Development History

0:29 World of Warcraft: Forever grew out of a request the WoW Classic team heard for years and could not act on at first: stay in the original world at level 60, and add to it. Opening the What's Next panel at BlizzCon on Sep 12, 2026, Senior Game Director Ion Hazzikostas traced the story back nine years to the BlizzCon where Blizzard announced WoW Classic. Classic launched a couple of years later, millions came back to level to 60 and fight Onyxia and Ragnaros, and talk turned to what should come next. For many players that meant The Burning Crusade, "and of course that is what came to pass". For others it meant something like Forever, which Kotaku reports was made by Blizzard's Classic team and had long been rumored as "Classic+". It was announced at the BlizzCon 2026 opening ceremony and is due on Nov 4, 2026.

Quick facts

A dream that stayed a dream

1:08 Even then, "in 2020 or so", Hazzikostas said, there was another group: "dreamers" for whom the vanilla game was just about the perfect MMO, except that it had already been solved. They did not want to leave a world grounded in the aftermath of Warcraft III, swap hard-won raid epics for greens from Zangarmarsh, or trade the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor for an Outland an epic mount crosses in minutes. "What if we could stay at level 60?" they asked, and the team asked it too, along with building new content, telling new stories and making "meme specs" a little more viable.

2:01 In 2020 the Classic team could not do it. Its people and its development pipeline had been "purpose-built to restore and curate an old version of the game, not to add to it". The idea kept smoldering instead and took hold inside the team, where developers kept pitching their own versions of what adding content to vanilla might look like.

Hardcore: players lead the way

4:53 The team's clearest lesson in building on the original game came from its players. Josh Greenfield, a senior game designer, told the "Go Again!" Hardcore panel on Sep 13, 2026 that one-life challenges had been around since Classic launched in 2019. When Blizzard opened Season of Mastery, a fresh vanilla realm with special rules, in 2021, the Hardcore community organized its own Road to Ragnaros event. With the build almost locked, a designer offered to "slam something in": a buff called Soul of Iron, handed out by an NPC in town and lost on death. Groups went on to reach level 60 without dying and kill Ragnaros.

8:15 By late 2022 the Hardcore players had settled on a roleplaying realm, and Greenfield, then a producer, watched its daily peak rise from about 200 players to about 1,500. When the team took the graph to Blizzard's leadership, the response was at first "a little lukewarm". Holly Longdale, then the team's executive producer, was "60 or 70% sold" and left for a two-week holiday to think it over, so the team asked an engineer to build a prototype in those two weeks: "You died, you stayed dead." When she came back and found it already built, Greenfield said, she agreed to go ahead.

45:20 Clay Stone, Associate Production Director of the WoW Classic and WoW Forever team, keeps a picture framed on his wall at Blizzard from 2023, because "Hardcore represented a turning point for us as a team": the moment Blizzard and the community showed why the original adventure "still holds so much promise". He called Hardcore "the start of a promise" and used the story at BlizzCon to announce that Hardcore is coming to Forever too.

Season of Discovery

2:44 In 2023 the team "decided to test the waters" with Season of Discovery, announced at BlizzCon that year. Hazzikostas called it "an experiment on many levels": a time-limited season that deliberately pushed boundaries so the team could find out "how much change was too much change". It added new quests, items and class abilities, and new dungeons and raids such as Karazhan Crypts and the Scarlet Enclave, "and we sure found those limits".

1:46 Forever's way of telling stories also began there. Josh Greenfield, who helps lead content and narrative direction for Forever, told the Found Photographs panel that "found photographs" was a term Chris Metzen coined in the team's earliest conversations about adding new stories to Season of Discovery. The idea is that new stories should be ones that could feasibly have happened in the vanilla era, Azeroth's first year, told as local stories: unravelling the motives of the Defias Brotherhood, or helping Tirion Fordring rediscover his lost purpose.

26:03 In Season of Discovery the team wrote stories in that classic, ground-level way, such as bringing Gregory, a minor paladin from Warcraft III known as Sage Truthbearer, back to the Light. Greenfield said the team studied original WoW and played through its classic quest chains to do it, and that many of Forever's questlines "are things that we started in Season of Discovery and carried forward".

