The Inside Story Behind World of Warcraft: Forever

Hello, one take Schreier here and today we're talking about World of Warcraft Forever, the newest game from Blizzard Entertainment. I always enjoy talking about Blizzard cuz you know that expression, oh, he wrote the book on X topic. Oh, he wrote the book on venereal diseases or whatever it may be. Um, well I wrote the book on Blizzard Entertainment. It's called Play Nice. Check it out. It's pretty cool. Um, and I wanted to talk about their latest game which is a new version of World of Warcraft. So, this video is based on a Bloomberg article and as always you can find a free gift link to that article in the show notes. So, please do check it out. It's my weekly column, my newsletter Game On which you can subscribe to and check out every single week. It's pretty cool too. Um, all right. So, what is the deal with World of Warcraft Forever? Um, I'm going to explain a little bit about what it actually is because if you're not familiar with this kind of universe of of WoW releases, you might be a little bit confused. And then I'll talk a

little bit about the development process. I interviewed some of the people behind it and I can share some quotes from them as we go. So, World of Warcraft Forever. Um, uh, I I guess it's best described as a uh, slumber party for wayward millennials. This is a game that is designed to appeal to millennial nostalgia. Um, if you are 40 years old, this is the game for you. So, okay. World of Warcraft, as you probably know, is a very popular online RPG where you make a character and you go and you team up with your friends and you battle monsters and go on raids and collect loot as orcs and elves and druids and wizards and whatnot. Um, it's been running since 2004 and it's been getting a constant cadence of regular updates since then to the point where the WoW that exists in 2026 would be essentially unrecognizable to someone who only played in 2004. It's become a very different game thanks to of these

expansions and changes and um world destruction. At one point they released an expansion called Cataclysm where they literally blew up the world and then remade it. So there have been a lot of changes to the game and there are plenty of people out there who really enjoy those changes and really like the new story, but there are other people who don't. There are some people, some lapsed fans who I think preferred some of the friction that was in the older versions of World of Warcraft, um preferred the content that was in those older versions, whatever else. So there are lots of reasons that they might have preferred that. It might be a nostalgia is a big reason as well. And so in 2019 Blizzard released something called World of Warcraft Classic, which is essentially taking the 2004/2005 version of World of Warcraft and just emulating it again for the modern version. So you log into World of World of Warcraft Classic, you log into a server on there and you can play WoW just as it was back then with a few of the bugs fixed and a couple of modern features here and there, but for the most part just as it was back then. And then the this what's called the World of

Warcraft Classic team within Blizzard started working on kind of their own parallel track. So they added all of the old expansions one at a time every year or two. So they added Burning Crusade um and then Wrath of the Lich King and they like they kept going with those expansions in the world of Warcraft Classic track. So you could essentially just play through like a parallel track that is like capturing what it was like to play World of Warcraft during the 2000s and early 2010s. The most recent one was Mists of Pandaria, which came out in 2012. The classic version came out last year. Um along the way they did something really interesting, which is in 2023 they um created something called Season of Discovery, which was this temporary seasonal um experiment in which they took World of Warcraft Classic and added a bunch of new stuff to it, like a new rune system and some other just kind of new stuff that they were playing around with. So you could go and play this world version of Classic that wasn't

just what you remembered. It also had new stuff And players really liked it. In fact, there was this big sentiment and people began talking about what um became kind of known within the World of Warcraft world as the World of Warcraft community as Classic Plus. In In other words, take Classic, add stuff to it, right? And it became very clear to fans that Blizzard was using this as kind of a a hotbed, a test ground for what might become a proper Classic Plus one day, a new game that was like taking the old version of World of Warcraft and adding new stuff to it. And now they have released what is Classic Plus. They're calling it World of Warcraft Forever. So right now, as of this week, if you log into your World of Warcraft subscription, you can play three different versions of the game. You can play modern version, the game that is currently being updated with new expansions and new storyline, etc. You can play World of Warcraft Classic, which is the parallel track that I mentioned before, or you can play World of Warcraft Forever, which is a version

