I haven't really played WoW Classic much - I basically got an Undead Warlock out of Deathknell and onto Bree and then decided I liked how modern WoW plays better. I ran a Death Knight through the starting experience to unlock a cool undead proto-drake mount, but beyond that, I haven't really touched it.
It's something I appreciate as a sort of living archive of the game WoW used to be.
There have been "Classic" recreations of various expansion, with I think even Warlords of Draenor Classic due to launch (though man, who would be eager to live through that again?) But as I understand it, there's also been a version locked at Vanilla-only.
This version (and I could be totally wrong here, as again, I don't play Classic) saw an experiment with the Season of Discovery, which brought in new (I think temporary) gameplay ideas that diverged from the 2004-2007 run of the original WoW.
Forever seems to be building on the popularity of Season of Discovery and making it the whole gist of the game, as a kind of alternate timeline for WoW (which they describe as not really changing the overarching story, but filling in gaps here and there with additional stories and characters).
Now, as I understand it, part of what appeals to Classic players is the relaxed pace - knowing that things are going to be as they are indefinitely means you aren't rushing to get geared up on all your alts to run Naxxramas.
In the early days of WoW, the endgame really wasn't the whole game. There's just a natural shift that occurred as players had been playing longer, where their mains and alts would hit the level cap of an expansion and thus be well-positioned to hit the level cap pretty early in the next one.
Given that, WoW has shifted its focus more and more to level-cap content, with the actual process of leveling up being more of a kind of prologue to the real game.
But for those of you who weren't playing 20 years ago, that wasn't necessarily the expectation back in the day. "Hitting the level cap" in Vanilla was practically being done with a character, and endgame content like raiding was reserved for a narrow few, more akin to Mythic Raiding today (and even that I think might be more accessible than it used to be). The game, then, was focused more on the personal journey as you quested across zones, perhaps occasionally running dungeons together along that journey (and given that the level 40+ questing content prior to Cataclysm was utterly anemic, you kind of had to grind dungeons to get to level 60. Seriously, if I recall, you could come to Tanaris at level 40, get like one quest, and then find that the next quest in the zone required you to be level 45 or something, when you were maybe near 41 after that quest. I ran Zul'Farrak a lot).
I'll confess that my approach to WoW is a bit mechanistic - honestly, my main goal is to try to get the fully Mythic tier appearances on each class (by getting Hero gear from Delves primarily and then upgrading them to 6/6). It's not necessarily the way I really ought to be playing the game, to be frank.
So I can kind of see the appeal of an endless "get there when you get there" version of the game. Indeed, as expansions have been coming out faster recently (War Within was by several months the shortest expansion in WoW's history, and Midnight seems likely to be on a similar 18-month timeframe) there's something of a rush to consume all the content you can (I gotta say, the in-between patch content like Forbidden Reach, Siren Isle, and Ritual Sites are ones that I've really kind of checked out of).
Anyway, the thing that's really odd, though, about WoW Forever is that this new content doesn't exist in the main WoW. So... should it?
I will say, I was glad to find out that the added Paladin-capable races coming in WoW Forever will also be joining us in I believe 12.2 (possibly 12.2.5). I'm honestly kind of eager to take an Undead Paladin through Tirisfal Glades and such, as it's been a while since we've really been able to hang out in WoW's spooky mode (Talebound appeals to me).
But what of, for example, the Skyborne? The backstory on these people is that they're apparently exiles from Dire Maul, who rose up against their prince. Practically speaking, they seem to use the Blood Elf model (a popular one) but have blue skin and golden eyes. While we could probably recreate that look with the Void Elves, it does make me wonder how much of what they come up with for WoW Forever that they might then import into mainline WoW.
It is a strange thing - this sort of parallel, or perhaps branching version of Azeroth. I guess the other big question is what this will do to the playerbase? I suspect that Forever won't siphon off players from "retail" anymore than Classic did, but will the Classic playerbase be divided here?
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