fit the format.

Popular dungeons from WoW's past, like the Deadmines, are mostly intact, save for a few alternate routes to accommodate parties who might want to sneak around bosses or skip some altogether. You're still in for the kinds of adventures through deep caverns and ancient cities that WoW players reminisce about today. Some dungeons are lifted right from WoW's earliest era, while others mix in their revised layouts (and loot) from later expansions.

I was delighted to hear that you can still take on the challenge of avoiding every boss in Dire Maul for the bonus rewards after you slay the king, otherwise known as a "tribute run" to WoW veterans. D&D: WoW is built to capture the spirit of exploring the MMO's dungeons for the first time, before the age of datamined loot tables and YouTube guides, while also letting you relive their most iconic moments at the table.

The team calls dungeons a toolbox for DMs to tell the stories of WoW's world without the trial-and-error of the MMO's combat or the tension of deciding who the blue dagger drop should go to. Enemy encounters are curated and there are no restrictions on taking a rest or leaving and coming back later—although the dangers can grow while you're away.

Climactic battles with WoW's biggest names are in there, too, including the Lich King, Illidan, Jaina Proudmoore, and more. They're also where you'll see some of the biggest changes from the MMO. Jaina, for example, doesn't gradually chill your party during the fight, but freezes a player and strikes them with an ice lance if you don't find a way to thaw them out fast enough (the devs recommend using fire, if you've got it) instead.

On the way to the dungeons, you'll have opportunities to prepare your party through WoW's gathering and crafting professions. D&D's crafting rules didn't require a ton of changes to make this work, the team says. You'll be able to do a wisdom check for supplies or ore to mine as you explore. You can take that ore and craft items from a list of recipes, provided you're proficient with the right tools. Powerful items, like armor, will be gated by your proficiency bonus, so there's a real incentive to keep improving your skills as you go along.

D&D's renown system also isn't that far off from WoW's faction reputation system, so the team kept it fairly straightforward: You earn rewards as you climb up the ranks of trust. Becoming exalted with the Earthen Ring can unlock a charm that lets you summon a big Elemental minion or a portal to teleport across the world. The dragon aspects, WoW's oldest and most powerful factions, will even grant you the equivalent of a Wish spell if they like you enough. Rival factions, where raising your reputation with one might damage the other, can show up, too.

Everything here sounds like a smart way to handle a collab that could've barely felt like a collab at all. WoW has so much overlap with D&D already that I can imagine a version of this book that just swaps some names around and calls it a day. Instead, you can tell this was created by people who know exactly what to pull out of Blizzard's world and what to leave behind.

We were told a lot more will be revealed in the lead up to the November 12 release, particularly the way classes from WoW map onto the tabletop format. Wyatt—who spent most of the presentation eagerly answering questions from chat—had to stop himself from spoiling things too early. He also says he's already thinking of all the leftover things that could fit into a follow-up book, but wants to see how this one goes before diving back into Azeroth.

It's very easy to look at RuneScape Reignited's announcement blog or fancy trailer and assume it's a new upgraded version of the classic game—it certainly walks and talks like one, not dissimilar to the upcoming World of Warcraft: Forever. "Begin the journey anew with a year of restoration changes paving your path," et cetera. But it's actually a new character type in the existing RS3, and existing players aren't all convinced it'll be good for the MMO.

In fact, some of them have wheeled out the dragon-headed cannons for one of those Falador riots. People have gotten their yuks in: on X, PhosaniNex posted, "All 100 RS3 players in attendance for the final riot to end all riots, what a sight."

So, what is a Reignited character? Well, they'll all begin play with no progress and share an isolated economy, but they'll be able to play on existing worlds or new, Reignited-exclusive ones. Reignited and regular players can hang out together and form a clan, but they can't fight the same bosses or trade with one another. A dev blog states there will be no new updates exclusive to these new characters, and once you've selected a character type you can't switch.

In other words, it's sort of like creating an Ironman character, but not quite as lonely. While the announcement page promises the chance to play without unpopular systems like Treasure Hunter, that move away from microtransactions was actually announced at the start of this year. Rather than an overhaul unto itself, this seems more like a push to get new people trying RS3 without the fear of being 20 years behind on everything.

But for those who never left the game for OSRS, Dragonwilds, or even one of those non-RuneScape games, it feels like something that could split up the playerbase more—and while Jagex stated in the above dev blog that neither veteran or Reignited characters will be favored, some aren't convinced their progress will matter the same way anymore.

"What does everyone that has spent 1000s of hours gain by making a new account? Does this make all previous progress worthless," Reddit user RiquaaLz posted on the game's subreddit. "It's already very hard to find enough players to do group content, this is just going to fragment the player base even more." That thread has around 1,500 upvotes currently. "I am not starting over bruh this game is waaaay too grindy for that," reads a comment from Last-Horror9563.

The response is interesting to behold, personally, as someone who hasn't spent much time in the true, original RuneScape since it looked like the game people now call Old School RuneScape on Miniclip. A fresh start certainly sounds appealing to me, though I'm not sure the state of the leaderboards or the Grand Exchange are what have kept me from trying RS3 all these years. Whether this gambit will resuscitate RS3 as RS4 looms and OSRS continues to pile on new features, time will tell.

As reported by MMORPG.com, developer Jagex has announced a new MMO follow-up to RuneScape with the working title "RuneScape 4." The announcement came as part of Jagex's yearly RuneFest convention being held this weekend.

The announcement was accompanied by a brief teaser trailer showcasing the game's art style, which builds on the recently-released Dragonwilds survival game: It's like a hybrid of the latest Jagex MMO, Runescape 3, and the ascendant Old School RuneScape based on the series' 2000s heyday.

In the trailer, we see a real Dragon Quest-looking medieval town in a verdant valley under floating islands. An adventurer riding a dragon comes under attack by a three-headed dragon while a wizard watches from below. The trailer ends with the wizard welcoming a new adventurer to the city.

MMORPG.com has more details: RuneScape 4 apparently emerged out of a planned expansion for Dragonwilds. A Jagex developer said that playtesters kept asking for a more traditional, MMO take on the survival game's setting and aesthetic. Other than that, we know RuneScape 4 is being built on Unreal Engine (unclear if we're talking version 5 or the upcoming 6), and that the MMO's original, Dragonwilds expansion version was targeting release in 2027. Scaling up to being a full, new game has almost assuredly pushed that back.

If you're wondering where the "4" comes from, here's how Jagex maps RuneScape's numbered releases:

• RuneScape, 2001: The Reason for the Season.
• RuneScape 2, 2004: Introduced full 3D rendering. Old School is based on RS2 circa 2007.
• RuneScape 3, 2013: Overhauled the art and systems, the current main fork of the game.

Stay tuned for more coverage from this year's RuneFest from PCG features producer Mollie Taylor, who is on the ground at the event.

WoW: Forever's had me nostalgic for a bygone era of MMOs that seems to be enjoying a touch of a resurgence—the idea of a lived-in immersive world, versus the daily task theme park of modern MMO design. Not that I have anything against the latter, mind. Theme parks are neat and roller coasters are fun.

