WoW Forever Beta Review — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] Hey folks, this is Helani. The World of Warcraft Forever beta has been available to play for a few days now, and the hype has been unreal. Everyone is saying this game is amazing, the best parts of classic, with a couple of retail upgrades thrown in for good measure, for the best of both worlds' experience.

[00:18] But, is that true? Is World of Warcraft Forever really as good as everyone is saying? Well, let's find out. Let's go over our list of pros and cons after playing the beta for a few days. Now, before we jump in, be sure to hit them out like button and subscribe so you never miss another video.

[00:35] Our first impressions of WoW Forever are very positive. It's been hard to put the gun down since the beta started, so you know they're doing something right. There's just something about the original World of Warcraft experience that's so damn cosy.

[00:49] It feels much more like an RPG where little bonuses and upgrades actually matter, and you can feel it as your counter gets more powerful. It's also incredibly comfortable, it feels great to play, and it's a lot of fun, but

[01:02] WoW Forever takes it one step further, and I think the main contributing factor so far has been the new quests and content. We knew going into the beta that we'd have a lot of new quests to experience, but what

[01:14] I didn't expect is that you see those new quests almost immediately. They're right there in North Shire giving you another reason to take down some kobolds. It continues as you head out into Goldshire with new quests left, right and centre, but

[01:29] my favourite part about the new quests, in their human starting area at least, is that they red to more elite monsters and quests that require grouping up. Part of me thinks it's a little evil putting elite kobolds down in those mines, but watching

[01:43] players run in, realise that's not a normal kobold and panic trying to figure out how they can avoid a long corpse run was pretty funny, and it happened quite a lot. Folks were also very quick to group up to take down these new foes, or just help out players that are struggling, which is always fun to see.

[02:01] Something about the way Vanilla plays seems to bring out the helpfulness in players, whether it's buffing others as you run by, healing players that are on low health, or just taking turns defeating quest monsters.

[02:13] It's like everyone pays more attention to what's happening around them. But the thing that surprised me the most is how well these quests just blend in. They play like vanilla quests.

[02:25] They read like vanilla quests. If I hadn't done the human starting zone countless times in the past, I probably wouldn't have been able to pick them out. If I go make a dwarf or a gnome and do that starting area,

[02:37] something I've done sparingly in the past, I doubt I could tell you what's new and what's not. The dev team nailed it with everything new they've seen so far. I was wondering if there would be a stark difference between what used to be there

[02:50] and whatever they're trying to add, but honestly, it's been seamless. Some of the new quests also introduce you to trade skills or professions incredibly early on in your adventures, which is huge.

[03:03] You'll be able to pick up mining, herbalism, or skinning before you leave your starting area. Usually, you don't see these trainers until the first time you visit the main city, by which point you'll have walked past countless gathering nodes or potential skins.

[03:17] This change lets you get to work on those professions right away. This is even more important because trade skills seem to be more powerful and more impactful than ever before in WoW Forever.

[03:29] Between being able to pick up your gathering profession early on and the crafting professions having new recipes, you can get some pretty good gear crafted for yourself. It's almost too good, especially early on, as the crafted gear from the professions will overshadow most quest rewards for a while,

[03:46] which also makes your character quite a bit more powerful than you might expect. Some of the new recipes also require materials from other professions much earlier than you would usually see, like these level 10 blacksmithy bleats that require enchanting materials, so you'll either need to be multiclassing and picking up multiple professions, or you'll have to rely on other players much sooner to get some of these items made.

[04:08] Even the secondary professions like cooking and first aid are more impactful than before For cooking, most food now has some stat bonuses So even your first couple of recipes can provide a boost to your character's power level

[04:22] And most of them come with a small experience bonus as well So keeping up with your cooking is going to be quite valuable And then first aid has a very interesting change You'll now be able to craft healing potions with first aid

[04:34] And those potions will not be available from alchemy They do still require herbs, so crafting them yourself without picking up herbalism is going to rely on a lot of RNG from monster drops or chest drops, or you can just buy what you need off the auction house.

[04:49] But that does mean everyone can craft their own healing potions in WoW Forever without having to pick up the alchemy profession, or at least they'll be able to craft the first few versions of them. Alchemy will still be needed to craft any other kind of potion, as well as the best healing potions later on down the line.

