World of Warcraft: Forever's launch has been downright impressive—MMOs are notoriously difficult to run servers for, particularly when it comes to launch, where players will get bottlenecked into servers, throwing devs into a catch 22: Do they increase capacity and wind up wasting money in the long run while things die down, or do they ride out the wave? And yet, after the chaos of the beta, it's been buttery smooth.

Which is why I'm willing to forgive Blizzard for a weird quirk of its realmless layering technology—cities have been empty, empty as hell. Which is a shame, given I know that hundreds of thousands of players are technically on this thing—and yet, none of them are in my Stormwind.

Well, Forever's devs are working on a fix, per the official forums: "Just wanted to chime in," says Aggrend, "And say that we are aware of some issues with certain areas not feeling as populated as they should. We will be tweaking some numbers tomorrow to help things feel a bit more lively. Thanks for the feedback on this one!"

That's a relief to hear, especially given I'm on a roleplay server, and there have been problems with this sort of thing where phasing has interrupted the flow of narrative commerce in the past. Cities, especially, should feel lived-in, and it's hard to create a sense of community when people you could be writing with keep bamfing in and out of existence.

But even if you aren't a roleplayer like yours truly, I think you should be gladdened by this news—big cities are one of the places where crowding isn't a problem at all, but rather, the thing you want. They're social hubs, and rubbing shoulder to shoulder with the masses at the auction house is kind of the whole point.

At least anecdotally, my Stormwind's been looking a lot more populated, and I'm sure that as populations settle to sane levels and Blizzard keeps chipping away at this tech, the streets'll be bustling again.

World of Warcraft: Forever has proven extremely popular—and while I was preparing for the launch last night, I was bracing for the same experience I had in the beta. Namely: Long queue times, connection errors, and disconnects. At least I wouldn't have to use a VPN this time, I thought, that is some small saving grace.

Turns out I needn't have worried. There was a brief panic, mind, when I finished a breezy five minute queue and landed on a ruleset selection screen that was completely greyed-out. But one eight minute queue later, and I was in—and proceeded to quest until 4 am with nary a disconnection or lagspike to be seen.

Granted, I am playing on both the EU realms and the roleplay ruleset, both of which are bound to be less populous. But having hopped online, it doesn't seem like I'm alone: "I fully expected to not be able to play today, but I logged in with no queue and no lag," writes one equally-astonished player on the game's subreddit.

"Outside of having to spawn camp some wolves at the start, this has been the best wow launch I've seen so far. I haven't really had to compete for mobs, or herbs or quest drops, and I only had a brief moment of lag," writes another.

On that point, I do feel like the phasing is maybe working a little too well. I had an eerie experience jogging around Stormwind (admittedly, this was at 3 am on a Wednesday. Anyone with a normal job was likely sanely and soundly asleep) and having the Alliance's capital city all to myself.

But it is early days, with Blizzard clearly having braced hard to deal with its server capacity. And compared to the opposite of having to bare-knuckle wrestle people for quest tags—or group up and cooperate like some kind of loser, I guess—it's way more preferable. So kudos for Blizzard, managing a downright smooth MMO launch. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some kobolds to rob of their candles.

The Great Outdoors quest is one of the first you'll find after leaving your initial area in WoW: Forever, in which you meet an NPC who teaches you about camping.

It's an extremely simple one—you perch your backside in front of a campfire and then wait for a short while as a buff accumulates, teaching you the importance of regularly resting at fires for their passive bonus. Basically, you just:

1. Press X to sit in front of the fire, which will complete the first stage of the quest
2. A buff will appear in the top right called Welcoming Campfire and will count down from 60 seconds
3. When it reaches zero, you get the buff and finish the quest

Simple stuff, but this quest is bugged for some players. When they try to sit, it doesn't register, meaning you can't complete the first stage. I assume Blizzard will be working on a hotfix, but one solution that works for some players is pressing X to sit in front of the fire, then typing /sit into chat. Give it a try and see.

Otherwise, you might have to return to this one later, which is definitely frustrating, as this NPC's follow-up quests introduce you to different aspects of some early-game professions and crafting.

World of Warcraft's big crossover with Dungeons & Dragons is finally here—and despite being a huge flagship collaboration, one of the biggest MMOs meeting with one of the biggest TTRPGs, I'm sad to say I'm feeling just a touch whelmed. This sourcebook is inconsistent—filled with very cool character options in some places, and just pointing at the already-existing player's handbook in others.

That inconsistency doesn't let the whole project down, mind. There are still some rules tucked away in here that I think are great additions to any campaign, not just a World of Warcraft-themed one.

Let's start with the big one: Classes. WoW and D&D do have a lot of overlap in terms of class fantasy—there's not much in the way of appreciable differences between a Fighter and a Warrior, other than a few iconic abilities being missing from the pack. As a result, this rulebook essentially uses the pre-existing classes as a template to throw some WoW flavour on.

Some of these changes are meaningful—take, for example, the Death Knight. This uses the Paladin's chassis, but throws in a ton of impactful changes, replacing Lay on Hands with Death Coil, for example. It also throws a whole new raft of Death Knight-adjacent spells, adjusts your Find Steed with a cool undead ghost that can phase through objects, and more.

