World of Warcraft Forever came out earlier this week, and has been a massively successful launch. It almost begs the question, “Why wait this long?” Well, Blizzard has revealed what made it finally release the Classic+ game mode.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Blizzard senior game designer Josh Greenfield revealed that the developer had been kicking around the idea of WoW Forever since before Classic released in 2019, but the team ultimately pulled the trigger on the straight-up port of Vanilla WoW first. But while Forever was put on the backburner, the Classic team started to get a little bit more experimental as the old-school version of the MMO aged.
Then, in 2023, Blizzard released a new game mode, Season of Discovery, which took Classic and made some pretty radical changes, like ability gems and turning old 5-player dungeons like Blackfathom Deeps into full-scale raids. This game mode had some pretty immediate impacts on even retail WoW, like when Blizzard released Mists of Pandaria Remix in 2024 and Legion Remix in 2025.
But it turns out that the biggest impact that Season of Discovery had was making the WoW team pull the trigger on Classic+, or Forever. According to Greenfield, the community response to Season of Discovery is what made Forever actually happen. He told Bloomberg, “That’s really when the conversation started around, ‘Hey, what does a permanent version of this game look like?’”
Season of Discovery’s success also helped convince leadership to allow development on Forever to proceed, and once the team started getting the new graphics engines in place, everything seems to come together. According to that Bloomberg piece, Northshire Abbey became a tech demo of sorts, and one that won over pretty much everyone at Blizzard.
And it’s good that it did. IGN’s early review of World of Warcraft Forever is extremely positive, and while it’ll obviously be a while before the full review is finished, reviewer Len Hafer says, “[Blizzard] made me believe I can go home again – and that home is somewhere I want to spend more time, with new surprises to discover. Let’s see if they can keep it up for 47 more levels. Watch this space for updates in the weeks to come.”
Players seem impressed with WoW Forever as well, especially on the back of an extremely smooth launch that was almost completely free of any kind of server problems. It doesn’t hurt that Blizzard dedicated a ton of hardware to keeping the servers running smoothly at launch, with around 200TB of memory.