of the game that is essentially the 2004 version of World of Warcraft, but with new stuff being added to it that isn't the Burning Crusade and the kind of the standard Oops. One take try here. If I If I knock down my microphone, we we keep it going. We don't do edits here. Um that is essentially uh the 2000 version of four version of World of Warcraft uh so Classic and then just like an alternate reality where instead of going into the dark portal, doing the whole Burning Crusade stuff and like continuing on that the the trajectory that they actually did, they're going in a totally different direction. And so World of Warcraft Forever as it launched has a bunch of new quests, um a bunch of new dungeons, um it has new features like gamepad support, a new graphical system, rendering system. It just feels like kind of an alternate reality, an a parallel dimension where instead of going one way, WoW had gone an entirely different way. And people are really hyped about this. The beta that they released last month became the most successful, the biggest World of Warcraft beta of all time. People seem to be really jazzed

about it. People were saying this week that they were shocked that it launched without any real server issues uh for the first time ever, best World of Warcraft launch that is ever gone down. So, people are really jazzed about this and um I haven't played it personally, but my colleague Cecilia uh did check it out and she says it's it's awesome. Um a lot of people have been just saying really positive stuff about this game. So, how did it all come to be? Well, I spoke to Josh Greenfield, who's a senior designer on the WoW Classic team, and um and Clay Stone, who is the associate production director on the World of Warcraft Classic team, and they told me a little bit about how this came to be. And again, you can find all of this in my Bloomberg story, which is linked in the show notes. But really, they told me Clayton was telling me that um he and Josh had this conversation even before Classic launch, like when he was first joining the Classic team, and it was kind of like, yeah, we're probably going to go in this direction of like releasing Burning Crusade and other expansions, but the real future, what we really want to do is just new stuff, Classic Plus. And so these conversations

have been simmering and going on in the background for a very long time, but it wasn't until Season of Discovery 2023 that this became a real possibility. And they told me like around early 2024 is when they started cementing what would become a pitch for World of Warcraft Forever, and they started talking to Blizzard executives and being like, hey, here's what we want to get we want what we want to do with this. Um it was actually much easier to pitch this game and get it greenlit because they had this um kind of template for what it could be in Season of Discovery, which is a very useful thing if you're ever pitching a video game internally at a company. It is much much easier if you don't just have like a PowerPoint presentation and a prototype or whatever, but you actually have something that is living and in this real world version of World of Warcraft in a real scenario where players are really enjoying it and you could be like, this is what this is going to look like. Like this is our our uh kind of proving ground right here. So, that was very helpful for them and they started saying, okay, what would a permanent

version of this look like? So, it wouldn't be temporary like Season of Discovery, it would be something that lasts forever. And that's where the name Forever came from is there was this idea that like it would be classic plus just living on forever. The code name was Camelot. Um, and so they kept pitching it, uh, this idea of one of the big kind of pillars was this idea of a new graphical renderer and a new lighting system, which you can see looks really cool if you play it in the game. Um, and they took, uh, Northshire Abbey, which is one of the game's zones, um, it's a human monk zone, and they took it into turned it into what video game developers call a beautiful corner, which essentially was like this little corner of the world meant to display what this new graphical rendering system would look like. And so they did that. That was part of their pitch. People were really impressed. They actually they were telling me, um, uh, Greenfield was telling me that like there were all these die hard like OG classic fans on the team who were kind of skeptical of this idea of doing this WoW forever. Um, and um, when they saw the beautiful corner, they were like, yep, we're in. We're sold.