A lot of the classes are solved by custom spells like this—the Paladin, for instance, has just the one new subclass to cover for Holy and a bunch of iconic Paladin spells. But the balance of these is a touch skewiff in places. Take Divine Shield, for instance. This thing is straight busted.

It's a 4th level spell, which does admittedly mean you'll only get it at levels 13 plus, but it makes you immune to not only the damage of a triggering attack, but also all damage until the start of your next turn. AND you can't be moved or have your speed reduced. While absolutely correct for the flavour of WoW's iconic bubble, this is crazy overpowered.

And while some of these classes do have a lot new on offer, others are so thin on content it's a wonder why they're there at all. The rogue gets a particularly short end of the stick, for instance. Outlaw rogues are just given a reskinned version of 5e's Swashbuckler subclass (which does, in fairness, have some new Cunning Strike options to bring it up to parity). Otherwise, the book just points you in the direction of pre-existing subclasses.

Others are a complete miss, too. Shamans are all awkwardly stuffed into the chassis of the Barbarian, which only really works for Enhancement shamans—Elemental and Restoration shamans are pretty much just your standard D&D barbarian with some flavour-adjacent rage options, rather than the full spellcasters they are in the videogame.

This inconsistency in quality applies to character origins, too. Some of them have fully bespoke traits—Dracthyr get their visage forms, Void Elves get this cool void form that triggers when you hit identical numbers on an Advantage/Disadvantage roll, and so on. And then there are Orcs and Dwarves, some of WoW's most iconic races, where the book goes: Just use the stuff that's already in the PHB.

And yet, there's a lot to this supplement I actually like. When it's actually adding new options to the classes, I think they're cool—the Frost Mage flavoured feat, Fingers of Frost, gives you extra cold damage against restrained creatures, for example. But the real thing I would encourage you to just crib for your non-Azerothian games are its gathering and crafting systems.

Crafty rules

In 5e (and the 2024 rules), crafting's always been sort of a joke. There are tool proficiencies, but they might come up every once in a blue moon. The actual Player's Handbook just says to half the cost of an item, then smacks you around the head with a massive downtime cost for anything particularly expensive—a suit of plate armor takes a whopping 150 days to craft (though you can split this with extra help). At which point you might as well just eat the GP cost and buy the damn thing.

This book, however, has some really neat rules for gathering and crafting professions. Having the right tool proficiency gives you access to a profession, which you can level up when your proficiency bonus increases to new tiers (which also increases the rarity of the items you can make).

Instead of making players shell out the gold cost, these gathering professions have a neat little table for getting enough golds' worth in raw materials to make the thing, with extra bonuses for beating the involved DC by five or more. When you get to higher levels, certain recipes might require items from specific regions—and you might only know how to make those items via recipes obtained from certain factions.

It's still all pretty lightweight (although each profession does have a useful list of suggested recipes it should know) but that's honestly a boon to this system, rather than a bane, because you could very easily just slot this whole mechanic into your homebrew campaign with very little trouble.

And, more to the point, you could very easily make entire adventure hooks out of going to get specific materials for a recipe here—which helps solve D&D crafting's main issue: It's not relevant unless you have literal months of in-game downtime to kill. While the book doesn't make changes to the time-to-craft issue, it's still a major step up.

Renown's another mechanic I like. You get renown with certain factions based on your origins, but you can increase this renown through play to get certain perks. For instance, improved renown with Darnassus gives you the option to learn certain proficiencies, gain a blessing from its leaders, or gather extra materials with herbalism. My favorite of these is the gnomeregan Shield Guardian perk, which specifically states that if you dip below 50 renown again, the guardian turns on you. Sorry buddy, my creator says you dropped off.

Aside from these rules additions, there are also some solid dungeon adventures with their own bespoke stat blocks, extra magic items, and a respectable bestiary full of critters to toss into your campaign.

The fact that there's plenty to like in this book makes it all the more frustrating that it's so inconsistent—some areas have novel, if a little wonky, additions to the system. Others shrug like the book's designers simply ran out of time and budget, pointing towards resources that you already own.

However, if you are looking to run a WoW-specific campaign, or just want crafting rules that don't suck, it very well might be worth checking out on the strength of its secondary mechanics alone. Just don't go in there expecting a 1:1 replication of the MMORPG. This is still Dungeons & Dragons—and in some places, I mean that literally.

WoW: Forever's release is imminent, transporting us back to the good ol' days of adventuring through Azeroth, but with new content, visuals, plus class and race tweaks to try out. You can even create your character early and reserve your name, though that feature ends today.

Forever releases on November 4 or 5 depending on where you call home, but it is a simultaneous release around the globe. Here's when you can play:

• West Coast US: 3 pm PST (November 4)
• East Coast US: 6 pm EST (November 4)
• UK: 11 pm GMT (November 4)
• Europe: 12 am CET (November 5)
• Australia: 10 am AEDT (November 5)
• New Zealand: 1 pm NZDT (November 5)

For full times, check the image above. There is a preload available on BattleNet which clocks in at around 50GB, though if you've already got Classic or Retail WoW installed, the size should be smaller as the game shares some of the same files.

