WoW Forever: Everything Old Is New Again

And, uh, this week, uh, I am a student, uh, to, to Zach's, uh, teacher, uh, because we are talking about World of Warcraft, specifically World of Warcraft Forever, um, the newest iteration of a game I've never played.

[laughs]

Yep, yep.

The, the newest iteration in a series of iterations, I, I think if you count all of them at this point, there's probably been about...

Well, it kinda depends on what you mean, 'cause there's retail World of Warcraft, which of course refers to the game that has existed for, uh, 22 years at this point and has continued to receive expansions and continued updates.

There is World of Warcraft Classic, which is just them revisiting the older expansions, starting from what is called World of Warcraft Vanilla, which is the, the base game that came out in the, the early 2000s, and they've gone through all of the, the subsequent expansions.

There was a thing called Season of Discovery that they tried, which was just the base game, but they made it so that classes could have new talents and do different things, uh, like tank when they previously couldn't or heal when they previously couldn't.

So, that was an iteration.

And now we're on World of Warcraft Forever, which of course those that know World of Warcraft will know that this is something called Classic Plus, which is its own thing, [chuckles] um, that I think-

[laughs]

... you'll kind of get a better understanding of as we, uh, continue to discuss this topic, um, i- in the, the larger framing of the conversation that we're having.

So, I'll spare everyone from me blabbering on that, uh, for, for too, too long.

But yes, to Aaron's point, um, there are, are a lot of different iterations of World of Warcraft.

There are a lot of ways to be a player who plays World of Warcraft in 2026, and in a weird way, this may be the most approachable way for people to jump in, uh, to World of Warcraft, a- at least compared to a lot of the other ways that people have historically had as options, which is, is kind of interesting.

Um, but before I let Aaron, you know, maybe elaborate on, on his potential, uh, interest, which I guess to clarify, Aaron, I don't know that you have a strong interest.

You just said that you would potentially be interested, and this would be the version that you'd be interested in.

Um-

Yes

...

I, I, I should say that World of Warcraft Forever was announced at BlizzCon 2026 about a month ago, along with a new expansion for Warcraft III: Reforged, which is of course a, uh, remake of World of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos that I believe came out in 2002.

So, super old game.

They just gave it a new expansion, which is, uh, you know, kind of interesting, and largely a lot of this ties into an episode that we did a little bit earlier on Witcher 3: Songs of the Past and talking about how there's a lot more AAA developers that are willing to re- revisit their back catalog and make completely new content for these games that had, you know, previously existed for quite some time but not necessarily really received, uh, updates.

Yeah, um, a- and it's, it's part of this, this sort of like growing...

I, I almost said phenomenon.

I don't think it's that actual, you know, like that, that, that magnitudeness, which is probably not a word, but I'm sticking with it.