But I have, true to the point, been grouping up with strangers more often in a slower-burn world, partially for convenience, but also partially because the slower pace has me less hungry for rampant progress and time saving. I've gotta hike for six minutes to get to this quest anyway, why wouldn't I stop and help someone in trouble?

When I get all sappy and soft-hearted like this, I also think of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary about a WoW player Mats Steen, who sadly died in 2014 of Duchenne muscular dystrophy—a man whose closest online friends travelled from across the world to attend his funeral.

Steen had a massive impact that I wouldn't presume to match, but in my 16 years playing MMOs (and roleplaying in them, like some kind of nerd), I've also met a lot of people who have changed my life. My first girlfriend, for instance—but I've also made a lot of friends who've become part of my social makeup, as much as any of my "real" pals.

I won't name them for privacy's sake, but one of these people—though I've only heard their voice for the better half of a decade we've known each other, for reasons I cannot share—has been a constant force of good in my life, and I hers. We've pulled each other out of some real mental swamps in the time we've known each other, and I've even met her sister in the real world through sheer accident.

Hopping from City of Heroes: Homecoming to Final Fantasy 14, we've told countless stories together in both MMOs. We know plenty about each other—she knows I write for this very website—but it's all been in the tiny, cosy window of Discord. It would not be going too far to call this person one of my best friends, and while I have a more regular balance of "real world" mates and digital friendships, the latter ones have never stopped being vital.

Ultimately, the friendships are what make these games—beyond any trick of design, art asset, raid, or loot system—special. As such, I'm carving out this week's Terminally Online to ask you all about the folks you've met in MMOs who've changed your life for the better: Please share in the comments below!

Final Fantasy 14's free trial is massive—so massive, in fact, that it's become a bit of a copy/pasted meme over the years. The sentence "have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14" is burned into our brains.

And, to be fair, it's a bloody huge one, currently letting you play for free for as long as you want right until the end of Shadowbringers (with some big limitations, mind). Still, it's a few hundred hours without a single monthly sub payment. Well, Final Fantasy 11's gonna be following in those footsteps, per the FF11 site:

The site also mentions that previously-created trial characters will also be able to once again play the game, so if you started a free trial and ran out of game time, you can hop back in.

That's a pretty huge bump—especially since it also lets players do some of the "Limit Break" quests. For context, while FF11 technically caps out at level 50, players can up that to a maximum of 99 by doing a certain questline every few levels. And they'll have all the time in the world to do it in, hooray!

Honestly, this now makes two of Square's premier MMOs very generous—and as a fan of the genre writ large, I'm happy to see genuine efforts made to keep old dogs like FF11, which is doing pleasantly well, alive and kicking. There's a dearth of new MMOs out there, so I'm just glad to see efforts to maintain the old ones.

To great effect, mind. Back in March, FF11 was getting so many new players it had to pause character creation on its busiest server for a while and, checking this auction house database, the game still has around 88,000 active players.

The blue elves might not be the only wholly original addition to World of Warcraft: Forever. Blizzard started surveying players about a list of new classes, some of which have been requested by fans for years.

Last week, a survey popped up on Blizzard's Battle.net launcher to gauge interest in future additions to WoW: Forever. Participants were told not to publicly share anything from the surveys, but, well, you know how well people listen to warnings on the internet.

The full survey was posted online by some brave soul, and in it you can see several proposed classes: Monk, Demon Hunter, Tinker, Illusionist, San'layn, Necromancer, Rune Knight, Bard, Warden, Witch and Death Knight. Each one has a short description, their role in a group, the kind of gear they'd wear, and a breakdown of some example abilities.

The Witch class, for example, is a ranged damage-dealer and support that wears cloth armor. A cauldron ability that buffs anyone who drinks from it as well as a ranged attack called "Voidbolt" that drains the caster's own life are two of their example abilities.

Bard and Tinker are two classes I always see come up whenever anyone talks about potential new classes. Blizzard's suggested version of them sounds like they'd fit right in with the rest of the roster. The Tinker description says they'd climb into their own mech to fight; Bards would perform songs to heal and buff their allies.

Returning classes, like Demon Hunter and Monk, sound pretty close to the versions that exist in other versions of WoW today. The survey specifically calls out familiar abilities that they wouldn't have in WoW: Forever, and clarifies that Demon Hunters would start at level one, rather than level eight as they do in WoW's Midnight expansion.

Even though these class outlines are pretty short, they feel considered in a way that makes me think this is something Blizzard is almost certainly going to do eventually, if not shortly after the MMO launches in November.

Plenty of people shelled out the money to play the new elves in the beta judging from how many I see running around every time I log in. I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard starts selling classes, too. Ideally there would be a way to unlock them for free by playing the game, but I have my doubts about the kinds of things Blizzard would give away these days if they'd likely prove lucrative. The survey already has some players worried that any additional classes might come out considerably more powerful than the others and ruin the throwback experience. They could be right, but it's still unclear how far WoW: Forever will veer away from the oldest version of the MMO. The full release on November 4 will hopefully provide some insight into what the future holds for Blizzard's retro spinoff.

WoW: Forever's been a great time so far, partially because the old-school design of it has forced me to actually group up with strangers. But there's just one problem: My working memory is shot from being a very tired millennial, and I can't possibly remember all these names.

Enter Grayvves' "I Remember" AddOn, which has now been ported over to WoW Forever. This lets you assign a quick note and a smiley, neutral, or frowny face to anyone you meet. Not as commitall as a friend request, but robust enough to make you seem like an attentive person with a good memory.

What do you mean, "it looks like a social credit system." I don't know what you're talking about.

I've been very much enjoying the World of Warcraft: Forever beta—and I will be the first to cop to the fact I think it's recapturing a lot of the essence of an oldschool MMO that we lost. Tongue in my cheek, I'll even join in with the "reject modernity" crowd. But, crucially, I'll be doing so as a joke.

I've noticed, skimming my hand across the surface of the discourse, a propensity for folks to be getting up in arms about which version of their favorite MMO was better and to do so loudly, passionately, and obnoxiously. These factions stand divided:

My heart lies with the Coalition, sure. I think Forever is one of the most exciting things to happen in the MMO space in years. I have a fondness for the old tab-targeting techniques of older MMOs and a resentment for the dodge roll, and I much prefer the slow-paced explorative nature of Forever to something like Retail, which has, I admit, temporarily lost me with its seasonal structure.

But I am also a lover of variety. My favourite games range from hopecore science fiction RPGs like Citizen Sleeper to basically every Soulslike I can get my hands on. I adore silly "friendslop" games and the hope-crushing simulator that is a MOBA, which Deadlock has pulled me kicking and screaming back into. Point being: I think there's a space for everyone.

Rose-tinted Warpaint

I don't think the design of retail World of Warcraft is inherently bad, it's just different. I think Midnight has got a lot of things right—player housing is an absolute win, the game's increasing alt friendliness suits what it has become, the lack of mandatory borrowed power chores is nice, and I like being able to rinse through my Delves and Preys and zip around on my flying mount. It's frictionless, easy, keyboard-smashing fun.