Earlier this week, Kris Zierhut, principal game designer on World of Warcraft: Forever, said that the game would have a release schedule that's a "little more laid back". Rather than the blisteringly fast eight to 10 week schedule of Season of Discovery, Forever'll aim to release major updates once every four months or so.

This is honestly music to my ears—I've been impressed by retail WoW's blistering pace and its seasonal structure, even if there have been some rocky, bug-filled patches in the past; and it's certainly something I've praised before, especially in contrast to other certain MMOs that have been coming to a standstill.

But I've been playing WoW… well, for a long time, but I've had a consistent sub since Dragonflight, and I've been able to see the arc of Blizzard whipping up its schedule into a proper roadmap. Which did pull the game back from the brink, true, but three expansions in and I'm just sort of exhausted.

There's always some new bar to fill, some new doohickey to collect, some new reputation track to chew on, and it all moves so fast that if I, say, have an off-week to go play another game, I feel pretty lost. While Midnight does major patches at roughly the same release tempo (12.0.0 came out in January, 12.1.0 came out in August) it also has a ton of interim stuff to flood out your schedule every three months, rather than four.

Launch was already crammed with stuff—a raid tier, delves, the new prey system, housing, and so on. Just under three months passed since launch, and wham, suddenly we've got Void Assaults! Ritual Sites! The Omnium Folio! Whatever Abyss Anglers is, I never checked, which is kinda the problem! Just over a month later, and there's a new raid and a new system plugged into Void Assaults (which I'm literally just now finding out about, I completely missed it). Two months later, and it's 12.1.0, which I hadn't even sat down to properly play before Labyrinths became a thing.

The idea of smaller, chiller patches in an overall slower-paced game (here's fellow PCG writer Lincoln Carpenter's treatise on the virtues of hitting a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds) sounds like a nice, soothing bath after an overstimulating day at the circus.

I do feel that prickling sense of overstimulation fear return when Zierhut talks about the interim stuff, however:

"And then one nuance on that is: We do plan on making content that unlocks in between … you want to stagger out some content across those four months. It's not just patch day comes [around], here's a content fire hose, and now we're silent for four months. A lot of that is, hey, there's a time event calendar that gradually unlocks things and opens them up over those four months to give things a little bit more life instead of that all at once effect."

Still, given Forever's meant to be a horizontally-progressing game that doesn't have expansions (we'll need to see how that pans out), I might find these little tasks a lot more soothing than the looming feeling I have with WoW, where at any point it might suddenly become too late to get stuck into a season.

Ideally, these mid-patch trickles will be optional tasks I can get around to basically whenever, rather than something I feel pressured to get done just so I can stay up-to-date for whatever flashy system's trundling down the pipeline next. Hit me with that lo-fi update cadence, I'm ready for it.

World of Warcraft: Forever is "realmless", which has a couple of advantages for oceanic (OCE) players—who so often get the short end of the stick when it comes to MMORPGs. Blizzard has servers in Australia, so OCE players can enjoy not having terrible ping, but due to the smaller playerbase they share a lot of overlap with the North American server architecture.

Which produces a unique problem: As it stands, OCE players are stuck in perpetual night. See, Forever has a 24 hour day/night cycle, so if you play during the evening and your timezone's matched to the server, the sun will set in Azeroth roughly at the time it would outside your window. But since OCE players are very much not local to North America… the curse of endless night persists.

As explained here on the WoW forums: "Because our servers share North American clock cycles, playing after work means the game is locked in pitch black. Log on at 7 pm? Midnight. Saturday afternoon? Dark. Unless you ruin your sleep schedule to play at 4 am, you practically never see the sun in Kalimdor."

A solution, however, was offered by the game's developers in an official podcast on the WoW channel—since Australia does actually have local server architecture, lead software engineer Ana Resendez says that "we could have an Australia timezone in those, but what happens if you're playing and suddenly you get an invite from [a North American player], then all of a sudden you go from night to day within like a couple of seconds? It's something we talked about."

Which is a little immersion-breaking, for sure, but likely preferable to being stuck in eternal night—especially given how gosh-darn pretty Forever's lighting changes are. There are a ton of lovely sunsets that'd be a shame to miss. Senior game designer Josh Greenfield, however, straight-up asks if Australian players would be happy for the chance to get some virtual vitamin D every once in a while:

"How would you feel about that, Australian players? Is that a thing you'd be okay with? Would you be okay with your day/night suddenly changing abruptly? … Getting feedback on that honestly would be helpful."

It's a teeny-tiny sample size, but at least on the r/wowforever subreddit, OCE players are all in favour: "In Retail," writes the author of one thread, "to make ourselves day time we are constantly having potions or toys to shift the sky for us anyway, it's something a lot of us are accustomed to … the shift would only happen when joining a dungeon.

