The Queue: The first day of Forever

It’s the first full day of a new/old Blizzard game with the launch of World of Warcraft: Forever, which has us all caught between the lure of nostalgia and the lure of new content. And without anything to buy, it’s pretty tempting to log on and check it out… perhaps falling into the nostalgia trap yourself.

But maybe it’s worth it, to turn back the clock and try to re-experience Azeroth in Forever. Maybe it’s a brand new/old day for Warcraft.

And in the meanwhile, the Midnight servers feel empty and hopefully you, like me, are not still trying to get your Ahead of the Curve achievement as your guild has grown a little disenchanted with the modern game. Gulp.

This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where we do our best to answer your gaming (and other) questions. Let’s get to it.

Nostalgia is a heck of a drug. And while you can’t go back 20 years to play vanilla WoW again, and thus WoW: Classic, for as popular as it has been, never quite made us feel like we were 20 years younger, WoW: Forever flaunts the rose-colored glasses of our memories with extra graphical punch (just look at those sunbeams!), some modern improvements, and brand new content to make us feel like we’re playing the game we remember playing.

There’s a lot of appeal to this trip down memory lane, where fond memories mingle with new content designed to neatly fit in alongside classic quests. Everything old is new again, but also there’s some genuine new content here, new lands to explore for the first time.

Combine that with the fact that the barrage of new content from patch 12.1 is getting long in the tooth for some players. I haven’t finished everything there is to finish, but I’m worn out of the Venomous Abyss raid, and I strongly dislike the patch 12.1.5 Kith’ix raid. I’m still logging on for raid night and doing most of my weekly chores, but I’ve been doing all of it for long enough that I’m not excited about it anymore.

And so WoW: Forever is launching at a great time, offering some brand new/old Warcraft content to explore while waiting for the next big thing to hit the modern game. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with Forever, well, forever. But it’s a great distraction, and the playstyle is familiar enough to be comfortable but different enough to be a refreshing change of pace for modern.

Plus it takes all sorts. Some people will play this instead of modern. Some people will do it on the side when they get tired or bored in the modern game. Some people won’t like it at all. And all of that’s okay. We don’t have to all like the same things, and in fact the world is more interesting when we don’t.

The default keybindings are the same as the default keybindings in modern, though I swear some of them have changed since I last updated my modern key binds. But it’s been quite a while since I set them, so I grant that could just be me.

However, your modern keybinds won’t carry over to Forever, even though they should work just the same. If you have a setup you like, you’re going to have to set it up again.

It wasn’t perfect, but I thought it was pretty smooth. The servers were available just a bit after they were s supposed to launch and, after a login queue, the game was playable and the crowds weren’t too bad — not even as bad as beta, so I expect they’ve done something to the game’s phasing to limit keep crowds managable and quests moving.

I was having intermittent lag bursts where everyone would spend a moment (or two, or three) running in place before the game snapped back into real time, so it wasn’t flawless — but it was frankly a lot better than I expected. I played for a while, leveling up to 5, before skipping back to modern for raid night.

What about the rest of you? If you were jumping into Forever, how did your first day go?

That’s all for today. Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you all in the comments section!