World of Warcraft: Forever, Digi Mart USA News: World of Warcraft: Forever is fascinating from many perspectives, not necessarily because of what it offers, since it is still very much Classic WoW, but because of what it means for the MMO genre as a whole.
The project is the kind usually confined to “what if” discussions: a version of a 20-year-old game that chose not to pursue expansions and instead spread its development outward horizontally. It aims not only to recreate nostalgia but to apply a fine layer of polish to it.
Forever includes more than 1,000 new quests and dungeons. After playing some of them during 50 hours in its beta, the reviewer says Blizzard has delivered on what they have seen so far.
Restoring an earlier version of a game is one achievement, but adding new areas and content that suit its old-school design is considered a magic trick.
The reviewer began with the new dungeon Ruins of Lordaeron. Although it was their first time in the area, it felt familiar.
Modern MMO dungeons, they note, resemble theme park rides, funneling players through a series of hallways to defeat bosses for loot and quest experience.
By contrast, the reviewer found the slower pace of older dungeons appealing. Players must manually ask for invites, collect quests outside the dungeon, travel there on foot, and then carefully pull groups through a sprawling maze where getting lost is possible.
The reviewer said this older approach holds merit and is not made easier by reduced difficulty, noting that the reviewer’s level 18 warrior could handle DPS duties without much trouble.
The reviewer also praised the questing design. The original WoW had large gaps in its questing zones that were either unfinished or barren of questlines, despite the developers’ intention to avoid that when the game launched in 2004.
Forever fills many of these gaps and adds new questing zones.
According to the reviewer, Forever does not modernize questing itself. Quests remain in inconvenient locations, are still given in large batches, and can still be frustrating.
However, the reviewer said the added content makes the overall experience run more smoothly, and the satisfaction of a long journey across a zone followed by turning in all quests at once remains rewarding.
The reviewer said that if Blizzard maintains this pace through the game’s remaining 30 levels, they expect to remain engaged in old-school questing for the foreseeable future. World of Warcraft: Forever can be accessed through the Battle.net launcher on the game’s official website.