"The gameplay in WoW Forever is a lot slower, you are not joining and leaving groups, getting kicked for your score or your gear level, you spend a significant time in that group so you're not going to be always changing the day and night."

However, as some players note, maybe the problems with the day/night cycle being 24 hours to begin with. Some suggest it exists on a 20-hour cycle, instead—which would gradually shift the time of sunset around so that players with more rigid schedules could experience Forever's different lighting states for themselves.

Which, personally, sounds like the best bet. While I do think it's neat if a game world matches my real-world state—it's always fun to get cosy—I'd rather have variety than consistency, especially when Forever's lighting is such an upgrade.

A major draw for World of Warcraft: Forever is how much slower it will be compared to the modern version of the MMO. Traveling across the world takes longer, quests take longer, and even fighting enemies takes considerably longer than most players have gotten used to.

This slower pace is basically the whole point of having an MMO set in the original era of WoW. It's an opportunity to experience what it might've been like if Blizzard never sped things up over the course of several expansions.

WoW: Forever will still evolve over time, though. Blizzard plans to regularly update it like the rest of its games. And unlike each version of WoW: Classic, it can pull from all of WoW's history to keep things going in perpetuity.

According to a recent interview with IGN, WoW: Forever's update schedule will accommodate how much longer it takes to do things. Principal game designer Kris Zierhut says it'll be "a little more laid back" than the modern game.

"So we've done a lot of experimentation to see what is the correct rate, and we're fairly convinced the correct rate is something closer to once every four months or 17 weeks or three times a year, whatever you want to call it. That is a cadence we have in mind for releasing new content," he says.

Many of the developers on the WoW: Forever team already experimented with releasing new stuff every eight weeks while running the limited-time Season of Discovery mode and Zierhut says, "It felt way, way, way too fast."

Major updates for WoW: Forever will be timed around new raid tiers, giving players several months to work through them. But raids won't be the whole focus. Blizzard intends to add new things to do for characters under max level, and some portion of every update will "unlock two or three months in or one month into that," Zierhut says.

For a game that celebrates the glacial pace of the old MMO, long before it adopted a seasonal model, that seems like a promising way to keep things fresh without tarnishing the spirit of it. That said, I'm still super curious how this will go in the long run, especially as players reach max level and squeeze the game dry with optimized routes and guides. One of Blizzard's big goals is to "unsolve" the game and I wonder how it will continue to do that as the years go on.

The design politics of studios in the early 2000s will always fascinate me—not the unsavory stuff, I am glad that is well and truly binned—but rather, the little elbows and feet put on other designers in studios where there wasn't a clear, clean pipeline or a mandate.

Such was the case with Blizzard where, as revealed by principal game designer Kris Zierhut in a recent Polygon interview, there was a little cheeky in-fighting over the power of crafted gear. Zierhut, who joined the company in 2005, was reflecting on the corrections the team wasn't allowed to make during the "no changes" era of Classic in 2019. Corrections that are now possible with World of Warcraft: Forever:

"The only design direction that really existed was: Don't change anything … I was there when we made some of these decisions. I had those discussions with Tom and Jeff and Scott. And I knew some places where we made mistakes."

One such mistake, as the article gets into, is the role that crafted gear had in vanilla WoW—this isn't to say that crafted items were never on the list of best in slot recommendations, but professions were actually meant to give you good gear from the word 'go', with a series of clear outlines for how powerful gear could be.

The problem? Some designers bumped up their gear's power on the sly. "Eric Dodds, the crafting designer, was always very responsible and followed the rules, and other people cheated a little bit."

This is, with over 20 years of hindsight and distance, really funny. The concept of a team of developers quietly bumping up their stats like they're in some gear equivalent of The Big Short—yeah man, just give those boots a few more points of stamina. Dodds isn't gonna know a thing, the sweet fool. But we know the future of WoW is dungeons, dungeons, dungeons, baby!

Anyway, having played the beta, I can confirm that this is indeed addressed. There are a lot of really good blue items that're soulbound which you can craft for yourself if you're, say, a blacksmith or a leatherworker—items that absolutely compete with questing and dungeon items. Crafting is absolutely worth it for your levelling journey.

James Wyatt, the principal game designer and project lead designer of the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft book was already running games in Azeroth long before he took on the project. For him, the fun of bringing WoW to the table is not to ignore the flexibility of D&D but to embrace it.

"Part of the beauty of playing D&D in the world of Azeroth is that you can do things in D&D that you can't do in a digital game because the options haven't been programmed for you," he said in a recent presentation attended by PC Gamer.

On November 12, you'll be able to see how Wyatt and the other designers mixed the two RPGs by "paraphrasing" the MMO into the tabletop ruleset. But Wyatt and senior game designer Ben Petrisor gave us a peek into how their approach affects the classes you can play in D&D: WoW.

WoW's classes are thematically similar to D&D's, and that's part of what makes the collaboration so fitting. However, WoW's classes have to fit into restrictive roles, like a tank or a healer, that don't really exist in D&D, so the D&D: WoW designers decided to return to some of the class customization that was introduced with 2020's Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

Paladins won't have to give up their usual kit when they invest in WoW's holy specialization, for example. Wyatt explained that a lot of the unique abilities and talents WoW classes have access to have been translated into options players can incorporate into their characters. A holy paladin in D&D: WoW will still smite their foes into piles of ashes but they'll also have stronger ways to heal their allies than they normally would.