Sometimes I'm in the mood to mindlessly do a bunch of low-stakes content. That mood hasn't taken me lately, but I'm not naive enough to believe it'll never take me at all.

Similarly, I also enjoy how Forever shrugs off those systems in favour of their design opposites: No overstimulating heaps of new patch-specific systems to partake in, no chore lists full of faction grinds, no dungeon finder. You log in, and you plod along with your playlist of choice in a world filled with players, and you do some quests. Maybe you find a group to clean out RFC with. You meet an undead paladin called Glinda Smlinda around a campfire. That's it, that's the game.

The issue I have is when this preference is put forward as a matter of moral imperative—the idea that modern WoW is somehow this corrupt, anti-gamer monolith that must be wrangled back to the way things were. I will say it plain: This shit sucks, it's annoying and it's subtractive and it's exhausting.

From a personal perspective, it's pretty unhealthy to make an actual identity and personhood out of a videogame you play, and it's certainly not subversive or impactful to make yourself a staunch defender of the old ways online. Because the truth is, Blizzard couldn't give a toss if we like modern WoW or not—it's all umbrella'd under the same price point, we're all pulling from the same buffet.

The community taglines the company incorporates ("putting the 'war' back in 'Warcraft', for example")? That's kayfabe, to get you to spend money. It's not part of a culture shift, Blizzard's just doing what it's proven profitable to do after years of safe success with Classic and Season of Discovery. And it'll keep running Retail WoW because guess what, that's also been very profitable too! Folks still play it.

From a pettier perspective, and this is just my personal exhaustion: It's console wars. We're doing console war stuff. Except, rather than doing them with blocks of hardware that can at least be attributed to different experiences on the whole, we're arguing about different versions of the same video game. Why?

More to the point, Forever itself is kind of a counterargument to the idea that these versions of WoW have nothing to learn from each other. What's made it interesting is how it's reinterpreting oldschool MMO design with just a few sprinkles of convenience. I do not blame people for being in love with the past, but we can't be trapped in it forever, but saber-rattling and name-calling over it? We shouldn't do that to ourselves, or each other. We should (and I know this is a vain hope) be normal on the internet.

Even though World of Warcraft: Forever is only in beta right now, players are able to explore a good amount of Azeroth to see what secrets Blizzard has tucked away for the full release.

Several secrets have been found, like a bunch of hidden books that reward powerful leveling items, but some of them have hints for what to expect when it launches in November. There are plenty of items that don't have a clear use yet that might become extremely valuable as time goes on.

A new NPC was recently found in the new Riverglades zone who sells a bunch of expensive crafting items. Theoretically, you should be able to get these items by playing the game normally, but many WoW: Forever players suspect he exists to prevent the auction house prices from skyrocketing due to their rarity.

Mister Graphed, the black market goblin merchant, sells items for 20+ gold—a hefty chunk of change in the Classic-era of WoW—that should prevent anyone from feeling obligated to buy them for more than that from other players. I'm sure it'll still happen because people love to sell items you can buy from vendors at a premium for the convenience of not having to travel around, but it will at least keep the prices from getting too ridiculous.

Notably, though, the vendor also sells new crafting materials called Fel Crystal and Stranglevine. Blizzard has done a big overhaul of professions in WoW: Forever, making them considerably more useful while you're leveling up. I was able to craft a nice set of gear before I was anywhere close to the beta's level cap of 20. These new items suggest there will be some really rare items to craft that never existed in previous versions of the MMO.

One item is available that isn't a crafting item at all: It's called the Gift of Galloping and it's a whopping 150 gold. This item says it gives you a 10% boost to your mounted movement speed for 15 days. Classic WoW never had anything like it, but I guess if you're rich you can pay a pricey subscription fee to go a little faster if you want.

It seems Blizzard is doing its best to prepare for WoW: Forever being a game that won't transition into new expansions. The level cap will permanently stay at 60, so there will have to be reasons for players to keep playing their characters or start new ones. It also means the economy will need things like that NPC in place so that the prices don't get out of control as players presumably get more powerful and the mysteries of the game get solved.

Uh-oh. The MMO no-life virus started coursing through me as soon as I jumped into WoW: Forever's beta, and it's refusing to let up. Which is a problem, considering I'm also housing the kind of sickness that makes me pump dozens of hours into Final Fantasy 14 every week like it's a goddamn full-time job. My body is a temple for poor time management afflictions.

My only prior experience with Blizzard's MMO is a level 13 Paladin I made a poor attempt at trying out around the release of Battle for Azeroth nearly a decade ago. This time it's sticking. I am absolutely loving WoW: Forever's stripped-back, old-school feel, complete with sprinklings of modernity that make it palatable for folks like me who lack those rose-tinted glasses.

The one thing I'm struggling to come around to, though? The music. Not that I think it's bad. The opposite, in fact—I've been loving the ominous tones of Durotar's overworld music, and venturing into Orgrimmar for the first time I was met with the perfect grand, foreboding sound that a city for the Horde deserves.

My problem is how little I seem to hear any of it. World of Warcraft likes for you to sit in these long, occasionally uncomfortable stretches of silence, instead letting the sounds of its world do the talking. Crunchy orc footsteps, the whispering of the wind, the squawk of an eagle. I am admittedly warming up to that deliberate choice of ambiance, but I also can't help but yearn for the thoroughly themed ways of Final Fantasy 14.

There's a song for just about anything in that game. Music for each zone during daytime hours. And another one for each zone during nighttime hours. Music for dungeons. And sub-bosses. And boss bosses. Hell, this expansion's raid series has a bespoke song for every single fight. And the final boss of each tier gets two of 'em! That's 15 whole ass songs just for one raid series.

Do some of its songs get relentlessly overused? Of course. I'm pretty sure most Warriors of Light suffer from some sort of Machinations-induced trauma at this point. But I'm convinced that for the most part Masayoshi Soken and the wider music team have, in fact, spoiled me rotten in this regard.

Tagging an enemy in WoW: Forever without being rewarded with some juicy combat music feels downright wrong, and it's the most unexpected way I've had to adapt from one MMO to another. I've become so used to that aural response that I've been feeling oddly lost without it. Hell, sometimes I'll be smacking away at an enemy while the serenity of the overworld music plays, which feels extra weird.

I kind of appreciate that World of Warcraft doesn't do it the way I expected it to, but I also certainly wouldn't say no to hearing more of what its composers have to offer. What I've heard so far has been downright fantastic, and I'm sure it won't be long before my brain starts getting all nostalgic and giddy when I hear the first few notes of Durotar's music flooding my ears as memories of my Troll Shaman saying "I need more range… cannot cast that yet… I need more mana… it is too far away…" will haunt/bless me once more.

The Elder Scrolls Online's developers have had a rough couple of years, starting with the scrapping of Project Blackbird in July 2025, which also led to 62 employees being laid off. Then, in July of this year, Xbox's reset tore into the studio's numbers, with a whopping 213 employees laid off from Zenimax Online. Overall, Zenimax Online's dev team dropped by roughly 60% in one year.

