Why World of Warcraft: Forever isn't for Azeroth's heroes, but for everyone else

• Feature
• Interview

Blizzard's Tim Jones and Nora Mills talk about World of Warcraft: Forever and its focus on a more low-stakes existence in Azeroth.

Ozzie Mejia September 21, 2026 3:30 PM Blizzard Entertainment 1

One of the most exciting announcements to come from BlizzCon 2026 involved a new way to experience World of Warcraft. The modern WoW continues the ongoing story of Azeroth and its greatest heroes. World of Warcraft Classic tells the tales of Azeroth's heroes from the MMORPG's heyday. While World of Warcraft: Forever takes players back to the old settings of WoW Classic, it's very much not a game about heroes. It's a game about life and community in Azeroth as a whole. To learn more about what this entailed, I wrapped up my time at BlizzCon by speaking with Lead Game Designer Tim Jones and Lead Software Engineer Nora Mills.

(The following interview was conducted during the early afternoon of BlizzCon 2026's second day.)

Shacknews: One thing you made clear in the reveal of World of Warcraft: Forever is that it's not going to focus on a big story, but more like on your own personal story. Can you explain more of what that entails?

Tim Jones, Lead Game Designer: I think part of the beauty of World of Warcraft Classic is that the world is filled with local stories, especially as you start at lower levels: You're dealing with a Kobold infestation, you are helping a farmer take back his property by dealing with some Defias. As you level up, the stakes do grow, but... it's never on the scale of "The fate of existence hangs in the balance" or "We have to save Azeroth itself." You're dealing with what it's like to live in Azeroth, dealing with the people. It's very rare that you run into a faction leader or a major lore character as part of a quest. Sometimes you do, but it's really about the simplicity and the lower stakes that make the world feel very grounded.

When we build content for WoW: Forever, that's the approach that we want to take when we are building all types of content for all levels of characters. When we're building low-level quests in Elwynn Forest, we want it to feel like a found photograph, like this quest could have existed if a player time-traveled from 2004 to now and were going through the zone, that this quest would have felt like it could have always existed. And, same with the dungeons, we really take care to make sure that they feel like they naturally exist in this physical space in the world, but also that the difficulty and the complexity of the creatures and encounters in those spaces feels like there's a coherence and a consistency between that content that's new and the content that is old.

Shacknews: On that note, does the team consider this to be a whole new World of Warcraft game, a remake of that classic WoW experience, or a little bit of both?

Nora Mills, Lead Software Engineer: Definitely, it is a third pillar of World of Warcraft. We already have our versions of World of Warcraft Classic. We've got multiple versions of World Warcraft Classic that are currently live. And then there's, of course, the modern game, which definitely has its own wonderful identity. This is a completely separate third pillar of World of Warcraft that we're really excited for folks to discover and explore. Explore those more grounded stories of the people of Azeroth, the world events, things that are happening around them and their reaction to it, how their lives have been impacted by the war, all sorts of wonderful story threads for us to pull on.

Jones: And it's still built on the foundation of the original game.

Shacknews: I'm glad you mentioned the foundation of the original game and, you kind of discussed this during Saturday's panel, but can you go into more detail on what the core pillars of Forever are and what separates this from current WoW?

Jones: Our core pillars are approachable and familiar: journey before destination, protect and nurture social experiences, and world as the main character.

There's a simplicity to WoW: Forever that definitely takes from original World of Warcraft Classic and vanilla, where classes are easy to get into, rotations are not overly complex. We want people to be satisfied. We don't want someone to be pressing the same exact button over and over. But, we also don't think that it's necessary for people to have to have add-ons in order to be able to play their class correctly. We want creatures to be deliberately simple and combat to be methodical and take some time. We want the leveling journey to take a long time, but slowly onboard people into complexity and not overwhelm them. We really think that WoW: Forever is an amazing starting point for people getting into the World of Warcraft game because of its slow roll and approachability there.