The same goes for classes like wizard that can pick up the Fingers of Frost feat at level 4 to lean harder into mastering frost-based spells like a frost mage would in the MMO. Beast master rangers can see what it's like to have a pet with its own weapon mastery on top of your own, emulating the tight bond WoW hunters have with their companions. There are dozens of new subclasses, spells, and additions to the core D&D classes like these, each pulling directly from the most iconic parts of WoW.

"We really crammed as much of the impactful talents across each WoW class into this book," Petrisor said.

Not only can you play WoW's unique hero classes—death knight, demon hunter, and evoker—you can experiment with new classes that Blizzard hasn't touched: Everyone who misses the early days of WoW when shamans could stand on the frontlines as magical warriors can pick up the barbarian subclass in D&D: WoW and channel their rage into elemental storms. Even bard, a class that was only an April Fool's joke in WoW, is fully playable in D&D: WoW.

The goal, Petrisor said, was to pull the restraints off of D&D's classes so that everyone, no matter which game you're most familiar with, can try something new.

"Even if you're coming into this without a lot of familiarity to WoW-specific classes, and you kind of want to just hit the ol' reliable button you'll still have an expanded experience and new and fun stuff to play with," he said.

Petrisor explained how the limitations of publishing a single, physical book were really the biggest hurdle when it came to imagining all the ways the two worlds could collide. But just like Wyatt stressed in the first preview presentation I attended, Petrisor has plenty of other ideas that he'd love to work on if people want more.

"If there's an IP that has the space to cover another book this is definitely one of them," he said. "So, the real challenge was—for me at least—while designing things was to try to find everything that would appease the fans of the game while also being options that would be interesting to D&D players and try to cram as many of those into this book as possible."

The World of Warcraft: Forever min-maxers have been arguing about the pros and cons of each playable race since the throwback MMO was announced. It isn't enough to just pick whoever looks cool for some people. They need to know how the math works out so they don't spend a hundred hours leveling a character who will do 3% less damage than the others.

Admittedly, WoW: Forever will be stuck in an era where unique racial abilities and traits mattered a lot more than they do in the modern version of the MMO. Some of them directly synergize with certain classes and others just make your life a lot easier for what will be a long journey. This is probably why Blizzard is still tweaking them a week from launch day.

Despite trying to balance them evenly before, Blizzard is doubling down on some racials having clear advantages for certain classes over others. You can see how this looks in today's patch notes, but you won't be able to test anything out until the WoW: Forever goes live next week.

Most of the changes fit that ethos: orcs, for example, won't have an increased critical strike chance but increased pet damage for warlocks and hunters. The skyborne, the new blue elves, had their absurdly powerful Read Leyline ability that makes them regenerate health and mana faster than anyone else cut in half. It's still good, but not broken good.

And then there are the tauren, the bipedal bovines who have been in WoW since the beginning, who have apparently discovered nitrous oxide.

Blizzard has blessed the tauren with a passive that increases your movement speed the longer you stay in motion. Plainsrunning was already strong as a way to move 30% faster than everyone else in the game, but the new patch doubles it to 60%. With enough time to gain speed, tauren will be as fast as the mounts you have to pay hundreds of gold for.

I kind of admire how much Blizzard is leaning into this idea, even if it costs tauren some minor damage buffs. There's a long-running joke among WoW players that playing a tauren makes you move slower. This is because they're so huge that their run animation just looks like they're moving in slow-motion compared to the rest of the cast. Now, the joke's on us, I guess.

Setting aside taurens growing wheels, messing with racial abilities this close to launch is brave. Blizzard intends to regularly balance WoW: Forever, but this is the kind of foundational stuff it won't be able to touch without pissing a ton of people off. Even if most people probably won't have the tier lists open for the best race/class combinations, they will still inevitably influence what kind of meta materializes for high-end PvP and raiding.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta is now closed, meaning I can no longer appreciate the pretty god rays in Ashenvale. To soothe this yawning ache in my soul, however, Blizzard has released a fun little stats tracker to tide me over with the knowledge that I apparently jump in MMOs way more than I thought I did.

If you played the beta and sign in, you'll be given a full list of fun little stats including your hours played, where you spent the most time, what killed you the most and, crucially, how often you jumped.

I jumped 7,738 times. And considering I played the beta for 57 hours (putting me in the 69th percentile—nice), that means I averaged around 135 jumps an hour, which is… honestly a lot more than I thought I'd jumped. Now of course, jumping is a time-honoured tradition. Even in a game with a /wave emote, simply jumping around someone to acknowledge that you see them is a far more efficient means of communication.

It also makes you go faster when you're running somewhere. This is absolutely correct and not at all unsubstantiated, don't look it up.

