How does World of Warcraft: Forever fit into current Warcraft lore?

There’s been a lot of buzz around the announcement of World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard’s take on the long-rumored Classic+ that expands on the Season of Discovery model. But one question keeps getting asked about this new game mode: How does it fit into the current World of Warcraft lore? The short answer is that it doesn’t, and you shouldn’t wrack your brain trying to fit all of the pieces together. But that answer is overly reductive and not truly representative of the story of WoW: Forever. The real answer is that it’s complicated, and we’re going to talk about why.

WoW: Forever still takes place in a post-Warcraft 3 world, but instead of directly following the events of The Frozen Throne expansion, it takes place after the new campaign for Warcraft 3: Forsaken Kingdom. This brand new Warcraft 3 expansion lets players experience the fall of Lordaeron and the creation of the Undercity, bridging the story between Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft, and some of that story will continue into WoW: Forever. Forsaken Kingdom also introduces the new Forsaken Paladin, which marks one of our divergences from the original World of Warcraft and WoW: Forever. The new race Shen’dorai, or Skyborne, are High Elves that made a deal with elemental lords of Air to escape Azeroth when the Shen’dralar turned to demonic magic; they effectively became Air Elves and introducing another divergence from the original lore.

Forever won’t completely break or re-write the lore, but will tell the stories that existed between the events of the first game. The stories of NPCs and characters we didn’t get to focus on and find out what they were doing. That said, new story and places are going to be added where it makes sense and doesn’t change the core lore of the world. The developers have stated that they are going to be cautious about adding new things where it makes sense and doing so strategically. Yes, Skyborne are a large change, but the story of the world doesn’t revolve around them. They have their own story, but still exist in the rest of the world. Dungeons and raids that appear will also be strategically placed, and tell new stories in an old world and potentially finish some quests and storylines that never got to be seen the entire way through.

There will certainly be more places where Forever’s lore deviates from current Warcraft in the future, with plenty of stuff for us to speculate on and tinfoil hat about. But if you’re trying to make WoW: Forever fit into the existing story of modern World of Warcraft, don’t. Forever starts in a similar place to vanilla World of Warcraft, but diverges from there to tell stories that the modern game never explored. Treat this like an opportunity to enjoy the stories that we never got to see, and to fully explore the world of Azeroth before the events that whisked us away to Outland. I’m personally very excited to explore all of the places we never got to fully visit, and to see what comes next.