Which is a terrible blow, given I spoke to its development team back in January and was told it had rallied—and things were, for a while, really looking up. Refreshes to animations, a new seasonal structure, and a heaping help of experimental gameplay. Which made the aforementioned 2026 bloodbath both confusing and deeply disheartening.

I spoke with a few developers from the game to check in on how they were doing: "It is challenging," says game director Nick Giacomini, "something like this, it affects us. It affects all of us and the developers at a personal level. So we can't just pretend like it didn't happen and that it hasn't impacted us. We're human.

"At the same time, we still love this game. We love our players, and we love contributing to this and continuing to make it exciting, giving players something to look forward to. We're committed to doing so."

Giacomini himself dropped a letter to the community back in July, which echoed a lot of that same resolution—while also making the difficult choice to postpone a lot of the game's updates to 2027. "With what happened," Giacomini tells me, "That required us to take a look at schedules, see what's possible, and things needed to shift. And one of the underlying principles with that was that we didn't want to rush to just hit a date, right?

"We want [the] player experience to be as rewarding as possible to continue to surprise players and get them excited. And had we rushed it, would have put that at risk. So we wanted to give the team the space to be able to do it right, which necessarily meant pushing dates out for some things."

Giacomini says that, despite everything, the studio's not just in damage control mode: "I was just in a meeting earlier today about our plans for the end of 2027 and early 2028. So we're not just trying to figure out what to do now. We very much have an eye toward the future and how to continue to grow and excite players in this game."

Loremaster Michael Zenke views it as a means of honoring his colleagues who put in a ton of hard work already to getting ESO back on its feet: "Because ESO is here to stay, because it's not going anywhere, I personally feel like indebted to the people that we worked with, and want to make sure that the vision that they had goes out in the world and lands really successfully with the people that we love and appreciate on the community, and that's that's our long term thing that we're looking at right now."

Fortunately, Giacomini says the team has been buoyed by the community's support—and while some have been disappointed by the delays, no real ire's been directed at Zenimax Online itself: "I think our community is certainly one of the best—perhaps I'm a little bit biased—but it's one of the reasons that I love this game … We've had people reach out, we've had people post.

"We had a book that was made by our community, and it's now sitting in the office on a desk open right in the middle where everybody can see it … They wrote about what makes Elder Scrolls Online special to them, things that have stood out, and it is extraordinarily heartwarming. And it's just really it's been really incredible how they've supported us through this."

Looking forward

Mercifully, it's not like ESO's going to be completely dry before these delays—come September 28, the game'll be getting three new bits of content: The Nowhere Vault, an experimental set of puzzles, mazes, and jumping challenges put in a randomised order, The High Seas of Tamriel, an event that'll see you battling on ships and underwater, and perhaps the most interesting one: rumours.

A rumour is a special type of quest that's essentially a scavenger hunt—no quest markers, just hints. Associate game director Jason Barnes says it's designed to pull players out of a streamlined questing experience and into something a touch more immersive:

"We all have grown and up in MMOs, and I know probably [for] everyone here, our our time has changed dramatically over the years, but there was this sense of discovery and exploration [back then], and coming across something interesting where you don't really know the answer, no one's pointing to a direction and saying you have to go here or anything like that."

That's what rumours aim to do, as Barnes puts it: "You're not playing the UI; you're playing the actual game itself. Early testing and feedback has been very positive. Matter of fact, we've gotten feedback saying 'you need to make them harder, you need to make them more obscure'. So we're like, OK, cool, acknowledged."

A lot of these are hold-overs that were in the works before the layoffs of July this year, but still—it's nice to see ESO properly trying to experiment, something Giacomini is pretty key to the game's future. And those experiments have, in his mind, been successful:

"Night market is a great example … at first, players didn't quite know what to make of it. They came in and just got steamrolled right away. It was hard content, and so there were a lot of calls for like, 'Oh my god, this is so overtuned. What have you done!' But as time went by they started grouping up and they started enjoying it more … It's one of the few examples that I can think of where we didn't have to go to the drawing board."

Despite everything, there's some genuine excitement to be found still among Zenimax's developers: "I'm just really excited," says Zenke, "in general, that we are trying things. We've been making the game now for a very long time, and the way that we made the game and the best practices we developed are all really good … [But] I'm very excited about taking a hard look at like, 'Why do we do this this way? Why is this set up this way?'"

I'm not going to sit here and tell you, in this harsh and chaotic industry, that The Elder Scrolls Online is immune to future hardship—almost nothing surprises me anymore. But while it's clear that the one-two suckerpunch of layoffs and restructurings have hobbled Zenimax Online, it's still trying to keep ESO going. And in a genre that's on the ropes, I certainly hope this game can get back on solid ground without further earthquakes.

One of the developers running the World of Warcraft: Forever beta has no patience for the people who think they can get away with naming their characters something inappropriate.

I was surprised at how many awful player names I've seen while playing the beta over the last week. WoW usually has a pretty strict filter that covers a lot of racist or disgusting names and all their permutations. But in the beta, I saw more than usual that felt like they should've been blocked at the character creation screen.

It turns out, this was a mistake on Blizzard's part, according to senior game producer Tom Ellis on X: "Our naming filter wasn’t ready to rock for dual names but we naively thought after twenty years folks knew what was and wasn’t OK and we’d be fine for a few weeks of beta till it came online."

Things were not fine from day one of the beta, which required Blizzard to manually run every name through their filter system and then double check them just in case, Ellis said.

A wave of bans went out alongside the beta's first major patch yesterday to revoke access for the worst names and force the iffy ones to be changed. This prompted some of those players to go on social media and Reddit to complain that they were wrongfully punished.

"A couple of us spent the evening reading through everything again and checked every Reddit post and Twitter and so far every one of them who's posted their three cheeky or just inappropriate names has had a 4th character they have accidentally omitted," he says.

Ellis says there isn't a new policy for WoW: Forever and that anyone with names like that "would have not been allowed in any variation of WoW at any time in its history and would have earned you a suspension."

"If you're genuinely confused, remember that it's our database, we can see every character you've created, not just the one you're playing," he says. "I read the list. No sympathy. Be a better human next time."

It was very brave of Blizzard to launch what was inevitably going to be a massive beta without a working name filter. I don't envy the poor developers who have to manually go through them all as a result, but I do appreciate that there's zero tolerance for players who are abusing it. For every "Jack MeHoff" or "Ligma Bowlz" sparking delight and joy from us all, there are far nastier malefactors who should know better.

If WoW: Forever's devs want to bring back old-school social interactions in the MMO, this is the moderation approach it needs. The best moments in the beta have been the times where I've grouped up with strangers for a quick quest or saved a fellow adventurer from being mauled by several enemies at once. The last thing I want is for WoW: Forever to be ruined for anyone hoping to experience the kind of social interactions that make MMOs feel alive.

My first MMO character was...

Sakura-Lola

Born: 2004? Maybe?

Game: RuneScape

As a child who was not willing to try to convince their parents to send money to a strange company on a monthly basis, I had resigned myself to looking at MMOs like Final Fantasy XI longingly from afar. After being introduced by my best friend, the browser-based RuneScape was it for me…well, at least until we got a bit older and began devoting all of our time to Gaia Online.