We're sold. Which, uh, Greenfield said, quote, we knew we had something special when we, uh, when we showed them that beautiful corner and they said, okay, yeah, I'm in. They also had all these high level goals with it, which I think are really interesting because they weren't just thinking, okay, we're going to take World of Warcraft and add a bunch of new stuff to it and just go in a totally different direction than modern, but essentially be doing what modern is doing. Instead, they wanted to create things that felt like they could have been in World of Warcraft in 2004. And Greenfield was telling me, here I'll read you another great quote from him, which is quote, it's a success to us when someone is playing and they say, was this a quest that was new or was this added? You have this Mandela effect. Oh, that was totally there. No, man, I added that last week. That is brand new. Which I think is really interesting. It's kind of like, how do you make something that, even though it's 2026, feels like it could have been an MMO quest in 2004, could have been part of the original game. And one of the things they did, so at Blizzard, Blizzard is a really interesting

company. They have a lot of veterans, a lot of people who have been there for many many years. In fact, it's a whole thing at Blizzard that once you have been there for X number of years, I believe five years, you get your first, um, I forget what the order is, but it's like you get a shield and then you get a sword and then you get a helmet, you get these kind of this ceremonial blizzard gear they used to do. I'm not sure if they still do this, but they used to do this like knighting ceremony almost where they would gather everybody together and it would be like you you have been here for five years, you get this thing. Um I think now they do it more in big groups because they're they're such a big company, but back in the day they used to do it where like the whole company would get together and each individual would get their their ceremonial sword or shield or whatever. Um and so it's a a big part of their culture is they try to retain people for years and years and years. Um it's funny uh I think it was 2024 like when the big layoffs happened after Xbox acquired Activision Blizzard that there was briefly a period where they didn't have a single person there who worked on the original Warcraft game. At at one point like throughout the company's history

they always had people there who had been there since the very beginning worked on the on Warcraft 1 back in the 90s, but then there was this brief period where they didn't and then they brought back Chris Metzen who's um one of the the original writers and storytellers someone who had been there for a very long time and so now they do. Um he like came in he was a consultant and then he came back full time. So now he he is there so they still do have someone who has been there since the original world of Warcraft or original Warcraft 1, but um but before he came back there was like a brief period where they didn't. Point being they've always put taken pride in having veteran people there and so they brought in uh veteran staff from around the company and also veteran staff from elsewhere to come in and give these guest speeches to the World of Warcraft Classic team to say hey here's what we were making here's the decisions we made back then and specifically here's why we made this decision. Was it because we didn't have enough time? Was it because of technical limitations or was it become because we actually wanted to make that decision and that was really helpful for the

World of Warcraft Forever team to get those answers and to be able to make their own decisions accordingly. Um so for example uh Ashara, right? Ashara is this zone within the original World of Warcraft, um high-level zone, like 40s or 50s levels, um level cap for the original World of Warcraft was 60, and also World of Warcraft forever is going to stay forever at 60. Um so the zone Ashara, it's this kind of uh fall-themed autumn-themed zone on a coast, uh very underused in the original World of Warcraft, and there were parts of it that like seemed like they could have led to something but but just never actually did. And so the WoW Forever team talked to those original designers and said, "Hey, like what's the deal here?" And essentially they said, "Well, we were planning on adding more to Ashara, and it was kind of part of our schedule for the pre-Burning Crusade launch period uh like pre-patch period, but like we ran out of time and essentially everybody had to go on to Burning Crusade, so we just never did it." And so the WoW Forever team was like, "Great, fantastic. Like that is

perfect because that is something we can go and flesh out ourselves." And so that's just one example. They like spent a bunch of time, Clayton Stone was telling me they they um were looking at all of these theories about unfinished World of Warcraft zones and parts of the game that seemed like they could have led to something else, and they were just like, "This is our opportunity to go in and flesh those out and essentially just take the original version of World of Warcraft and make it what like the the optimal version of what it could have been back then." Um they also added a bunch of new features. I mean controller support I mentioned before, which uh I think they haven't said anything about releasing this game on consoles, but controller support feels like a good way to eventually segue into the dream that I think a lot of people have had for a very long time, which is getting some version of World of Warcraft on consoles. It's funny, their biggest competitor is Final Fantasy XIV, which has been on consoles for years and years and years. So um it seems like it's something that should be doable, at least in theory, and I imagine that