[05:06] This all ties in very nicely with the new camping feature, which you are also introduced to very early on. This might be one of my favourite new features so far. Right after you leave your initial starting area, you'll find an adventurer next to a campsite who teaches you how it all works, and how you can contribute to a campsite's buffs.

[05:25] Anyone can contribute to any campsite, up to three buffs total, and then anyone who sits near the campsite for a minute will get all of those buffs. That gives you time to take a little break, maybe grab something to eat or drink,

[05:37] stretch your legs, or just say hi to your fellow adventurers and see if anyone is on the same group quest as you. It's worked out really well from what I've seen so far. Folks have also been really good at handing out class buffs

[05:50] that the campsite doesn cover so you usually walk away with a lot of useful bonuses There always been at least one active campsite in every quest hub that I visited so far so players are obviously taking to this new feature quite well

[06:04] What's super interesting to me is that because some of the camping buffs are exclusive with the class buffs that they mimic, you will probably end up focusing on the buffs that are most impactful for you, that you don't have access to, and largely ignore the ones

[06:18] that do overlap. For example, the loadstone from mining mimics Blessing of Might, so that's not super useful for a paladin as the blessings are free to use and last just as long. But

[06:30] Blacksmith can create sharpening wheels which increase strength, and that buff is shared with the Strength of First Totem, something a paladin is not going to have access to very easily or often. So always using a sharpening wheel at a campsite can give you that big

[06:44] strength buff without needing to have a shaman in your party, and then you don't really need to ever worry about using the mining one because you can blessing of might yourself. Now, all of this does have a fairly significant knock-on effect, especially when you combine

[06:58] it all together. With more quests available right from the very start of a game, you can level up quite a bit faster. That leads to you over-leveling quests, something that didn't really happen all too often unless you were hopping around starting zones, which, let's

[07:12] be honest, most veteran classic players probably were. It was an efficient way to level, and catch you from being overwhelmed by higher level quests. All of the new quests make that unnecessary, and you'll either be overleveled for most

[07:25] quests as you arrive to them, or at the very least you won't be underleveled. That does make the game a little easier than it used to be, and it makes your questing adventures more straightforward. But when you throw in the larger gear upgrades from Trade Skills and the near-permanent buffs

[07:39] from the Campsites, the difficulty of the early game has been reduced by quite a good chunk. It's not necessarily a bad thing, though, especially if you want newer players to jump into World of Warcraft forever.

[07:52] That's not to say there's no danger, though. You are still going to fall flat on your face if you pull more than one or two monsters at the start, or if you don't watch where you're going and you run into a patrol, or you backpedal into another group of mobs as you try to kite.

[08:06] That aspect of vanilla is still very much alive, and it was hilarious watching players flee from trains of kobolds in both mines, or watching players learn why every human player fears the murloc camps.

[08:19] Now, we can only get up to level 20 right now in the beta, so this may not be entirely representative of the game as a whole, but that's how it feels so far in the Warcraft 3 other beta. Now, something that has absolutely blown me away are the new visual effects.

[08:34] Whether you have the SD models on or you play with the more modern HD models, either way, you should see the same changes to the environment. The lighting is phenomenal. The first time I walked down to the Stormwind Harbour, there was this dawn-right sun bathing the entire area.

[08:50] It looked amazing, but also not out of place, which kind of blows my mind. The water effects have also been massively upgraded across the game, and the way the light plays on the surface of the water is pretty awesome as well.

[09:03] You also get some really cool effects in any areas with a lot of canopy cover, with the light shining through the gaps in the trees, creating these awesome rays of light that really set the mood. What's also been very impressive is how dark some areas of the game are now.

[09:18] You have to seek out light sources sometimes, or just try and get comfortable with not being able to see very well. It definitely makes some areas of the game feel more dangerous and foreboding. As the class changes, the classes that I've tinkered about with so far

[09:33] don't feel non-vanilla by any stretch of the imagination. It's still very much the same playstyle and same combat style almost across the board, even with extra abilities and tweaks that certain classes have.

[09:46] I've seen a lot of talk about paladins being busted or broken right now, and outside of the big quality of life changes, like blessings lasting for an hour baseline and judgment not consuming your seals, it's mostly the same kind of gameplay.

