I mentioned earlier that I didn’t think Forever was going to be for me long term, and maybe it won’t be my primary game. The sentiment online seems to be that the game is well received and is the solution to everything that is wrong with World of Warcraft. In fact, it will be so good that it’ll absolutely crush Retail’s numbers, and Blizzard will have no choice but to sunset the game.
Absolutely preposterous.
Retail’s too popular and too good of a game for Blizzard to end. People like the raiding, the dungeon system, housing, all the collectibles, etc. It’s got something for everyone even if it doesn’t have everything for everyone. Despite the presentation comments about helping Azeroth “one last time”, Paul Kubit (Associate Game Director) explained that many of the story beats will get resolved in the last expansion of the Worldsoul Saga, which will pave the way for more stories afterwards.
I do want to add that this discourse of Retail vs Classic needs to stop. We’re all playing in one big sandbox. I don’t see why one has to end for the other to live. I don’t agree that one version of the game is infinitely better than the other, simply because there are too many individual preferences. I’m not going to condemn someone for living in Retail exclusively versus another who heavily favours Classic and wants to play forever in that era. They’re two different games. People need to stop shitting on other people for enjoying other games. It was like this decades ago with all of the different MMOs of the time. Between Tera, SWTOR, Rift, Wildstar, and all of these MMOs that were billed as the next WoW killer, Warcraft has outlasted all of them.
But I’m telling you, not even World of Warcraft is capable of killing World of Warcraft.
These purists just need to take a step back and tone down that rhetoric. It’s not necessary anymore in this day and age. If Forever has too many changes (like this Undead Paladin), Classic proper itself is right there. I don’t think that’ll be killed off because there’s a definitive community for it.
Most of this “Retail is dead, Forever killed it” energy I keep seeing is coming from Twitter (or X). Twitter WoW discourse has always run hotter and angrier than the actual playerbase. It’s a small, loud slice of the community, and it rewards the most extreme take, not the most accurate one. A quote-tweet dunking on Retail gets more engagement than a nuanced “actually I enjoy both” post ever will, so the algorithm just keeps feeding you the loudest voices.
We’ve seen this exact cycle before.
With Shadowlands launch, Dragonflight’s slower opening months, you can pick almost any expansion and you can find a wave of “this is the one that finally kills WoW” tweets. None of them were right. The subscriber base didn’t evaporate, the raiding scene didn’t fold, and here we are years later still running progression on multiple teams.
None of this is to say the criticism of Retail is baseless. The gearing treadmills, M+ score gatekeeping in pugs, systems bloat between Delves, Bonus Rolls, and tier sets, weekly reset chores piling up. Those are real complaints and I’ve felt some of them myself. But there’s a difference between “this system needs work” and “the entire game needs to be sunset so Forever can take its place.” The Twitter framing collapses that distance entirely, and it makes the actual, fixable complaints harder to take seriously because they get buried under this apocalyptic rhetoric.
Running raid teams gives me a different vantage point than most people tweeting about this. I’m not about choosing a side. I’m trying to figure out how to fit Forever into a schedule that already has four Retail raid teams in it. From where I sit, the “pick one or the other” framing doesn’t even reflect how people are actually playing. It reflects how people are performing their opinions online.
Another topic I want to weigh in on is that the new race coming into Warcraft Forever has a price tag on it. I saw some discourse about how it was a big ol’ cash grab and unfair that things cost money.
That’s crap, man. This game is a part of the subscription and there is no box price for it like paying for another expansion in Retail. If you think about the fact that WoW’s subscription has not risen in years (at least, in certain regions in NA), you’re getting a deal. You can still access the rest of the game easily with any of the base races and classes.
Have some level of gratitude that the game isn’t more expensive and is financially fueled by name changes, server transfers, faction changes, transmog collectors, and the AH Anniversary mount FOMO players (like me). Paying for a new race isn’t that offensive to help kickstart and sustain a new game altogether.
My Approach to Forever
I’m on multiple raiding teams and I also oversee them. I won’t have the ability or time to dive fully and immerse myself into the way slower game style of Forever. It’ll take me 15 seconds plus a lot of Wanding on my Priest to just kill a mob.
What I need to do is change my approach to the game. I need to think of this as a single player RPG where I can drop in and out. Don’t get me wrong, I love end game content (raids and dungeons) more so than leveling. But if my end game itch is scratch on retail, I won’t need to rely on it in Forever and can just stroll through it like I would in Cyberpunk or Dragon Age.
Raids will come out later in December. Who knows if I’ll have the time to do it as much as I love raiding. This might lead to me dropping one of the other four raid teams I’m participating in.
The Death Jesters and Zeroes to Heroes community is already hard at work laying out the foundation for our Forever guild. If you’re looking for a place to hang out and start, I’d highly recommend it. We had a strong representation this year at BlizzCon with multiple raid teams and community members present. Look at the turnout below!
You’re welcome to join! We haven’t decided on a ruleset yet, but if I were to hazard a guess, it would most likely be Alliance based on a normal ruleset, although nothing has been confirmed.