My recollection is hazy, but I distinctly remember selecting flowing golden locks for my avatar, sticking her in a pink polygonal crop top, and setting out on a quest for cuter clothes. A rando gave me a ring and asked if I'd like to be their internet girlfriend. After that, I saw off randos by pretending I didn't speak English (if memory serves, I was obsessed with Final Fantasy X at the time and 'Suteki Da Ne?' was my go-to conversation-killing phrase—it was incredibly effective).

Somehow, some way I ventured into either a high-level area or player versus player zone and promptly lost everything. Many such cases—but perhaps it's time I pay a visit to the ol' RuneScape account.

(Read the full article here)

My first MMO character was...

Rennyfuu, Archer

Born: ~2002-2006

Game: Priston Tale

I spent time poking around in RuneScape and Graal Online as a kid, but they didn't stick. It wasn't until my failed campaign to persuade my mom into giving me her credit card for Final Fantasy 11 that I found my true MMO gateway: Priston Tale.

The western release was in beta for years, and I spent most of that time lagging to death on a 4MB integrated GPU as the game's worst archer. I have fond memories of arguing with grown adults twice my age about winning strategies in Survive or Die—the game's big arena brawl against waves of monsters—and distinctly remember a thread on an old fan forum dedicated to complaining about me. I was a menace.

I made multiple characters before Priston Tale eventually died out and was sold to Suba Games, where I'm fairly certain it remains active. I'm sure Rennyfuu is long gone by now, but sometimes I toy with the idea of going back for a visit.

(Read the full article here)

The World of Warcraft: Forever beta has gotten less stingy about talent costs. It was a little strange that it was stingy in the first place, given the fact you probably do want to let your players test out your refreshed talent system, but hey, here we are.

Resetting your talent now costs one silver, per the WoW Forever beta development notes on the official forums: "If you have not recently changed your talents, the cost is now 1 silver to re-spec. This is temporary for the Beta only. After your first talent reset, the subsequent cost will be much higher, but it will drop to 1 silver after 1 hour has passed."

My first MMO character was...

Zarwulf, Orc Hunter

Born: 2004

Game: World of Warcraft

Zarwulf was not my first MMO character, but I'm far too addled to remember anything about playing Ultima Online in 1998, or pretty much anything about my childhood. I do remember a wee bit about what I was doing at university, though, and that was mostly playing World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies and Guild Wars.

My buddy Zarwulf had a big sword, an impressive grimace, and probably a pet wolf. And he still exists, frozen in time—a situation I'm not going to remedy by playing him again. Better to leave the past in the past. In a way, he lives on in Guild Wars 2, where I sometimes muck around as a Daredevil with the same name.

(Read the full article here)

I grew up in the 2000s with a PC but not a whole lot of money. That's the kind of combination that gets you bargain-bin Sold Out Software games from Poundland or, more so in my case, an absurd number of free-to-play online and browser-based games that were utterly pervasive across the internet.

My childhood was a never-ending revolving door of these mid-tier Flash and Java games. Some have long left my memory, a fleeting experience. But some continue to rattle around in my brain, reminding me of simpler times where I didn't have to pay taxes or subject myself to at least one hour of screen-free time before bed lest I wake up with a headache the next morning.

But where are these weird and wonderful games now? Are they still scattered across the internet? Are they in their original forms, practically untouched, or have they evolved into far deeper and darker games than they once were?

Well, as I continue to march into my 30s against my will, I've been thinking back to the games I would play as a child and asking myself just that question. So why don't we go and check in on a couple of them?

Where the hell is Puzzle Pirates now?

Puzzle Pirates is, if you haven't already guessed, an MMO where you are a pirate and you do puzzles. Every component of a ship's operation is done through different puzzles—bilging is a Bejeweled-inspired match three, sailing is a buccaneering Doctor Mario, patching the sails is incredibly similar to Pipe Dream. You get the drill.

It's an incredible niche premise, one I expected to have long sunk. Except… it hasn't? As I popped on the internet to see if the game was still kicking around, I was shocked to discover that it was. Hell, it's on Steam. Still official and everything! No private, fan-run server to be seen! A couple seconds and a mere 85mb download later and my ears were being thoroughly blasted with jaunty pirate tunes. A search through my ancient childhood email inbox revealed that my original account was unfortunately deleted in 2012, so I made a brand-new pirate called Johnpcgamer (pirates are a singular-named folk, it seems) and dove right in.

And, well, aside from being told how to purchase premium currency within the first 60 seconds of being born, it's exactly how I remembered it. There are a lot less mateys milling around these days—most of them seemed to be the real for-lifers, ones with more trophies and gold and puzzle proficiency than most of the server combines—so I dove into a few tutorial voyages with some friendly bot pirates.

As a child I mostly stuck to bilging—as far as I could remember it was one of the easiest, and it was also one of the main duties assigned to scrubs like myself. I made a start with that one, before moving on to carpentry and rigging. And the minigames still hold up surprisingly well today, unsurprising considering most of them are inspired by iconic, already-established puzzles.

The occasional mid-voyage reports were informing me that I was, unfortunately, doing a little bit shit. The puzzles are good, but they require a level of speed, foresight, and cleverness that I clearly do not possess. At least there were no real-player captains there to yell at me about it.

After sailing the high seas for a little while, I went for a quick stroll around the town of the island my ship had arrived at. It was stuffed to the brim with tailors—every business in Puzzle Pirates is player-owned, and as with all MMOs I assume fashion is the endgame—with a single inn wedged between them all.

I nipped in, hoping to partake in drinking games with some NPCs. Unfortunately, they all massively outclassed me and in a display of pirate honour, politely refused to go toe-to-toe with me in a drinking contest lest I end up in some sort of hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby scenario.

Unfortunately, much of Puzzle Pirates seems to be gated off to swabs like me. Everything is too expensive (even buying doubloons, the game's premium currency), a good handful of the minigames are paywalled behind a subscription, along with many of its systems. But that's exactly how I remember it, so I'm taking a weird sort of comfort in this deja vu.

It's strange seeing this relic of my childhood stand the test of time. A niche MMO that I'd be surprised if it was drawing even triple-digit numbers these days, still drifting along the ocean slowly but surely. I doubt I'll be going back anytime soon, but I'm happy I even have the option to in the first place.

My first MMO character was...

Maldirr, Orc Warrior

Born: ~2005

Game: World of Warcraft

Technically, my very first MMO characters were in a RuneScape account (that was later hacked during years of inactivity) and a Trandoshan force-sensitive in Star Wars Galaxies, that I only played long enough to realize the New Game Enhancements were bad.

After enough hours of watching cinematic raid clear videos on WarcraftMovies.com and daydreaming about the legendary weapon names I saw after Googling my way to Thottbot, I convinced my parents to foot the bill for a WoW subscription. My intention was to make an Orc hunter.

I misclicked. I only realized I was playing a warrior after noticing my new character didn't have a bow.

But I rolled with it, and Maldirr remained my WoW main for years, Mortal Striking his way through casual Arms DPS rotations across somewhere in the neighborhood of four expansions. Eventually, however, the thrill of big Execute numbers gave way to other curiosities, and I started putting more time into my Worgen rogue. Then my undead mage. Then my dwarf shaman, who gets the most attention during the couple times a year I pay for a month of subscription time.

