I was there Gandalf, in 2004 during the World of Warcraft Beta.
Actually I didn’t know much about Warcraft at the time. I was hyped because it was a Blizzard game, and I desperately wanted a Diablo 3. But Wow got me hooked and I played it exclusively for years, up until Wrath of the Lich King, where I finally said enough. I didn’t like the direction it all took after The Burning Crusade.
I did return shortly for Wow Classic, but it was only for the nostalgia itch. After 40 or so levels I felt satisfied and never returned to it. This is why Wow Forever, or classic plus, is so alluring to me. I get the nostalgia but there is also new content for me to look forward to. I just hope they don’t ruin it this time, like they did with retail 🤞
I chose not to play beta this time, but wait for the release, but I’ve been following the beta closely and know pretty much what to expect.
First of all, it’s very nice to be back in Dun Morogh. This is where I leveled my first character and it feels home to me. The snow glistening, the ambient music. It’s perfect. I notice immediately the new UI and I don’t like it. The reason they updated the UI was because you should be able to see in streams that this is Wow Forever and not Classic or Retail, but I don’t like it. Some of it feels sloppy, as if they couldn’t be bothered to involve an art director. I especially dislike that they moved the character portraits to the lower middle of the screen. I might find an add-on that restores the classic UI later.
Running my first quests, the old feeling is there. I can’t tell if they have updated the graphics, which they probably have, but the game doesn’t feel old. It feels just like it did in 2004 and that makes me glad. It runs smoothly also on my MacBook M1 Pro even though recommended minimum requirements is M2. It gets slightly warm but not uncomfortably so, and not enough to run the fans.
I notice some players are running around with another player on /follow. I wonder what that’s about? Are they leveling two characters at once or are they botting? I’m also quite amazed at how well the new instance system seems to work. There are just the right amount of people around me. In the old days we used to create a line where you would queue to kill the first miniboss in the starting area. This is not needed anymore. I think they’ve gotten the balance right between being too crowded and too sparse. The sharding screwed me once, where the mob I was fighting disappeared in front of me, but apart from that I think it works very well. Apparently if you took part of the stress test, your preferred language was set to French, which means that I got sharded with a lot of French speaking people, but that was easily remedied in the settings.
They’ve added thousands of new quests in Forever. So far I’ve only found those that introduce the new campfire mechanic. You can create a campfire and when players sit down at one, they receive a buff. Pretty neat!
The new weather effects are also nice. They add to the ambiance in a great way. A fog rolled in and I really enjoyed that. As long as they don’t use too much of it, I think it’s great.
It took me about 7 hours of unfocused leveling to get to level 10, and then I entered Ironforge and parked my character, feeling right at home.
This might or might not become a series where you can follow my journey through Wow Forever. We’ll see.
