Saturday’s BlizzCon 2026 opening ceremony got under way at 10:30am on 12 September inside the Anaheim Convention Center, which, for anyone in Sydney or Melbourne setting an alarm for it, meant 3:30 on a Sunday morning. Somewhere in that ceremony, the rumour that’s followed World of Warcraft around for most of Classic’s life finally became an announcement, with a name, a trailer and a date – World of Warcraft: Forever, launching on 4 November.
It’s the thing players have been calling Classic Plus, and Blizzard’s pitch is that it isn’t replacing either version you already play. It’s a third, permanent branch alongside modern WoW and Classic, one that goes back to the game’s first year, sets itself after Warcraft III: Reforged’s Forsaken Kingdom campaign and before Molten Core, and then, rather than marching through the expansions everyone already knows, stays put. The level cap is 60, time is suspended in that first year, and new raids, quests and zones get added sideways rather than stacked on top. As PC Gamer’s live coverage noted, that leaves the door open for future expansions that go somewhere the originals never did. “This is a new opportunity to get back to what the heart is of MMOs, and what makes them so damn special,” executive producer Holly Longdale said.
The headline numbers, straight from Blizzard, are three new zones, over 1,000 new quests, nine new dungeons and two new raids, with some existing areas getting overhauled as well. The new ground includes Zephras Isle, the Riverglades and Mount Hyjal, while Game Informer has the raids down as 10 to 20 player affairs and adds a new battleground, the Darkspear Islands, to the list.
There’s a new playable race too, the Skyborne, a neutral elven people with their own starting zone on Zephras Isle, and with them come race and class pairings vanilla never allowed, the Undead Paladin being the one everyone’s already talking about. Under the hood there’s new lighting, global illumination, volumetric particle effects, a new water renderer and real-time shadows. If that sounds like it’s drifting a long way from the Azeroth you remember, there’s an SD and HD toggle for your character, so you don’t have to go along with it, and a new reputation system hands out items and account-wide perks.
The systems are where it gets interesting. Talking with MMORPG.com, senior game designer Josh Greenfield and senior art director Jeff Parrott walked through campsites, where your profession decides the buff you can set down for other players. A campfire holds three fixtures to begin with, more at higher levels, each lasts around 10 minutes with an hour-long cooldown, you can’t pitch one in a city or too close to another, and players nearby get a buff telling them there’s a fire to go and find. “It’s kind of the evolution of the buff high five when you’re running by people, and you give them blessing and might,” Greenfield said.
Gear’s being rethought as well, with epics meant to keep their prestige without always beating a well-chosen blue. There are hundreds of what the team’s calling biome-specific effects – the Whitemane’s Chapeau they showed shortens the time it takes to resurrect someone, while other sets hit harder against dragons, the idea being that a raid tier from two years earlier stays worth running. You won’t know any of it going in, either, because every item is obfuscated until it drops for someone on your server, so the first raid tier arrives without a best-in-slot list. “The first week will be the Wild West of people getting items and going up on Wowhead or whatever,” Greenfield said.
As for the machinery of getting in, Forever is included with an existing World of Warcraft subscription or Game Time. The Skyborne race comes with the Skyborne Heroic Pack, which also carries the Zephras Isle starting experience, early name reservation, a mount, cosmetics, housing decor and a friend invite code. The Skyborne Epic Pack adds beta access, 30 days of game time, more cosmetics and three invite codes, a limited-time Warcraft Forever Collection bundles all of that with Warcraft III: Reforged and the Forsaken Kingdom campaign, and there’s a physical Collector’s Edition through the Blizzard Gear Store while stock lasts. The beta opens on Thursday 17 September, after being playable on the show floor in Anaheim, and launch is 3pm PST on 4 November, which is 10am AEDT on Thursday 5 November here.
What it adds up to is Blizzard betting that the world Classic proved people would still turn up for can hold a community for years, without an expansion treadmill pulling everyone forward. Whether that bet pays off won’t be settled in Anaheim, though, it’ll be settled in that first Wild West week, on servers full of people who don’t yet know what’s about to drop.
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