Then there's Azeroth as the main character. Grounded story quests! Quests that are quests, and stories, and lore that feels like it exists, that it could have always existed. You are not the main character, the world is the main character. You're not a champion, you are just another soldier, another character going and helping people, listening to their issues. They don't necessarily hold you in high regard when you do this, but there are reputations, and when you put in effort and time into leveling your character up or gaining reputation, then that effort? It matters and it matters forever.

"Journey before destination," that just means that when you look at endgame and the leveling, there's gonna be people who really want to rush to our endgame, and want to get into the raid and be super competitive doing the raiding content, but for WoW: Forever, we really think that the leveling experience is just as important as the endgame. And so, we're making a promise to continuously provide awesome raiding content, ten and 20-player raiding content, every single tier that we go into in the future. But, we are simultaneously making sure that we're looking at the leveling journey, we're look at where there might be gaps, where there isn't a dungeon at a specific level band or there might be a part of Elwynn Forest or Wetlands that people never explored before and finding opportunities to expand the world horizontally, to make the world feel more full, and for there to be multiple opportunities for people to go on in their leveling journey.

[Nora], do you want to jump in here for protected nurture social experiences?

Mills: Absolutely! In fact, this is my opportunity to shine a light on the engineering side of things, because one of the things [Lead Software Engineer] Ana Resendez just talked about on the Deep Dive panel is how we've gone realmless. And we've noticed patterns over time, like, classic players love their mega realms. They love to pack onto a single realm, so that they have as many people as possible to play with. In WoW: Forever, we've taken major strides in the direction of utilizing our tech and evolving our tech to pay attention to social context within the game and understand, like, "Have I encountered Tim?" Like, "How many times?" Like, is this someone who's part of my life or social web, so to speak? And when we're doing what we can to try and create opportunities for players to encounter one another more often in the world, such that it makes that "mega realm" neighborly vibe, so that it lends toward protecting those social experiences.

The other thing that we're doing, too, is you can see this in our gameplay systems that we've talked about, like camping, for instance. Camping is one of those things where, if you just walked up to someone and you were trying to hype up, "There's this new feature, you put down a campfire, and then you sit there for a minute," at face value it sounds like... maybe not the most exciting thing, but the thing that happens there is, you can put down equipment, you can gain buffs, you can gain perks, you might unlock an ability where maybe you can repair there in the future. It's something that if you see it out in the world or if you're about to put down a campfire and set up a campsite, that's an opportunity for you, as a player, to be like, "Hey, maybe I'm nice!" In general chat in the zone I'm in, I'm going to say, "I'm about to put down a campsite. Here's what I'm putting down. And if you want these buffs, here's the general location that where I am," and other players can join you at the campfire, sit down, and it creates a situation where you're sitting there, you're pausing your excitement and the journey into dungeon questing, right? You guys sit there for a minute to gain advantage of those buffs, but in that minute, you might feel inspired to say, "Hey Tim! You're around my same level. Are you got to go do that quest over there? You know, you're gonna go into that dangerous cave?"

Jones: "You're farming wastewater bandits too? Let's go do that together!"

Mills: It creates these opportunities for players to connect with one another and create these friendships, these relationships with one other, and that's something that we find as a cornerstone of many classic MMOs. That's something in WoW Classic, in particular, that inspired a lot of us to want to create and stand by this pillar for Forever, because this is the type of thing that... I've met folks at BlizzCon, they met their spouse in World of Warcraft. They met their friend group. My friends, I met a bunch of my friends in World of Warcraft. They came to my wedding last year and we've known each other for over a decade. It's incredible what a "video game," with air quotes, can do to bring people together and connect them across social and even geographical boundaries.

Shacknews: What can players expect from the Hardcore rule set that's going to be added post-launch?