3:39 By the middle of 2024, Hazzikostas said, the team was certain the idea was "not only possible, but compelling". Season of Discovery had shown it what worked and how to build content 20 years later that belonged beside the original. Years of Classic had also shown that players approach the game differently from 2005, when "knowledge was a different thing". Most of all, players had told Blizzard they wanted not a temporary season but "a forever home where their investment would be meaningful".

Setting and continuity

0:52 Forever "begins at the same time original WoW begins". It keeps all of the original quest content and builds on it, before the Dark Portal reopens at the start of The Burning Crusade and before players travel to Northrend, and the team intends "to occupy this space and expand upon it indefinitely". Blizzard's announcement places it after Warcraft III Reforged: Forsaken Kingdom and before Molten Core.

5:09 It does not share modern WoW's story. Forever "does not exist in the same continuity as modern World of Warcraft", Greenfield said, and Metzen calls it "our little time bubble". The separation gives the team creative freedom without creating situations that would need a direct response in modern World of Warcraft. It does not overturn the foundational lore of the strategy games: the team will not decide that Jaina was a dreadlord all along, and it aims to "paint inside the lines".

Anticipated, new but familiar, unexpected

6:17 The team sorts new content into three kinds. The anticipated are places players knew about but could never explore, such as Mount Hyjal: "the wish fulfillment". If players want a well-known piece of content, the panel said, it is probably "on a whiteboard back at the office or perhaps even in production right now". New but familiar content, such as The Riverglades in Blizzard's recap, rests on places and characters from original WoW and the early strategy games, and should feel as if it "could have been here all along".

7:21 The third kind, the unexpected, covers new concepts, often places or characters that exist in Warcraft's story but were never explored. It is "a category of content we plan to introduce sparingly", chosen with care so as not to upend the world, its stories or its characters.

24:14 Zephras Isle, the floating home of the new Skyborne race, is the example. It is "not a major fixture in the world" but a self-contained place that players will not visit every week to raid or farm. The panel showed its final in-game map beside the original sketch Chris Metzen drew after the team's first meeting about the concept, which he sent over "very excited".

27:20 The Riverglades show how a zone gets made. Evan, the Classic team's lead content designer, said it started from a piece of land on the eastern shore of the Eastern Kingdoms that was on the map but had never been developed. A world builder proposed several biomes, the team settled on a single zone of about 30 "chunks", roughly the size of Stranglethorn Vale, and a discussion lasting months narrowed "about 10 or 12 ideas" to the handful of stories in the zone.

Pillars and pace

6:21 The What's Next panel set out four pillars: approachable and familiar, the world as the main character, the journey before the destination, and protecting social experiences. The first explains two things Forever will not have, flying mounts and level scaling, because "Azeroth should remain a dangerous world where preparation matters".

8:10 The third pillar sets the long-term shape. Forever is designed as a long-term home, and Blizzard is "not planning around future level cap increases that invalidate your accomplishments". Its catch-up system, the panel told the audience, "is quite simple. Play the game".

42:30 Clay Stone said Season of Discovery also taught the team "the benefits of a strong road map". Forever is being built "in the way it was originally conceived back in the early 2000s", with everything learned in the 25 years since: "a fast-paced production for a slow-paced game". The dates that follow are on Release and Roadmap.

The Warcraft III link

15:57 Forever's stories also reach back into Warcraft III. The Forsaken Paladins, one of its new race and class combinations, roll "directly off of" the new Warcraft III campaign, Forsaken Kingdom, which follows the Forsaken finding their footing as a people under the threat of the Scourge and the Scarlet Crusade. The Found Photographs panel promised "direct connective tissue" to explore in Forever. See New Race and Class Combinations.

From rumor to reveal

4:32 By BlizzCon 2026 the project was, in Hazzikostas's words, "both the best kept and worst kept secret of the summer". He thanked "all those dreamers" who kept the idea alive and said the team had enjoyed a year of reading and watching "online discourse about what Classic Plus could be, should be, and definitely shouldn't be".