When I get those resurgent bouts of the WoW bug, I still try to put a few levels into Maldirr for old times' sake. At some point, I changed his hair color from brown to gray—but he's still wearing the same old Stone Guard tabard I'd earned from too many hours in Alterac Valley, when there was nowhere I'd rather be spending my time.

(Read the full article here)

Here are those 74 seconds of scorpion-clubbing ASMR you wanted, boss. You may not like it, but this is what peak MMO gaming looks like.

World of Warcraft: Forever has a lot of clever little surprises in it that players are digging up during the beta, including this one: A hidden druid shapeshift form that activates if you're wearing the five-piece Embrace of the Viper from the Wailing Caverns dungeon.

This is, in my estimation, sick as hell, and I'm glad that Blizzard's continuing to sneak hidden mechanics and rule-breaking items into its reimagined Azeroth.

My first MMO character was...

Ovidlords, Night-elf Druid

Born: ~2006

Game: World of Warcraft

After a friend bought me a video game bundle that included Diablo 2 and WoW, I jumped into Diablo and thought the Druid seemed like the coolest thing I’d ever seen. When I made the jump to paying a monthly sub for WoW, I was ecstatic to find I could also roll a shape-shifting Druid, so Ovidlords was born.

I was a Druid tank at a time when absolutely no one wanted that. I managed to MT Gruul in the Burning Crusade when I was told that was impossible. He also eventually ended up getting our server-first Ashes of Al’ar when we beat Kael-thas.

The account has since been deleted, but I’ll absolutely always remember my bear-y first MMO character.

(Read the full article here)

If there's one thing that Blizzard nailed with World of Warcraft: Forever, it's the atmosphere. There's nothing quite like walking under the moonlight in Tirisfal Glades listening to distant howls and flapping wings on the way to your next quest. But many players familiar with the era of WoW it's based on felt like it was missing something.

"I miss running through Dun Morogh hearing the iconic music with a massive snowstorm lowering my view distance on my Dwarf hunter, picking up quests from the dwarf next to the fire [and] restoring my inventory," Reddit user Darthbobz wrote in a post pleading Blizzard to bring WoW's old weather effects to WoW: Forever.

It's not that it doesn't rain or snow in WoW: Forever, it's that it doesn't rain and snow enough. People like Darthbobz want to be blinded by the amount of weather on screen, not surrounded by the suggestion of a storm.

Blizzard even says the core pillars of WoW: Forever are that the world is the main character and that the journey is more important than the destination. For the most part that's true: Over half of the experience involves running around forests and deserts rather than flying across them on a mount like you do in the modern version of the MMO. But the diet weather effects in the beta clash with the rest of Blizzard's commitment to adding friction back into the MMO.

It turns out, Blizzard agrees, and will be cranking the weather effects up to 10 in "certain" WoW: Forever beta zones, according to a teaser video for the next patch. The video is an ASMR-style montage of a rainstorm in Elwynn Forest. The screen is so thick with rain and fog it's hard to see past the trees bordering the town of Goldshire. It's a real storm that makes you instinctively want to duck into the inn to stay dry.

The beta's level cap is 20, so when Blizzard says "certain" zones will have the increased weather effects I assume it's because most of the game isn't available yet. It also might mean that snowstorms and sandstorms aren't quite ready to go live, but we won't know until the patch notes are out later this week.

I honestly didn't expect intense weather effects to come back within the first few weeks of the beta. Blizzard's quick turnaround has me curious if we'll see more updates based on player feedback that are more substantial than some balance tweaks and bug fixes. WoW: Forever is already in a really good spot judging from the flood of praise people have given it in the last week. That's promising for a game that's going to be here in just a few months on November 4.

Like many others who carry the spiritual stain of prior MMO contact, I've been spending some time in the WoW: Forever beta. After piloting a freshly-minted orc through the introductory quests in the Valley of Trials, I emerged into the wider Durotar scrubland where I soon entered into combat with a hostile scorpion that had strayed too close to the road I was following to Razor Hill.

For the next 38 consecutive seconds, I did nothing but watch my orc slowly bludgeon that scorpion to death with a wooden club. And reader, I say this with full sincerity: Those were 38 seconds of peak gaming.

I haven't just been playing Forever to sample Blizzard's distillation of year one WoW nostalgia. I've been testing a conviction that I recently forwarded after a week with Star Wars Galaxies: a belief that MMOs would be better off if they rediscovered their lost willingness to burn more of our time.

My half-minute and change of scorpid combat has left me feeling pretty confident in the hypothesis.

The notion that slower could be better might feel antithetical to current trends in game design, particularly in MMOs. Games have given themselves over to the pursuit of acceleration: the drive to win faster, kill more, and make the numbers bigger as soon as possible—to achieve the most gaming in the least amount of time.

Judging from the ecosystems of optimization guides and meta build videos, players seem very eager to indulge. But when the rhythm of retail WoW is tuned with the assumption that even low level characters should enjoy a frenzy of special attack animations, button presses, and near-instant kill times, a meditative arachnid clubbing is a reminder of what's been lost in the exchange.

Namely, a chance to appreciate the rest of the videogame.

When I've been acclimated to years of high-speed flying mounts and an abundance of off-cooldown abilities, the contemplative pace of my orc's club-swinging opened up so much room for admiring the surrounding space—room I hadn't realized I'd been missing so badly. I could savor the way the in-game sunrise spilled over the Horde heartland's redstone crags, or the interplay of ambient wind samples and the soundtrack's intermittent war drumming.

And crucially, unlike when an MMO is doing everything in its power to propel me along a highway of reptilian brain chemicals, those 38 seconds give me time to think: about what spells I might unlock over my next few levels, which zone I might want to quest in next, or what business that troll warlock is running towards in the distance. It's time to wonder, weigh options, and linger in the concepts and possibility spaces that WoW proposes.

Knowing how WoW—and games like it—have gradually become a blur of constant doing, Forever's massive popularity is validating how much satisfaction there can be in slowing MMOs down. Maybe this time it'll stick.

My first character was...

Leetman, Human Rogue

Born: ~2004-2006

Game: World of Warcraft

My first ever character was in World of Warcraft, after—as my bio states—I pretty much begged my parents to give me a WoW subscription, and was rewarded for my articulation with a proper WoW account and a life-changingly debilitating enthusiasm for videogames. And while I did technically have a Runescape character before this, I can't remember 'em, so Leetman is here.

I was not a good rogue. In my defense, I was 10 years old—but I didn't level my poisons, I didn't reach level cap, and the height of my career was spent futzing around Un'Goro Crater. I did, however, manage to get the gold for a mount, which made me feel pretty swanky. That was a big deal back in the day.

Leetman would eventually be traded out for the troll shaman Earthborn when The Burning Crusade rolled around, but I shall remember him fondly. Perhaps his reticence to use poison was merely a question of honour—but he's deleted, now, so we shall never know.