The enemy that killed me the most was the Silithid Swarmer in the southern barrens, which I'm going to chalk down to those bastards being a touch overtuned rather than any skill failing on my part (I do not know why the minions it summons have so much health). I'm also heartbroken to find out that I spent the lion's share of my time in The Barrens, presumably killing lions. If you know anything about the absurdity (and sometimes obscenity) that takes place in Barrens Chat, you'll know why this news upsets me.

Anyway, I'll be able to jump a lot more when Forever goes live come November 4, where I'll be able to relive the experience of fighting 900 other players for a cactus apple on launch day once more. Though if my uncertainties about how its endgame's gonna shake out are true, I'll be thankful for the slower pace.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta has just ended, and I'm basically sold, for now. I've had such a good time, in fact, that I dipped at around level 26 on my warrior (and 16 on a Shaman) because I didn't want to spoil or burn myself out before the full thing releases in November and I am consumed in a quest-drunk fugue.

But there is one thing that's rattling around in the back of my mind: This version of WoW is designed to be played perpetually (so in MMO terms, for about 10-20 years, give or take) at the level cap. There won't be any expansions, and the game will continue to expand horizontally.

Which leaves a major question hanging over its endgame. Now, collecting a few interviews together, we've seen a smidge of what that'll look like. In an interview with SkillUp, associate production director Clay Stone contrasts overtly horizontal progression systems (such as the Legacy tree) and gear, which he notes "our intention very much is to try to limit the amount of power progression as we release each raid tier."

Speaking to IGN Nordic, lead game designer Tim Jones says that "we're not going to make a Tier 2 raid without making the loot better … Tier 2 and Tier 3 raids will therefore have better gear, but we're going to be responsible about it. We still want gear from previous raids to remain useful, such as the Onslaught Girdle."

In other words, Forever'll still absolutely have a vertical progression, but your best-in-slot might include gear from all sorts of raids, which… oh, boy.

I'm not going to put a wooden plaque on my chest and say the end is nigh. If Forever's raid tiers only increase your overall item level by a couple of digits, then it really is not that much of a problem. It's essentially playing out that power creep in slow-motion, and if it takes a decade for there to be a numerical difference between, say, tier 1 and a hypothetical set of tier 10 gear that matters for more people than just hardcore min-maxers? It's all gravy, baby.

But as someone with a vested interest in these sorts of systems, I can't help but wonder if Blizzard is just making broad, sweeping assumptions about the way it has to do things at endgame. Forever is going to be purpose-built to keep folks in this rehashed version of classic Azeroth for a very long time. Is it not poison to the entire exercise, then, to purposefully introduce vertical progression at all?

Going up, up, up

I can see a few issues—or let's call them challenges—with this approach. Firstly, three tiers is manageable. But if Forever continues to add raid tiers, then those small incremental increases in gear power slowly stop becoming incremental at all.

Unless a character can set foot in a tier 3 raid comfortably without getting gear from the first two tiers, what you've done is essentially created an attunement questline. That questline being, 'do several tiers of raiding to get up to snuff'.

In a game that resets every expansion, or season, this is a non-issue. But Forever'll have the task of bridging that gap the wider it gets—either with catch-up gear, which kills the older raids dead, or by issuing stat squishes, which never feels good on the other end of things.

The other problem is that, even if you do solve those problems, you've only got so many players. The wider the raiding scene is spread apart over the course of these raid tiers, the harder it becomes to find a group or a guild to do the specific raid that you need.

This can be solved, as these interviews mention, by giving each class useful best-in-slot gear from lower tiers so that they have an incentive to go back and do them. But there's another problem there, too: Characters only have so many equipment slots, and what's considered a BiS getup is dependent on a ton of other difficult-to-tune factors.

My point being: Blizzard really cannot rely on gearing to keep Forever's raiding scene alive in the long run, and yet (at least to start off with) it'll be mimicking old patterns. Just smaller, more controlled, and slower-paced. It's a little like trying to avoid an iceberg by designing the world's slowest boat. Sure, you're avoiding it for longer, but if you don't put a steering wheel on the damn thing you're gonna crash.

This is by far Forever's biggest risk. Playing the game casually is going to rock. Questing is going to rock. Levelling alts is going to rock. Forever has already convinced me of all of these things—but the delicate, finickity balance of a pseudo-horizontal endgame is far harder.

You have to wonder if a developer who has been designing linear progression systems for over two decades is simply finding it hard to break from that ingrained patterning. Jones' words: "We're not going to make a tier 2 raid without making the loot better." They're sticking in my craw, because… well, why not? Why are there tiered raids to begin with?

You could do as Guild Wars 2 does—new classes or skill trees to unlock that require endgame feats, character power for specific zones that'll stay relevant in perpetuity, an equivalent of "masteries". Basically, expanding the definition of what endgame is, and then having raids be a part of that ecosystem, rather than trying to slow-death power creep.

Blizzard's going to have to learn some very hard lessons to get there, though. I think this attitude towards tiers will work absolutely fine for a while, but there will come a point where the developer has to wonder if it wants to keep kicking the can down the road or really, genuinely reinvent what an endgame is in World of Warcraft. And that'll be either very exciting or very, very messy. Perhaps both.

