Endgame Viable

I broke down and pre-ordered World of Warcraft: Forever, and took a quick look at the beta. I made a Dwarf Hunter and played a couple hours in that same old starting zone that I remember from 2006, which was the first time I played World of Warcraft.

I was mainly looking to find out what the game was supposed to be, because it wasn’t at all clear from the promotional material. It sounded like basically the same game as WoW Classic. So what was the point of it?

And to be honest, after playing a bit, it looked like the same game as WoW Classic.

But then I loaded up the actual WoW Classic and played the same Dwarf Hunter starting zone. Then it was more clear what they’re trying to do with Forever.

WoW Forever is basically WoW Classic except with a modern UI for people who don’t want to punish themselves just finding quest locations. The quests are highlighted on the map and the enemy mobs are highlighted and so forth. It’s like the WoW Retail UI overlaid onto the WoW Classic grind.

To me, it’s a big improvement. WoW Classic’s lack of amenities is pretty annoying. It’s why people made addons.

But otherwise, it’s the same quest flow as 2006. Which means you have to kill fourteen mobs in the first handful of quests.

Yes, I said fourteen. A staggering amount of mobs to kill at that low level when pretty much all you have is an auto-attack.

So it’s all the combat grind and repetition from 2006 with a 2026 UI.

Not a terrible idea, I guess. If I wanted the nostalgia of playing WoW, without the self-flagellation, I’d certainly pick Forever over Classic.

But as I mentioned previously, it’s not very solo friendly.

There was this one quest where you had to clear out a hobgoblin camp and click on a thing for a quest. If you’re by yourself, the enemies spawn faster than you can kill them at low level.

You’d think, since game developers constantly tell us how social MMORPGs are, people would naturally group up to tackle the challenge more easily and share experience and kills and whatnot. I witnessed exactly zero groups tackling the challenge. We just kind of swarmed over it individually until the necessary critical mass of players was achieved, and everyone grabbed the quest objective as best they could. It was everyone for themselves. Nobody stuck around after they had gotten the quest objective to help other players.

I wish I’d been recording it, to show the reality on the ground to all the game devs still clinging to the idea that people want to group up with strangers.

Anyway. WoW Forever looks to be the best version of WoW Classic available.