Even after spending something like 20 hours in the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, I’m still not entirely sure who it’s for. Personally, that’s a good thing: I like that it’s a little mysterious and full of possibility. But at the same time, it’s clear that Blizzard has ignited a feverish tug of war between the people who want an MMO that religiously adheres to the 2004 version of WoW and those who hold no allegiance to the past and just want to play a new thing.
World builder Matthew Armstrong’s approach—which he admits is purely his own, not Blizzard’s as a whole—is admirable. As he says later in the post on X, “If you’re making a game for everyone then you’re making it for no one.” I’d much rather see the developers behind WoW: Forever take a firm stance on what is or isn’t in the spirit of the old MMO rather than spend the next however many years trying to make every type of WoW fan happy at once.
In my head, I think of WoW: Forever as a remake and not a remaster. It’s trying to evoke what the old game felt like back then, not recreate it down to each blade of grass. They didn’t call it “WoW Classic: Forever”, after all.
The debate over who it’s for—largely happening on Reddit and X—kind of misses the point, and anyone who thinks Armstrong is taking a side is too. WoW: Forever is for whoever likes an MMO where the world and the other people in it are more important than your role in an epic storyline, an MMO where you can spend 38 seconds hitting a scorpion or an evening with strangers gathered around a campfire.
My favorite part of WoW: Forever is that it hasn’t been solved and categorized yet. Maybe there will be a day where I disagree with its direction, but right now it’s exciting to imagine all of the things it could become. It’s a rare game where I don’t feel guilty spending an evening finishing zero quests and making no progress toward some ultimate endgame. There’s no battle pass to complete and no daily goals to check off. It’s a taste of more social MMO in a way that simply doesn’t happen anymore, and I’m excited to see how it develops when it’s fully out on November 4.
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