Mills: We haven't said much. You might want to check out the Hardcore panel later today where we're actually going to have, it's going to be me sort of emceeing, and then [Senior Game Designer] Josh Greenfield and [Principal Game Designer] Kris Zierhut are going to talk about the journey of Classic Hardcore to its launch, and then share some tidbits of what's coming soon to Forever Hardcore. There are a lot of really fun implications. I'll tease one for you. One of the really fun implications of love for the Hardcore is, like, we just talked about camping, right? In our internal play testing, I was playing a character and I was like, "Okay, you know, like death is death, I'm playing Hardcore, but I do want to set up a campsite. I want to go get those buffs so I can go on my quest." I set up my campsite, didn't really think it through and I panned my camera as I'm sitting there for 30 seconds, thankfully I didn't start paying attention to my second monitor and just zoned out, but a dangerous creature was wandering down the road and I was like... *gasp*... I instantly got up and ran away from my campsite. So there's these new situations that weren't there, because camping wasn't a thing in other versions of WoW. It's unique to WoW: Forever. There's a lot of unique new scenarios in which, players are going to have to learn, "Oh shoot, it matters where I set up my campsite, I need to be really cautious."

One of the things they talked about on the Deep Dive is that WoW Forever is not a solved game in the way that WoW Classic is, because it's very much a time capsule of the original game that we have in WoW Classic. So players have effectively solved the meta in Classic. Well, Forever is going to be unsolved, right? You're not going to necessarily know if you're about to head into that cave, "Is there a dangerous creature in there? Should I actually, like, look around? Maybe I should invite Tim to a group, because I think it might be dangerous. I don't actually know yet, right?" So it's very, very interesting new twist on current Hardcore, I would say.

Jones: I have one thing to add, and this is more of like a thought experiment for you and for our players, is that... look at some of the systems that we're adding to the game. The legacy system is a new account-wide progression system where when you level up a character and, this really focuses on the leveling journey. When you reach certain leveling milestones, you get a Legacy Point. When you level up certain professions or explore the world or do certain dungeons, you can accumulate Legacy Points across your account from doing this with multiple characters, and then you can spend those points to be better at gathering or make your food buffs last longer, maybe get a talent point earlier than you're supposed to. And what are the implications of that in the Hardcore world? How should the legacy system exist in Hardcore? Should there be specific legacy system challenges that are unique to Hardcore? I think that those are really exciting to think about and we're going to be really excited to talk more about that in the future.

Shacknews: What can you tell me about the new Skyborne race? There seems to be some early criticism that dismisses them as "They're just more blue elves," but is there more to them than that?

Jones: Absolutely there's more to them! When we think about making new content in the game, I'm going to deviate for a second here, we think about the types of content that we want to make. And one of those is the expected, right? So there's zones like Hyjal, places like Gilneas. These are places that people already know exist in the world and are expecting in a classic-plus style game that eventually we'll explore and develop those places into full-fledged questing or PvP areas. And so, we're doing that right off the bat. We're going to Hyjal. We're seeing what it looks like at this period of time in World of Warcraft: Forever.

Mills: Then there's the anticipated. It's new, but it meshes seamlessly within the world, such that it could have been there all along.

Jones: Right, and the Riverglades is a really great example of that, where there's elements of the Warcraft 1 storyline about how humans were pursuing orcs retreating over into the eastern reaches of the Eastern Kingdoms, and there was a physical space in the original vanilla map that wasn't developed into a zone, and we took that footprint of a zone and we developed a new story. We expertly created a flow from Red Ridge into this beautiful new frontier with quests for both Horde and Alliance.

And then the third pillar of types of content is the new and unexpected. And we feel that the Skyborne, the Shen'dorei, are part of that pillar, where it's not necessarily something that players expected. It is grounded in World of Warcraft lore, just like the Riverglades. It's a bit more exotic, but there is a story that we're very excited to tell. There's going to be more about it in the Found Photographs panel with Josh [Greenfield] and [Lead Content Designer] Evan [Lee] later today, that explores, "Who are these elves? How are they different from the other elves that we know in the world?" And there's some really exciting story elements that we think players are going to feel more comfortable about welcoming this new race into Azeroth once they hear these things, like how they're tied to Eldre'Thalas, the ancient city that eventually turned into Dire Maul. Prince Tortheldrin, and how he manipulated his people and used their power to summon demons into the world... that's established lore, [but] could there have been a group of elves that opposed him, that lost a fight against him, and then had to flee into exile? And then [we're] figuring out how to integrate that story with other elements of what we know to be lore and art grounded in the vanilla world, and create something that can surprise and delight a lot of players. So, you know, they're not just "blue elves." They have a lot of customization options. They can be pink. They can have darker red skin. We think we've crafted a really beautiful starting zone in the Isle of Zephras.