(Read the full article here)

World of Warcraft: Forever's got me feeling nostalgic. In case you've been under a rock this week, Blizzard's released the beta for its reimagining of "Classic"—or, if you're at least 30 years old like me, "Vanilla"—World of Warcraft. It's a trip and a half, seeing these old zones touched up with just the right amount of modernisation.

I've been feeling so nostalgic, in fact, that I decided to ask my fellow writers who their first MMO character was. Or, at least, the first one they could remember. In doing so, I have discovered two things: First, we're all a bunch of mid-2000s kids. This much should not surprise you.

Secondly: It's amazing how many details we can drum up about these games, especially from 20+ years ago. You always remember your first—and if you feel the warm rose-tinted fuzzies, I encourage you to share your own first MMO character in the comments down below.

One day, I just stopped playing. You don't realise it's the last time you'll play, but it was—at least for a very long time. I always kept my account details, though. Not too long ago, in 2025, I decided to log back in after God knows how many years. I'm 34 now, but I was 33 then. I must've been 10 or under when I was playing RuneScape.

I was banned. My account had been banned for years. Some clown had stolen it and used it to do nefarious things in my name. I don't know why, but I felt a real sadness for losing that account, even despite not logging in for years. So I sent Jagex an email. It read:

And, wouldn't you know, someone at Jagex un-banned me. So I'd like to take this moment to say thank you to 'Mod Frenzy' at Jagex support. I don't know if that's a specific mod or just some collective name for the support team at the bottom of every email. Either way, they saved probably my longest running character in any videogame from near-certain banishment. Legend.

I have made the choice to min-max in WoW: Forever, something which I am starting to regret, because oh no, my hubris. See, Blizzard will be raising the level cap sometime soon to 30, and I decided I'd complete a bunch of quests, but not turn them in. But I'd forgotten that a lot of Vanilla-era quests involve picking up quest items. And I only have eight-slot bags. Help me.

You can play the first several hours of World of Warcraft: Forever and miss a lot of the changes Blizzard slipped into the early leveling experience. There are new quests and NPCs, but they barely stand out if you don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the MMO.

Now that players have had enough time to hit the beta's level 20 cap, they're starting to find what makes WoW: Forever different from a 1:1 remake of the old game. Items that break rules, like an axe that lets you mine ore without the mining skill, tease what's in store when the full game is out on November 4.

That axe, for example, drops off of an enemy in the Deadmines dungeon. You can use it to mine materials 30 times before it presumably breaks. Loot multiple of them and you can circumvent the way professions are usually meant to work in WoW: Most people pick up a gathering profession and use the materials to make gear with a crafting profession. The new axe lets you run two crafting professions—a luxury almost nobody had in 2004.

Players have also found a new sword that enables a playstyle for mages that was only a dream before. The Coldflame Saber—found in the Shadowfang Keep dungeon—has a unique bonus that causes melee attacks to deal fire damage to frozen targets. Normally mages want to be as far away from enemies as they can, but this sword enables a 'battle mage' playstyle that would've gotten you kicked from a group if you tried it in the past.

The concept of adding items that turn the old MMO on its head isn't technically new. Blizzard ran a limited-time mode called Season of Discovery where breaking the game was the entire point. Mages could stand in the frontlines and tank dungeons like a warrior in it. I don't get the sense that WoW: Forever will be quite as absurd from the start, but some of the new items suggest Blizzard won't be holding back the weird stuff just for max-level players.

There's no doubt Season of Discovery was a major influence on WoW: Forever. A "Cozy Sleeping Bag" item from it was just recently found in WoW: Forever, in fact. Curling up for three minutes in it will give you a 3% XP buff that stacks with the 5% XP buff from cooking. WoW Classic purists would lose their minds at an 8% XP buff.

Blizzard intentionally hid many of WoW: Forever's new items from dataminers so players could discover them organically. Earlier today, people realized there are a bunch of hidden books that reward you with extremely powerful rare items to juice your leveling journey. Assuming secrets like this will be snuck into the entire world, the November launch is going to be full of surprises as people uncover it all.

Even though Blizzard is committed to keeping some of the foundational aspects of WoW intact, I like that there are areas where nothing is sacred and things that you might've imagined as a kid might actually become real. I'll be patiently waiting for an item that lets warlocks tame enemies as permanent minions like Path of Exile 2 just introduced in its recent update.

Alright, here's the problem—I'm not sure this really works for its intended purpose.

World of Warcraft has traditionally had roleplay servers, yes, and those servers do traditionally have people acting out their gameplay in-character: But there's a perception, which is being applied here by Blizzard, that this is their—our—main deal.

In my experience, most RP communities do have players who are still interested in… well, playing the game. Very few people log on exclusively for the purpose of writing with each other. They'll also do dungeons, raids, and so on—with a clear split between their in-character actions and game time. Basically, nobody's RP-walking in a dungeon on Argent Dawn EU. We're doing the damn dungeon.

I won't gripe about the "strict naming conventions and behaviour rules" because there's every chance they're reasonable, although the word "strict" does give me cause for alarm. Roleplay servers tend to work on informal manners without one real "one size fits all" model of in-character/out of character conduct.

What gives me actual pause are these clarifications by Blizzard:

• "Cross-ruleset grouping is not supported, so characters in different spaces will not be able to group together for those activities."
• "Players cannot freely hop between rulesets; to play under a different one, they’ll need to create a new character in that ruleset."

This seems like an overkill requirement for roleplayers—who, again, very rarely act in-character while they're doing dungeon runs and raids. While I can see separating "normal" ruleset players and roleplayer ruleset players out in the open world, where RP is likely to take place, there's no real reason to split them off from the rest of the community outside of that.

Roleplay servers in the retail game are where we congregate, sure—but they're actually populated by a lot of folks who don't roleplay, or just like to watch people RP. And I see no reason why, in Forever, we should be siloing off those groups from each other in all content.

A clear split between the other rulesets makes sense, but to a roleplay ruleset, I think a semi-permeable membrane would make sense. That way, I can still play with my non-RPer mates—something I do all the time in other MMOs of choice without having to make a separate character.

Judging from player interest in the WoW: Forever beta, it seems like Blizzard's got a good start at channeling nostalgia into its retirement home for aging MMO millennials. But there's only one thing that'll determine if it's a successful rebottling of the old lightning, and that'll be whether or not I can find myself shuffled back into the same game of Alterac Valley that I'd logged out of 18 hours earlier, where nothing has changed except the number of times an orc has been cursed out in text chat for wasting effort by fighting over the wrong graveyard.

Nothing else matters.

A common early World of Warcraft experience was to stumble into a series of corpses lying on the ground that, when looked at from the right angle, spelled out a URL for a site where you can pay real money for in-game gold.

Gold was scarce back then, which spawned an entire market for buying it instead of grinding for it. Even if you never touched one of those sites, it was impossible to not see ads online or splayed out in front of you in a popular city.

Blizzard has taken a light touch in the past when it comes to punishing people who willingly violate the MMO's EULA with real-money trading (RMT), but promises that won't be the case for World of Warcraft: Forever.

