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.
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."