[09:59] Holy Strike gives you another button to push, which is very welcome with how vanilla paladin plays, especially during the early levels, but that's kind of it. Prop Paladin is far more enjoyable at lower levels with the self-absorb and having an actual taunt,

[10:13] so that's really cool, but all in all, it still feels very much like Vanilla. It just picks up a bit faster for some of the slower classes. The new dungeons have also been a lot of fun to work through.

[10:25] The Hall of Thames looked and felt like we were venturing into Moria. Even the little area leading to the dungeon was very cool. I was again very surprised that everything just sort of fit in. It's like the dungeon was fully designed back in the day, and they just found it lying around in some old hard drive somewhere.

[10:42] Some packs were quite unforgiving, and using crowd control made things significantly easier, especially at these lower levels where your tank and healer are kinda just doing their best with the limited toolkits they have. The boss mechanics were simple, but if you mishandled them you could wipe quite quickly, so pretty standard vanilla fare.

[10:59] The Undercity dungeon was dark and dank, full of spiders and undead, with nice nods to the human city it used to be. There are even some notes that you can pick up and hand back in to living relatives of those lost in the sacking of Lordaeron.

[11:13] All in all, it was a pretty good dungeon, and just like the Hall of Thanes, it didn't feel out of place. Now, most quests for the dungeons are also very vanilla-like, in that they come from various sources, areas, and questlines,

[11:26] which means you'll probably want to spend some time in and around the zone where the dungeon is located before heading in to plunder the bosses for their loot. The changes to how XP is rewarded from dungeons also means those quests are absolutely huge,

[11:40] and the updated rewards are nice too. It makes your dungeon rooms very rewarding, even if it takes a little while to work through them. Maybe a bit too rewarding in some cases I was in almost all blues by the time I hit level 18 which is definitely not a typical vanilla experience

[11:57] Now getting to these dungeons, especially the ones in the opposite faction zones or cities, was a bit daunting with summoning stones not being a thing in forever, but the new world travel options actually made it super easy. If you didn't know, there's a

[12:10] new boat from Stormring Docks to Orbadine, making it much easier to get from the Night elf areas to race human areas and vice versa, and there's a boat that goes from Orbadine to Menethil Harbour, then on to South Shore before heading back to Orbadine, so you can

[12:25] get around much easier, especially as alliance players. But one of the largest changes that excites me the most about group content is that the dev team are actively fighting against data mining and spoiling content before it's actually

[12:40] released. We won't have a dungeon or raid journal that details all of a boss's mechanics and what loot they can drop, and all of that info will be hidden until bosses have been defeated and items have actually dropped for someone on the server. That's going to be

[12:54] huge for the excitement factor as we get into higher end dungeons, and especially raids. Having to go in blind, figure it all out, and take a moment to look at the brand new shiny loot to see if it's any good and who could make the most use out of it is going

[13:07] to be a massive change of pace. For the longest time, most players have gone into raids with more or less complete shopping list of what they want from each boss. That won't be the case in WoW Forever, and it's something I'm really looking forward to. That sense of wonder

[13:22] has been recaptured at least somewhat in the lower level dungeons, with Root being redesigned and switched around. We have no idea what's going to drop when running these new dungeons, or even old dungeons at this point, and the new dungeons are a lot of fun as well, so

[13:37] I can only imagine how awesome it's going to feel entering the new raids for the first time. Now another huge change in WoW Forever is the server structure. We'll be on mega servers, which means you don't really get to pick or choose a realm for better or worse.

[13:52] You just pick a rule set, and everyone who wants to play the same way will be playing together. I have to say, so far, mega servers have been a huge win in my opinion. There's no worrying about making the wrong choice of realm, or having friend groups split up

[14:06] due to a realm filling up or anything like that. Just make sure you're in the same rule set and you're all good to go. I can't overstate how big this is for new players jumping in. The realm list is a new player nightmare, especially when they learn it actually matters

[14:21] later on, so ending up to just pick a rule set that sounds cool and jumps straight in is massive. Can't praise that enough. The queues should also be less of an issue on launch day, or really any busy day as everyone is spread out amongst the entire server structure

[14:36] instead of a huge chunk of players being crammed into one little corner of it. Now, I'm not sure exactly how layering works, but I have been running into the same folks while questing, even across multiple bays,

[14:49] so they have managed to recreate that realm feeling from what I've experienced so far, which I know was the main worry for a lot of folks. One of the funniest aspects of the Mega Server decision

[15:01] is all the crazy names you come across now that folks can have two names to be silly with, That's in the entire spectrum, from folks naming themselves after iconic Warcraft families, spell abilities, WoW deities, power sources, and quite a lot of names that are probably going to get folks banned.

