// PC GAMER — GAMING
WoW: Forever, by casting off modern convenience, has horseshoed back around to being casual friendly again
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
World of Warcraft: Forever seems, at first blush, like an antidote to the idea of a modern MMO. I see it in the (naturally, traditionally) insufferable trade chat as I potter about on my fury warrior—people turning up their noses at the idea of retail players. Cushioned as they are in their soft little bubbles, ptooie!
But as someone with a 9-5 job and other MMOs I play, I wouldn't particularly describe myself as a "hardcore" WoW player. Competent, sure. I've cleared high-end content in other games (like a Savage tier in FF14). I know how to push buttons and avoid mechanics—and I also like hard games in general. But I'm definitely not on that grindset, particularly not in a beta.
And while I do admire the folks trying to get best-in-slot gear for a month—there's something beautiful and ephemeral about the effort—I do have to wonder: Are we playing the same game? Because WoW: Forever's actually super casual friendly. And if you played it with the right attitude, honestly, Classic was pretty casual friendly, too.
WoW's gone through what I'm going to frame as a water cycle of difficulty—its starting point, back in vanilla, is what we're going to call an "oldschool" mindset. A big, open world that required a lot of patience and cooperation to get around, littered with quests, where getting to level 60 was part of the journey itself. The water in this laborious metaphor.
Then we start moving towards Cataclysm, a halfway state—steam rising up into the clouds. Things are more straightforward, you've got people griping about "welfare epics", the dungeon finder has well and truly obliterated the social contract, people are finding new and inventive ways to insult your mom, and so on. However, you still need a challenge, a carrot on a stick.
Enter borrowed power grinds: Your artifact weapons, your Azerite armors, your Covenants. In a world where everything but the hardest of content comes easy and levelling is a brisk inconvenience, these systems are needed to keep players logging in every day. Eventually these systems go from beloved for their sense of progression to reviled for their meaningless tedium.
And, crucially, for the fact that a missed day, week, or month sets you permanently behind folks who're putting in the hours every single day. The clouds get heavy, resentment brews, and suddenly—bam! Max exodus, pandaemonium! And to fix it, we move into the downpour cycle: A seasonal structure.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.