World of Warcraft Forever charges for what Ascension gave away

I didn't stay up Saturday night. BlizzCon's opening ceremony went on without me, and I caught up on Blizzard's videos on YouTube over the course of the day, between two rounds of dad duty, with the curiosity of someone who had lost his private server a week earlier. So World of Warcraft: Forever exists, it's the Classic+^[1] the rumors promised, and I rather liked the videos. The disappointment came later, on the official site, while reading the pre-purchase offers, where beta access and the new race sat inside paid packs.

What's in the box

Forever is billed as a third version of the game, alongside modern WoW and Classic, and Blizzard pitches it as a "permanent home" where level 60 stays the ceiling for good^[2]. It launches on November 4 at 3 p.m. Pacific time, included with the regular subscription or game time, no box to buy^[3]. The announced content could keep a player who only has his evenings busy for a while, with more than a thousand new quests spread from level 1 to 60, three new zones including Mount Hyjal, nine dungeons, two raids for 10 and 20 players, a battleground, and six race-and-class combinations that didn't exist in 2004, undead paladins and dwarf shamans among them, free for everyone^[4]. The first raid opens on December 9, and hardcore realms^[5] come after launch, with no date attached^[6].

Two ideas won me over. The first does away with separate realms, since everyone picks a ruleset, normal, player versus player, or hardcore, and still runs into everyone else in the same world^[4:1]. The second settles a ten-year-old argument, because Forever ships a game-wide switch between the original character models and their high-definition versions, one toggle that changes your character, the other players, and the world's inhabitants at once, with the 2004 animations restored on the new models^[7]. People who want their Classic untouched keep it, people who want a little modernity get it, and nobody forces their taste on the neighbor. There's real work in there, and I won't pretend otherwise.

A race out of thin air, sold separately

The rest left me hungry. Not one new class, the nine from 2004 remain alone on the menu, and the only novelty on that front is a race, the Skyborne, neutral elves who can join either faction and who, as far as I can tell, come from nowhere in the game's lore^[4:2]. Granted. The problem is that they're for sale. The $30 Heroic pack unlocks the race and its starting island, the $60 Epic pack adds beta access and 30 days of game time, and an $80 collection tops it off with Warcraft III: Reforged^[8]. The specialist press had its headlines out the next day, "$30 elves" and a "bitter taste"^[9].

What worries me isn't so much the $30 as what they foreshadow. If every future race or class arrives in a pack, on top of a monthly subscription, the permanent home will soon cost as much as a second one. Ascension, the private server Blizzard shut down by settlement a week before its own BlizzCon, offered for free a classless mode where you picked talents from every tree, a "free pick" mode that let you build a character spell by spell, and since July a realm with 21 classes invented from scratch^[10]. Blizzard has the game, the servers, and the artists, and its answer to all of that is a paid race. I don't know whether the gap is measured in years of work or in willingness, but you can see it from here.

Rent in Azeroth

A WoW subscription costs €12.99 a month where I live, or €10.99 a month if you commit to six months or a year^[11]. Since I only ever come back to this game to test it, I always pay full price, and that's the price I judge by. I'd have liked Forever to run without a subscription, on the Guild Wars model, the game bought once and funded by a cosmetics shop, which is roughly what Ascension did, its shop selling nothing but looks and mounts^[12]. A free Classic+ with a shop would have cut the ground from under every private server at once, without a lawsuit or a settlement, while bringing players who had left for good back into official WoW. Paying rent on an apartment you never sleep in, I said in June about subscription MMOs, and nothing has changed since, except that they now offer to sell me the wallpaper too.

I'll wait for the beta videos

The beta opens on September 17 and runs through October 21, capped at level 20 and then 30, reserved for buyers of the two most expensive packs^[13]. I'm not putting down $60 to test a beta, so I'll watch other people play on YouTube and check the gameplay and the reviews for whether the promises survive once the trailers are over. I play to have fun without overthinking it, a few dungeons with friends, some farming with my cousin, no time for raids anymore, and above all no obligation to repeat the same quests every day to push a reputation bar. Yet Forever announces exactly that, new reputations to grind and account-wide perks to unlock^[2:1], and that's what I want to see up close before I believe in the "home" rather than the chore chart.

So my verdict is a mix, fairly positive about what Blizzard built, fairly negative about what it charges for, and lukewarm about what it does for me. I think I'll test it someday, one month of subscription, long enough to check. But I said last week that Ascension had figured it all out, and I stand by it, with the footnote that Blizzard has just figured out half.