47:13 Blizzard announced Forever at the BlizzCon 2026 opening ceremony on Sep 12, 2026, with a beta planned from Sep 17 and launch on Nov 4, 2026. Kotaku's Rebekah Valentine called the release date "sooner than I think anyone expected". Closing the What's Next panel, Stone said that when he started on Classic, "our dream was to get here", and thanked players for "believing in this dream".

A smaller first pitch

Forever began smaller than what launches. "There is a version of WoW Forever that really is that version of Vanilla with just a couple slight class changes," Clay Stone told PC Gamer in October 2026, as Massively Overpowered reported: "We give Paladins a taunt, and presto change-o, you got Classic Plus." The appetite inside the team and across Blizzard to deliver "something much more substantial" grew instead, he said, and "the actual scope of what we're ultimately delivering with launch was something that built up over time."

Holly Longdale, the executive producer, told the same story from the other side in her keynote at PAX Australia in Melbourne on Oct 9 to 11, 2026. The team had said "yeah we want do it, we actually want to do it, but I don't know if we have enough time or people," she recalled, and she answered: "We'll figure it out, we're going to do it." PCGamesN reported that she called the beta the biggest in Blizzard's recorded history, and that the team had learned to look for trends in feedback and research them before acting, because "you don't listen to the loudest people in the room". Stone described Forever's new content in the same three kinds the team uses (see above), from the anticipated Mount Hyjal to the unexpected Skyborne and Zephras Isle and the new but familiar The Riverglades.

Frequently asked questions

When did Blizzard start working on World of Warcraft: Forever? The idea circulated among players and inside the Classic team from about 2020. Ion Hazzikostas said the team became certain it was worth pursuing by the middle of 2024, after Season of Discovery.

Who came up with "found photographs"? Chris Metzen coined the term in the team's earliest talks about adding new stories to Season of Discovery.

Is Forever a version of Season of Discovery? No. Season of Discovery was a time-limited experiment; Blizzard calls Forever "not a mode, a season, or a new version of Classic". Many of Forever's questlines began in Season of Discovery.

Is Forever in the same timeline as modern World of Warcraft? No. It has its own continuity, which Metzen calls a "time bubble", set in Azeroth's first year.

Was World of Warcraft: Forever always this big? No. Clay Stone said in October 2026 that the first version of the idea was vanilla WoW with "a couple slight class changes", and that the scope of what launches on Nov 4, 2026 "built up over time".

Who makes Forever? Blizzard Entertainment's WoW Classic team, the team behind WoW Classic, Classic Hardcore and Season of Discovery.

Sources

• World of Warcraft: Forever What's Next Panel Recap, Blizzard Entertainment, September 2026
• World of Warcraft: Forever Found Photos Panel Recap, Blizzard Entertainment (via Wowhead Blue Tracker), September 2026
• Carve a New Path with World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard Entertainment, September 2026
• Everything Announced at BlizzCon 2026 Opening Ceremony, Blizzard Entertainment, Sep 12, 2026
• World Of Warcraft: Forever Revealed As WoW's Rumored Classic+, Kotaku, Sep 12, 2026
• World of Warcraft Forever devs have learned "you don't listen to the loudest people in the room", PCGamesN, Oct 11, 2026
• World of Warcraft Forever had a much smaller original pitch, but it 'built up over time', Massively Overpowered, Oct 12, 2026 (Clay Stone to PC Gamer)
• Watch Holly Longdale and Clay Stone's Keynote Presentations Live from PAX Aus 9-11 October, Blizzard Entertainment, Sep 28, 2026
• World of Warcraft: Forever, Wikipedia, retrieved Sep 15, 2026
• World of Warcraft: Forever - What's Next Panel | BlizzCon 2026, World of Warcraft, Sep 13, 2026 (video)
• World of Warcraft: Forever - Found Photographs | BlizzCon 2026, World of Warcraft, Sep 15, 2026 (video)
• "Go Again!" World of Warcraft: Forever Hardcore Panel | BlizzCon 2026, World of Warcraft, Sep 15, 2026 (video)