// KOTAKU — GAMING
Get Up To Speed On World Of Warcraft: Forever’s Big Launch: Everything You Need To Know
World of Warcraft: Forever launches on November 4, and unless you’re someone who’s already deeply buried in the community, it probably sounds a little daunting. What even is it? Original WoW, but not? Lighting effects and torches? Something about some new blue elves?
I’ve been trying to explain WoW: Forever to friends and colleagues again and again for weeks now, but I have become tired and now I am just writing it all down for anyone to read. I’ve broken this up into two parts: the first half or so is for people who are familiar with some version of WoW already, but the second half addresses anyone who’s never even touched WoW and doesn’t know the first thing they should be doing. All of you are welcome in WoW: Forever, and I want you to understand the game as much as you want or need to, because I’ve played about 15 hours of it and it’s genuinely very, very cool.
Read these things you need to know, absorb them, and then come meet me in the Riverglades:
Literally that’s it. If you already have a subscription that you use to play WoW or WoW: Classic, you’re golden. Don’t need to do anything else.
That said, if you want access to the new Skyborne race and their starting zone, it costs $30 for the Skyborne Heroic Pack. At the moment, this is the only gameplay content gated behind a bonus paywall, though it’s possible other things could be added in the future. There are other, more expensive bundles that will get you the Skyborne and a number of other goodies across both Forever and other WoW games, but again I cannot emphasize enough that if you just want to make an orc or something and play Forever, and you already have a WoW subscription, you don’t need to buy extra stuff. If you don’t have a subscription currently, you will need to get one, obviously.
For those who have never touched World of Warcraft before, hold tight, I’ll get to you in a moment. Veterans, I’m talking to you right now. Maybe you’re coming back to WoW after years of not playing, or maybe you’re active in Midnight right now. Regardless, WoW: Forever should be pretty familiar-looking, especially if you played World of Warcraft “back in the day” and have powerful memories of that time. It’s still an MMORPG set in Azeroth, with the same locations across Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, albeit in their original forms (before Cataclysm shifted everything around). The majority of the questlines, characters, classes, activities, and mechanics are exactly the same as they were when WoW first came out. If your most recent memory of WoW was playing back in its first few years, and you open up Forever when it launches and roll the same kind of character, you honestly might not even notice that much of a difference…at first.
Even so, there’s plenty of new things to be found. Even if you roll the same character you played in the original game and venture through the same zones, you’ll likely find yourself on quests here and there that seem unfamiliar, and that’s probably because they’re brand new—woven in with the old stories. But if you want something that truly feels new, here are a few good places to start:
Good grief that’s a lot, and that’s just in addition to the existing ones! The new dungeons are as follows:
Early on, you’ll get a quest tutorial for a new campfire system that lets you build campfires out in the wilderness and sit by them to gain buffs. Those buffs are determined by the items you and other passersby set up around the campfire, which are learned through your professions. I really loved the quiet moments this system inspired when I toyed with it during the beta, and I definitely recommend using it when you’re out questing and the nearest town is far, far away. Or, join someone else’s campfire when you see the smoke rising in the distance. It’s worth it both for the buffs and the cool social interactions you’ll have.
A new Legacy Point system replaces achievements from modern WoW, and gives you spendable points for doing things like leveling c