In a recent Q&A, senior game designer Josh Greenfield addressed concerns about guilds letting players bid on items with gold (known as "gold dragon kill points" or GDKP) and the risks of RMT in WoW: Forever. He emphasized that Blizzard will "very aggressively punish gold buyers," to prevent the in-game trading economy from getting out of hand.

"Being frank, we've been probably too lenient on gold buyers and it's been a little bit easy to get around some of our actions before and we are taking it very seriously," Greenfield added. "As someone who's got a 22-year-old World of Warcraft account I can tell you it's not worth losing it permanently, it's not worth losing any of your accounts permanently, so I would very strongly recommend [you] don't do it, it's not worth it."

Greenfield doesn't say it outright, but is implying that anyone who breaks the rules with RMT will have their account banned rather than temporarily suspended. Whenever I see discussions about RMT, people will always say that it would help if Blizzard didn't slap offenders on the wrist and actually took away their access completely. Whether or not that will be how it's handled in the full release remains to be seen—nobody cares about becoming rich in the beta—but it's at least promising to hear that it's a high priority for the studio.

In an MMO where the level cap will never be raised and updates will introduce new things to characters of all levels, the last thing you want is for severe inflation to kill the value of trading with other players and therefore the value of learning a tradeskill altogether. Greenfield stressed that the sanctity of the economy is an important part of the experience and that Blizzard has tuning knobs for controlling supply and demand to balance things out.

The more I've gotten into Path of Exile 2, an action RPG built around player trading for rare drops, the more I've witnessed how quickly things can go haywire. An exploit that lasts two hours can have devastating effects on the price of items, so I hope Blizzard is also prepared to handle whatever crops up organically, too.

When the gates opened on the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, it was a free-for-all. Everyone fought to be the first to "tag" enemies with their attacks so they would count for their quests—a problem that is essentially obsolete in modern WoW.

My memories of doing this in the real classic WoW came flooding back as I frantically tried to claim enemies before someone else did. But that old frustration also prompted old solutions: Whenever I came across a quest to kill seven wolves or whatever, I invited other players into my group so that everyone got credit.

This, according to senior game designer Josh Greenfield on X, is exactly what Blizzard wants to see.

Greenfield responded to a conversation about whether or not shared enemy kill credit should be a thing in WoW: Forever to say pretty firmly that it's not going to change.

"This is one of those things that we simply must hold the line on," he wrote. "I think there are other things we can do to help alleviate some frustration here but shared tagging is not it."

"It's hard to see the value in something like this when you are frustrated in the moment," he added, "but it is extremely important to our social pillar to maintain some of this friction."

The chaos of the beta launch is a limited-time thing. It'll happen again on November 4 when WoW: Forever fully drops, but eventually it's not going to be as much of a problem as the population of players spreads out across Azeroth.

From that point-of-view, I like the firm stance Blizzard has on this. It requires almost no effort to invite someone to your group for the 5 minutes it takes to finish a quest, and in that short amount of time there's the possibility for a longer-lasting friendship to grow. I've certainly met friends this way before and it would be neat to have it happen again.

But at the same time, I hope Blizzard is prepared for what will probably be an overwhelmingly popular launch week. Hundreds of players squeezed into a small field with 30 wolves is only going to cause frustration if there's no solutions for things like slow enemy and item respawns. Beta players have already posted screenshots of people lining up to interact with a quest object that only shows up every few minutes. That's the kind of friction nobody wants when they only have a few hours to play.

World of Warcraft: Forever has a nice little toggle that lets you switch between Classic's old-school models and Retail's newer, shinier ones. But which one are you using?

Personally, I'm sporting the HD models. The big braided mohawk style on trolls just looks so much better. You can see a little comparison of my current Forever Shaman up in the ol' header image; peep how she looks in each style and let me know which one you like more!

I swore I'd never become this evil

Anyway, this beta is not designed to be a competitive experience. For those not in the know, Blizzard will be wiping all of the WoW: Forever progress when the game launches in November.

But I am going to be treating it like one, because all of my morals have crumpled into a hole with a sign that says: "I want to be 3 levels higher than everybody in October for like two hours." I'm especially (on paper) against the idea of min-maxing in a beta, where your progress means absolutely nothing. And yet. And yet.

Here's the issue—I am currently an inch away from level 19. I have a bunch of quests I'd like to do, including finishing the new Ruins of Lordaeron dungeon. I am not doing this, however, because Blizzard will at some point be increasing the cap from level 20 to level 30.

But I also have a massive problem: I don't want to stop playing my Warrior. I'm hitting some absolutely meaty crits. So what is a lad to do? Well, while you can still do quests in the beta, there's nothing to say you actually have to turn them in, especially because Blizzard has increased your journal limit from 20 to 40.

If you're picking up what I'm putting down: I will be continuing to quest in level-appropriate zones through this new Azeroth, I just won't be turning anything in. I am going to, like some kind of maniac, flood my questing journal with 40 batches of EXP, then get the biggest dopamine hit of my life when that level cap is raised sometime next month.

Why am I doing this to myself? That's a very good question, and one I'm too busy grinding to answer.

WoW Forever is basically my first time experiencing Blizzard's MMO for a significant amount of time—that level 13 Paladin rotting away on my retail account for the last eight years doesn't count—and you know what? Even as someone who isn't rocking around Azeroth in rose-tinted glasses, I'm having a pretty sweet time.

I even surprised myself by how endeared I am to all its old-schoolness. I like that there's no globally shared tagging, even if that means you party with a handful of randoms for 10 seconds and never speak to them again. I've even been fine with its archaic gathering quests, where all of its nodes are server-side instead of client-side. Want to go and pick that cactus fruit, but some other player beats you to it? Well, it's gone now. Go and pick another one.

Well, I was fine with it anyway. That is until I arrived in Orgrimmar, the Horde's capital city. My initial arrival was dizzying, bearing witness to its densely-populated streets and rapid-fire global chat where recruitment messages are quickly buried by folks talking about how many rolls of toilet paper they go through each day. Yeah, I dunno either.

I was having a lovely little time exploring, picking up just about every quest I could find. And then it happened. I innocently scooped up a quest called Rocks to Rest, tucked around the back of a building where a group of troll children are gathered.

Go and get some rocks so we can have chairs and tables, I'm ordered. Okay, easy enough. Right? WRONG.

Turns out that whimsical server-side gathering nodes become significantly less so when there are at least 10 of you vying for sporadically-spawning rocks. And you have to collect eight of the damn things. I scooped up my first one with relative ease, before the rest of my quest devolved into the chaos of rapidly swinging my camera around waiting for one to spawn, before watching everybody (me included) dash off in its direction for the hopes of being the chosen one who gets to loot it a millisecond before everybody else.

Now I've seen queues and orderly lines form for some of these quests, but Rocks to Rest? It's the wild west, baby. You snooze, you lose. I made the mistake of rotating my camera away from a rock that spawned directly behind me, and before I even had the chance to swing it back around and begin looting, I was beaten to the punch.

I was expecting a raid boss to be the thing that broke me. Maybe dying one too many times to a quest mob, or trying to navigate the game's multitude of systems as someone who has barely set foot in this world before. But no, it was a freaking boulder.