The Queue: Modern Forever

With WoW Forever entering the discussion, people have started calling Retail WoW “Modern WoW” now. The questions, then, become: will you play Modern WoW forever? Is WoW Forever modern enough for you?

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where we ponder our orbs and try to create future plans on the spot while the Old Gods laugh.

Right now, I plan to mostly play one character — most likely a Mage — while rolling two other characters that I’ll play less frequently when I feel like changing things up. So those two should be gathering a lot of rested XP.

Which leads me to the wider analysis of my plans that I was eluding to in the intro to this column.

WoW Forever sounds very attractive to me. Instead of trying to explain why, I could just point you to this Zepla video, because many of the things she says there are things I feel almost exactly the same way about. The TL;DR is that a slower, more dangerous world where you’re just an unknown adventurer trying to make it, focusing on doing one thing at a time instead of being bombarded with ephemeral systems, and each thing you do has friction and immersion sounds extremely appealing to me, like choosing a hearty slow food meal at a good restaurant instead of grabbing a quick snack from the kitchen.

I miss that. I crave that experience again, especially now that it’s somewhat modernized, with new class balance, new quests, new graphics and all that jazz.

However, sometimes I fear that I’m not necessarily the right target audience for WoW Forever. I think WoW Forever is carefully crafted to appeal to two kinds of players: people who already play WoW Classic instead of Modern, and people who have stopped playing WoW, whichever version it was, a while ago, and might feel like coming back to a fresh start. I’m neither of those: I’m still a player of Modern WoW, even if these days I play it far more casually (and with far more frequent breaks than before). And the truth is that it’s very hard to juggle multiple MMOs (for me, at least). I don’t see myself abandoning my current roster from Modern WoW to start a new roster in Forever.

So I might just roll one character, and one or two extras to gather rested XP, but who knows how much time I’ll realistically dedicate to them, even if I do miss and crave the experience their game world might provide me. I’ve decided that I’m not gonna plan or worry about it; I’m just gonna see where things naturally lead me to.

The Draenei arrive, but they’re different. They look more purple and have longer ears.

The Exodar never crashes, because these Elune-aligned Draenei have found the Blood Elf saboteurs and killed them before they could do anything. The ship lands safely on Ashenvale and settles on a previously uncharted island nearby.

The Broken have been much more widely accepted into this society. They can become Demon Hunters, so the Demon Hunter class is introduced to WoW Forever through them. Whenever you ask a Broken Demon Hunter NPC about their origins, they refuse to elaborate and leave.

At night, when the moon is full, a mysterious shape can be seen crossing the sky. Some people swear it looks suspiciously like a giant moonkin.

Where do Old Gods go when they die?

They don’t go to Bastion where the Kyrian lie.

They go down the Jailer’s Maw and cry.

Won’t see them again until the Quilboars fly.

I’m gonna cheat the same way you did when you posed the question: the song is Odyssey, by Kyuss. The animated series is based off of the universe I’ve been developing for years and hope to turn into something one day. One important sequence on my story was actually developed with this specific song in mind as a background influence.

But for the non-cheating version, I’m gonna pick…

…keep reading.

Slowly but surely. I’ve been sick these last few days, but I still had to work, and I still had to do some other things, so even though I assumed I was gonna be spending a lot of time just lying in bed and playing my Switch, that did not happen to be the case.

I’m on Cai’s chapter 6, though I’m almost done with it. So basically halfway through that first route, though I assume future routes should be faster. But I’m in no rush; I never really rush to finish these games. I enjoy taking my time with them.

I’d say so, yeah, but while most games do offer a bunch of “fun” possibilities, they don’t really explore all of the fun possibilities. We could definitely do so much more with it.

And heck, a fantasy world that focused more on all the possibilities of potions, including their behavioral and societal implications and consequences, would probably be super fun to explore. Now I want to read a book based on that. Or maybe watch an animated series.

…that’s the animated series I’ll be choosing a theme song for, and that theme song is Better Living Through Chemistry, by Queens of the Stone Age.

This has been The Queue. Don’t drink potions and ride, kids.