In anticipation of the full launch of World of Warcraft: Forever next month, Blizzard is throwing the gates wide open on the throwback MMO to stress test the servers.

Anyone with a World of Warcraft account will be able to play the 'WoW: Forever - Stress Test" client in the Battle.net launcher later today. You don't need an active subscription, nor do you need to have purchased any of the WoW: Forever special editions. All you need is some patience for what could be a bumpy few hours as people pile in.

The regular beta servers will be offline until the stress test is over, which means anyone who can't go that long without a hit of WoW: Forever will likely show up. I wouldn't be surprised if some Blizzard folks drop in with some surprises of their own, like spawning world bosses or something in the last hour or so (this happened during a recent PvP tournament).

Everyone will start fresh on the stress test server, so you won't have time to do much but the first couple of leveling zones. You will get a taste of what to expect on launch day: Crowds of players wandering around like ants, and quest enemies dying before you can even click on them. Get ready to fight for your XP.

Here are all the times for the WoW: Forever stress test:

• West Coast US: 2 pm - 6 pm PDT
• East Coast US: 5 pm - 9 pm EDT
• UK: 6 pm - 2 am BST
• Europe: 7 pm - 3 am CEST
• Australia: 8 am - 12 pm AEDT
• New Zealand: 10 am - 2 pm NZDT

Once everything wraps up, Blizzard is going to flip the switch back on for the regular beta servers until Friday.

I'm crossing my fingers that this stress test actually helps with stability on launch day. There will almost certainly be long queue times, but having to start and stop as servers go haywire will ruin any chance of actually enjoying the game that day. We already witnessed this with the launch of the beta, and that was only the people who paid for the game. On November 4, when WoW: Forever properly goes live, anyone out there with a subscription will be lining up.

Ah, zone chats in MMOs—trade and general chats, /shouts and /yells. Intended as a way to render the social glue that binds these videogames together, they are often instead a tableau for (and I say this somewhat affectionately) absolute lunacy, pock-marked with some of the most vile verbiage you'll see online.

Take, for instance, the time-honoured tradition of "Barrens Chat" in World of Warcraft. Combine a big zone that spans around 10-15 levels along with proximity to a major city, and you get a certain kind of verbal hooliganry that, in my journeys through WoW: Forever, I was actually pretty nostalgic for.

I mean, sure, the Chuck Norris jokes have gotten a smidge old. But while collecting Zhevra Hoofs, I would find myself possessed to ask Barrens Chat philosophical questions, and while I never received much in the way of wisdom, responses were always entertaining.

I'm not so fond of trade chat, though, which—at least on the horde side of things—has mostly been dominated by a bot by the name of Margrave Tyrael. Who, I kid you not, was literally sitting there for days spitting out the same automated messages, questioning why Blizzard was deleting beta characters.

I fell for it, at first. Then I started trying to warn people not to fall for it. It didn't work.

Things are no less cursed in my other MMO of choice, Final Fantasy 14. I shan't repeat some of the obscenity I've seen in Ul'dah here, but it does always stagger me that the same kind of infectious absurdity can persist, particularly in a videogame whose moderators are altogether far more heavy-handed with banning folks for ill behaviour.

Which leads me to my question, dear reader: Zone chats. Are they a force for good, or ill?

Personally, I'm weirdly fond of them. I don't think these chats are particularly healthy to engage with, and they're certainly not worth arguing with some rando over. But the belligerent nonsense of the masses feels somehow pure. Unsullied by the algorithmic mechanisms that drive us, purposefully, towards enragement and bickering. Instead, we piss people off all by ourselves. And that's kind of beautiful.

The developers of World of Warcraft: Forever, the venerable MMO's newest 'Classic+' flavor, say that even though the level cap is staying at 60, there will always be new gear to chase, and lower level gear has never been more powerful.

Blizzard Entertainment developers are wary of the drastic increases in power in WoW's modern version, including the recent Midnight expansion, which render previous seasons of gear irrelevant, require massive resets between expansions and lead to periodic stat "squishes" to avoid players becoming omnipotent gods.

"Classic wasn't far off from this," vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas said of Forever's approach in a recent PC Gamer interview. "It's gradual. Going from [Classic raids] Blackwing Lair to Ahn'Qiraj that's actually only a couple of item levels higher. Those two largely coexist. C'thun drops are probably better than anything in Blackwing Lair, but that's like one or two items per player. This is a system that can last for a long, long time."

Associate production director Clay Stone says that's part of what makes gear in Forever—and Classic—meaningful.

"Your best-in-slot that you pick up from a previous raid tier may continue to be your best in slot for a long time. It's very much our intention to try wherever we can to not invalidate old content."

Then again, a long time isn't expected to be literally forever, Hazzikostas says.

"At some point, if you're running the Barrow Deeps raid that's coming out in December, you're going to have all the items that you want. That's fine. You're done with it."

Forever players will see gear progress at level 60: those modest item level increases, gear that's good in specific niche situations, and rare "chase" pieces should keep people hunting, Forever developers say.