having gamepad support for World of Warcraft is is kind of a good first step, so that's part of it. Um they even added a new race of these blue elves called the Skyborn, which I think have been a little bit controversial among the fan base. Um it's was of like, "What? That doesn't feel like it's something that be would be in the original World of Warcraft. But Chris Metzen himself helped design those. So make of that what you will. They also they had a lot of debates over like quality of life features because there's a lot of one of the kind of big points of contention over MMOs these days and especially something like World of Warcraft, which has been there in 2004 and now is here still here still living 22 years later, is this question of friction, right? How much friction should an MMO have? Is it good to reduce it? Are you reducing it too much? There are a lot of conversations over this idea of the dungeon finder and whether that ruined the community feeling of the game because if you can just automatically get match made with other people to do dungeons, you don't need to go and find friends and strangers to

team up with. So that's always been a big question and this is of course a big question for this game. They ultimately decided to answer some at least some of these questions with toggles. So for example, putting quest markers on the map they were telling me was a big point of contention. That was a big question mark like are they going to do that? Why did the WoW team make the decision not to put quest markers on the map back then? And they ultimately decided to give players a toggle and let players choose whether or not to do that. I asked by the way I asked them something I was really interested in is if the idea of WoW Forever is to appeal to a lot of lapsed fans and people who maybe aren't huge fans of the modern version of the game, is there some tension there? Like are the modern World of Warcraft team are they taking offense to World of Warcraft Forever? And they kind of they said no. Essentially Greenfield told me here I'll read a quote from Greenfield. Again, this is senior designer Josh Greenfield quote almost everyone that I've interacted with has been very excited at the possibility of a what if. It's just another path that

is fun to explore especially from a storytelling perspective. So yeah, now this game seems to be very popular. It's part of a WoW subscription. So I think it's kind of it's beneficial to both teams to be complementing each other because they're not actually competing with one another since they both feed into the same subscription subscription, the same monthly subscription, so they both take success in in the same way. It's funny, I think if it was kind of independent monthly subscriptions, then they were they would truly be competition, but here they are not and that I think is a very smart thing of Blizzard to have done is to put them all in one subscription program. Um, so now the majority of the Classic team is working on World of Warcraft Forever. They wouldn't answer if they're like planning on adding more stuff to Classic, if they're planning on doing more expansions after Mist of Pandaria, but they told me that they hope to continue working on World of Warcraft Forever and keep updating it and doing stuff for years to come. Um, uh, Clayton Stone told me, I'm going to quote him again directly, quote, we want to go on this journey as long as players

want to go with us. There are so many theories about unfinished World of Warcraft, unfinished raids, unfinished zones, unfinished dungeons, stories, and adventures for players to go on. And another quote from him, this is a game that I know I've wanted to play for a very long time. If our players get to continue to go on this journey, that means we get to continue to go on it as well. Seems like it's been very popular. We do not have numbers just yet. People are just starting the game, just came out this week, but I'm very curious to see where they go with it, if it's ultimately success a success, and if it does cannibalize players from the modern version of World of Warcraft. I suspect it will not because I suspect that the nostalgic 2004 players are all coming back for this one, whereas the new players who have stuck with the game are just going to continue sticking with the game, and I suspect there will also be some cross pollination there. That is the latest game from Blizzard, World of Warcraft Forever, and uh, yeah, I I'm I haven't really engaged

much with World of Warcraft over the years, but I am curious to check this one out. Unfortunately, it is coming out at a very bad time uh, to be playing new video games, but maybe one day I'll get a chance to check out WoW Forever. All right, have a good weekend. I'll see you all next time.