If you’ve been spending most of your Azerothian time over the years logging into modern iterations of WoW, your brain has likely been rewired by a very specific kind of efficiency.
In Retail, a quest bas become a bit of a “drive-thru experience”. (I am of the opinion that this is JUST fine, and people should play whatever they want, however they want. They both exist for a reason.) You fly at what feels like a thousand miles an hour across zones, land on a glowing coordinate, blow up fifteen quillboars in three global cooldowns, click an item sometimes without a dismount, and often auto-complete the objective via a pop-up on your screen. Questing is an obstacle to clear on your way to endgame content. I suppose you don’t have to speed run it, but most people do.
Then you step into World of Warcraft: Forever, and 2004 comes rushing back into your life like a gnome on fire.
You remember, with some level of discomfort, that quests used to take time. A LOT of time.
“Quickly Knocking Out This Quest” is an illusion in the old way of playing
It starts innocently enough. You pick up a seemingly straightforward quest in Durotar: fetch twelve spider venom sacs or whatever, (with a drop rate of 15%), or deliver a letter to an NPC on the completely opposite side of the continent.
In Retail, you’d pencil that in for a thirty-second detour. In Forever, you accept the parchment, hoof it on foot for the long roadtrip. Twenty minutes later, you are knee-deep in a cave system that isn’t on your mini-map, wondering why the drop rate on spider venom is roughly equivalent to winning the lottery in a state that does not currently have a state lottery.
You remember, with some level of discomfort, that quests used to take time. A LOT of time.
You forgot the golden rule of classic-era design: The journey isn’t the obstacle: The journey is the game. Convenience is the mini-boss, and you are gonna drink and eat a LOT. (Shoutout to my fellow mages struggling through Silverpine right now.)
The Slow Burn is Back and It Demands Your Flesh
In Retail, convenience is everything in a way. Zone scaling means you never out-level a story beat before you finish it, and you always know where to be, and what to expect.
Forever strips away that safety net. When you cross into a new zone, you feel the raw weight of the open world. It’s seems far most vast because it effectively is. No mounts till 40. No multitudes of taxi flight points. No 30 minute cooldown on your hearthstone.
You pull ONE mob instead of the 3 to 6 you might in Retail, and suddenly you’re chowing down conjured cheese and popping expensive healing potions just to survive an accidental second random pull. A single escort quest can turn into a twenty-minute tactical operation that requires calling in guild-mates or begging a passing stranger for a heal. None of this is by mistake. It’s by design.
The Secret to Loving “Forever” is Learning to Love the Friction
As frustrating as it is to realize that a simple quest chain is going to eat up an entire evening, there’s a strange comfort in it.
When a quest takes real effort, completing it actually means something. You remember the names of the zones. You remember the cramped caves where you died twice. You remember actually having to read the quest text to figure out which clump of trees houses the lost prospector, rather than mindlessly staring at a mini-map. (Use the Spoken addon if you wanna have it all read to you, and I recommend it: It’s fantastic and has helped me soak up the world in a way that I never have before.)
Playing Forever after two decades of an ever-evolving Retail is a weird lesson in unlearning muscle memory. It forces you to slow down and accept that in this version of Azeroth, getting things done is going to take a whole lot longer than you thought, and it turns out, there’s joy in that.
None of this is by mistake. It’s by design.
Do I wish mob tagging was less of a frustrating mini-game in certain populated hubs? Yes. Do I wish the drop rate on grizzly bear hearts was one to one? Sure. Is it easy to get cynical and think that the 1.0 form of the gameplay was artificially padded out with certain systems? Absolutely.
But if you let what is here wash over you, you might find that the old way of playing WoW is your new way of playing WoW, and the friction feels kinda good. (Phrasing...) - Scott