We're answering some mysteries for players and we're creating new mysteries for players. And again, this is WoW: Forever, this is a Forever promise. This is the first new race that we're adding to the game. There is a lot of possibilities of where we go in the future and we want players to try to keep an open mind. People can be free to criticize the game, we want to hear what the community feels and we will do our best to react and make future plans around what the community desires. We're not afraid of what the community has to say. We really want this to be an open dialog with people and we're excited to craft these new experiences with the community as we go into the future.

Shacknews: Last question from me, do you anticipate any challenges in coexisting with the current World of Warcraft, especially as that team continues to kind of push where the MMO genre is going?

Mills: I wouldn't say so. I would say that WoW: Forever exists as such a distinct pillar of World of Warcraft. Everything down from the game, and the systems, and how and why we are crafting them the way they are in alignment with those pillars Tim touched on. It really creates its own identity and, as we continue to explore the world, in which WoW: Forever occupies that vanilla time period, it's existing in somewhat of a time bubble, where we're gonna be exploring all sorts of what is going on in this time period in this world. And it's not gonna be these huge world-ending threats, these huge cataclysmic "the entire world hangs in the balance" type stories that we're going to be telling. Rather, it's going to more grounded, perhaps to some degree, we hope, relatable with our players. There's people occupying Azeroth during this time period, and what are they going through? What is that old farmer on the side of the road thinking about the war that's going on and the orcs that keep invading his pumpkin field and stealing his stuff? There's all sorts of really interesting and compelling stories to be told at that scale, as well, right? So I really do feel like it sits next to modern and really complements the other pillars of World of Warcraft.

Jones: Modern is an amazing game. Mythic Plus is very cool. It's great for people to be able to showcase their mastery of a class and their mastery of a piece of content. It is really exciting to watch the higher difficulty raids and people competing for World First. There is a lot of amazing stuff that Modern offers. I think the way that we differentiate ourselves and the beauty of our game, and each game is wonderful in their own separate way, but we have a completely different pace, and a different focus. Endgame is special to us, but the leveling journey is equally as special to us, and we will continue to build upon making that leveling journey just as important as our end time.

And I think one thing that's also unique is we're not making things difficult for the sake of difficulty. Really, the challenge in classic content, especially endgame, is preparation and just getting your friends together. And then if you have some knowledge of a raid boss, then the expectation is you put in the work before, you crafted your consumables, you made sure that you enchanted your gear, you got your sharpening stones ready, you've all met at the same time. You should be able to crush that content. There should still be some difficulty and challenge, but there's no expectation that you're putting in hundreds of reps or even tens of reps on certain raid bosses. We really want the focus to be on, "You did the preparation, you have a community of people, and in doing those things, you should see success." So our difficulty and pacing are completely different from Modern, I think we can, like Nora said at the very beginning, we're the third pillar of World of Warcraft and I think that we can coexist very well with modern World of Warcraft because we focus on different things, our pacing is very different, our focus on the importance of leveling is very different and that's okay. I think those are special things about both of our games.

Mills: We like to say that it's like a menu of options, and I actually think of it as an actual restaurant menu, where some people come in and they're like, "I like pizza, I like sushi," and you know what that other person may like both, they might like one, they may like neither. As long as we're offering things that are available to players to jump in and engage and enjoy themselves, right? Having different pillars, different niches that these games occupy, I think is a really compelling offering, all under one subscription.

World of Warcraft: Forever is coming soon with a closed beta set to begin in November. To learn more about that, be sure to take a look at our World of Warcraft: Forever beta guide.

Shacknews staff does not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) in their content. Shacknews strictly prohibits the use of its content for AI training or to generate text, including text in the style or format used for this publication. Shacknews reserves all rights to this work.

Ozzie Mejia Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?

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