An item might be especially powerful when fighting in a desert, or against a dragon, for example, making it particularly good in one especially tough fight.

(And yes, players, developers are aware that this means bag space will be at a premium. "We're already thinking about that," principal designer Kris Zierhut says, mentioning the ideas of more bank space, trinket bags or even garment bags to hold the excess.)

Un-solving the game

Forever launches on November 4, and so far players have seen few of the pieces that will entice them at the end game. The current level cap in the beta is 30, and future items have been hidden from view and datamining to keep them guessing.

"We resurrected some old tech that keeps item stats and properties and tooltips secret, unknown to the client, until the item has actually been obtained by someone on the server," Hazzikostas says. "That's something we can use in modern WoW if we want."

Essentially a flag on items determines whether they are known, making them visible in the game's data. It trips when someone discovers an item for the first time, making sure that if the player links the item to others, it doesn't cause bugs

But until that moment, players can't get a sneak peek at what the piece of gear does. It's one reason why Forever doesn't have an Adventure Guide for dungeons; developers want the game to keep its secrets.

"Every single boss in our raids has some items that are very low percentage drop chase items, kind of like the Dragonspine Trophy was in Gruul's Lair—but for every boss," says Zierhut. "It might be three weeks, four weeks before somebody sees that item drop, and the whole meta is torn up again."

The goal is to keep the magic of exploration alive, he says.

"The goal is to un-solve the game, so players have to figure out again what's the best path," Zierhut says. "They don't know what the best items are. They don't know what to get. It's back to 2004 and nobody knows anything and figuring it out all over again."

Hand-crafted power

To add a layer of complexity—and, again, keep players from gaining power too quickly—items deliberately aren't optimized for players' preferred classes and stats. "Our items are much more idiosyncratic, and you don't get exactly what you want," he says, noting that knowing your class and choosing between gear sets will be one way players express skill in Forever. "None of the gear is perfect."

That's an old strategy—there are oft-discussed items from WoW's original launch that put strength on cloth gear, for example—but what is new is how much power items can have at a relatively low level.

Both low-level drops and crafted gear are powerful early, and that's on purpose, developers say.

"A lot of times tradeskills felt like an afterthought in Classic. Like, 'Oh, I could craft this item, but it's too much work and I'm about to out-level it anyway. Skip it. I'll level up my tailor when I get to level 60,' " Zierhut says. "I made a deliberate effort to make more crafting recipes worthwhile to craft while you are leveling up, including lowering the skill requirement to craft them.

"The typical item from tailoring, leatherworking, blacksmithing requires 25 fewer skill points than it used to. So you'll be able to craft that item right around the time it's your best-in-slot at that level and get the real value out of doing it."

Much of the tuning done so far to gear in Forever's beta has been to keep that idea of modest but steady progression across the whole leveling process.

"It's just a slightly different gradient in terms of power level," lead game designer Tim Jones says.

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.

I've been playing World of Warcraft longer than some of you have probably been alive (which is, frankly, quite depressing), and during that time, I've gone through all the stages of WoW gameplay.

Casual leveling. Easy-mode raiding. Mythic raids and M+ with high keys. MoP Classic with the full glory of a fresh Brewmaster Monk.

And I've struggled sometimes. Once you have so many different keybinds that you're using your Ctrl, Alt, and Shift, it's too easy to make a raid-wiping mistake if you click the wrong thing.

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Some of those mistakes got me in hot water with my raid leader, in fact. That's what prompted me to finally invest in a proper MMO mouse.

My choice was simple: a Razer Naga, which is a mouse I'd been dreaming of for years as a broke college student. I bought it at full price, but you can now get the Razer Naga V2 Pro at a snazzy 21% discount while Prime Day deals last.

When I first bought it, I wasn't one to spend a fortune on peripherals (other than the headset, which, coincidentally, I also use a Razer headset these days). The price tag made me flinch, but I'm an adult now, so there was no one to tell me I couldn't do it.

Good thing, too. The Razer Naga V2 Pro completely transformed my WoW gameplay for the better, and I don't think I could ever play an MMO again without a suitable mouse.

The Naga V2 Pro serves up three hot-swappable magnetic side plates, so you can customize it as needed. Choose between 12-, six-, and two-button variants. I tend to use the 12-button plate for gaming, and then scale down to two when I'm working. In total, you can get up to 19+1 programmable buttons, and with Synapse, you can add a modifier to each, too.

This is a hefty squeaker, weighing in at 134 g. It's equipped with the Focus Pro 30K optical sensor and has a polling rate of 1,000 Hz as well as a max DPI of 30,000. You can use it in wired or wireless mode (in my case, I just plug it in to charge once a week or so).

This mouse slightly overwhelmed me at first. It definitely has a learning curve. But now that I've mastered it, I'm doing better than ever, my guild master doesn't hate me (at least not for gameplay reasons), and I love everything about it. For me, it is by far the best gaming mouse.

Get the Razer Naga V2 Pro while Prime Day deals last, because there's not much time left to gear up for WoW Forever (or wherever else your MMO-loving heart leads you to).

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)