WoW: Forever is more than just a millennial retirement home

World of Warcraft: Forever is fascinating from so many perspectives—not necessarily in terms of what's on offer (it is, despite my enamorment, still very much Classic WoW) but in what it means for the MMO genre at large.

It's the kind of project that usually only gets cooked up in "what ifs", a version of a 20-year old game that decided not to go for expansions, but to instead spread out horizontally. A World of Warcraft that didn't have to rush a single hour of development time. It's an attempt at not only just recreating nostalgia, but applying a fine layer of polish to that nostalgia.

Forever has over 1,000 new quests and dungeons—and having played some of them in my 50 hours with its beta, I can say that Blizzard has absolutely nailed what I've seen so far. To restore a prior version of a game is one thing, but to add new areas and content that feel appropriate to its oldschool game design feels like a magic trick.

It's like someone's dusted off a set of forbidden texts and started reading them in flawless ancient greek—a sleight-of-hand that's been dunked on as a "millenial retirement home" but, as the exact target audience for Forever, I've gotta say: Bingo night's really popping.

Dungeon crawling

Let's start with the dungeons. I went through the new romp, Ruins of Lordaeron, and was clocked sideways with a feeling of familiarity, despite it being the first time I'd ever set foot there—modern MMO dungeons are like theme park rides, where you strap yourself in and get funnelled through a series of hallways to knock over bosses for fat loot and a ton of quest XP.

And listen, I love rollercoasters. But I had no idea how much I'd missed that slower, more ponderous pace. Having to manually ask for invites, spending a half-hour collecting quests outside of the dungeon itself, journeying there on foot, and then once you're in—carefully pulling group after group in a sprawling maze where you can legitimately get lost.

It ruled. It still rules, that's what surprised me—there's merit to this older way of doing things that transcends the rose-tinted glasses I'm wary of, and it's not even because the game's harder. Quite the contrary: Doing solid DPS as a level 18 warrior is pretty easy, I just hit Heroic Strike every now and then and try not to rip aggro too much.

But the lo-fi pace of it all, even if it does take longer, is downright lovely. It has a quality all of its own—one that's so refreshing in a world of seasonal grinds. And that expands to the questing, too.

Ask me a quest-ion

I've talked about the classic pace of questing on the site before, but the light touch Blizzard has applied here is marvellous—the original WoW was riddled with huge gaps in questing zones that were either unfinished or simply barren when it came to questlines, even though its intention back in 2004 was to avoid that. Many of these places—and new questing zones entirely—are getting added with Forever.

I didn't have a direct template to compare it to, but I felt it: Forever paves over these yawning gaps in the questing experience, but it doesn't modernise questing itself. They're still put in inconvenient areas, they're still given to you in massive batches, and they're still sometimes a massive pain in the butt.

But layering new stuff on top of that old chassis means the engine runs smoother. The satisfaction of a long, multi-hour journey across a zone pairs so sweetly with the dopamine hit of turning all your quests in at once. A hit that I just don't really get in modern theme park MMOs anymore.

Sometimes I had to travel to different zones because I was being outlevelled by quests, sure, but I was never stuck, I never had to grind. And if Blizzard can keep that tempo going for the rest of its 30 levels, I'm going to be wrapped up in a cozy loop of oldschool questing for the foreseeable future.

You can check out WoW: Forever via the BattleNet launcher on the game's official website.