[15:18] I've even run into a few people with the same last name as my characters, which tells me I'm not particularly creative, but it is what it is. We had a good laugh and went on our way. But here's the kicker, I'm actually reading names again,

[15:32] laughing at the good ones, sharing them with the Dara and remembering people that we've seen 5 or 10 levels ago I can't tell you the last time I actually paid attention to most players' names in retail WoW

[15:44] As a side note, I have seen posts about folks losing their beta access for questionable names so while it may be tempting to push the limits of the naming filters try keep it classy at the very least

[15:57] Have you heard any fun names while out and about in WoW Forever? Let me know your favourites down in the comments section below. One of my larger worries about the Mega Server infrastructure was how busy each shard or layer was going to be.

[16:12] Vanilla-style quests are notorious for not playing well with large crowds. Where we need to kill enemies to have a chance at looting something, we need to loot an item from the ground. Lots of players around can make even simple quests take significantly longer.

[16:25] Let me tell you, players are obviously incredibly excited about WoW Forever, because everywhere I go there are a ton of people and because everyone is playing on the same beta service together regardless of region

[16:37] there are crowds all throughout the day but I haven't really trail rated to frustrate and crush progression and I'm pretty sure it's because the dead team have ramped up respawn rates for everything items respawn faster

[16:50] monsters respawn faster sometimes too fast and you end up in a bit of a pickle but I haven't really run into the issue of waiting on slow respawns which is a good thing with this many people around.

[17:02] Another neat change is that when your shard or layer is winding down, because it's gotten a bit too empty or the server is just trying to merge players together, you'll get a 5 minute warning before you get transferred. So you shouldn't randomly get phased to a different layer out of the blue,

[17:16] you'll get a warning that says you get phased in 5 minutes, so make sure you get somewhere safe, and then you have a button that lets you transfer immediately if you're already in a good spot, so you have more control over when you get shifted across layers,

[17:29] which is going to be huge when hardcore comes around. The only time phasing or layering has been weird in my experience is when setting up groups. There have been multiple times now where I've invited someone, or someone has invited me,

[17:42] and even though we were in the same layer we get phased to a different one causing everything to respawn or in some cases we phase to a layer where the quest monster we were grouping up for has already been defeated and we have to wait for a respawn which was quite odd Hopefully those kinds of cases

[17:58] are just bugs that will get ironed out by the time Forever launches for real. Now, there are quite a lot of updated UI elements that players are a bit torn about. Things like the professions window, which looks quite good in my opinion. It has all these professions

[18:12] laid out very nicely and all the buttons or spells you could want from each profession, like your tracking spells and your various recipe windows. Your professions are tied to that same window on the right-hand side, so you don't have to open multiple menus.

[18:25] You can just flip back and forth, which is a nice change. I actually prefer this profession window and menu over the retail one. Learning new recipes is also a bit different, as they're filtered by craft type and level,

[18:37] which took a bit of getting used to, but it does make it easier to scroll through what you might be most interested in learning, especially while you're relatively low on coin. We also have the retail map and quest stack of visuals,

[18:49] which again is fine by me. I'm not a classic purist by any stretch of the imagination, but these menus don't really stick out to me. They blend in fine and work really well. One thing I definitely appreciated is the quest limit increase.

[19:03] You can now have up to 40 quests at once in your quest log, which means you can safely pick up almost every quest you come across as you wander around the cities. You'll still fill up your log if you're not actively doing the quests, but at least you don't have to worry about juggling quests

[19:17] to make sure you have all the ones that might be relevant for your next regular journey. A lot of folks seem to be torn on the objective tracking, though. If you choose the classic setup when you first load up WoW Forever,

[19:29] this will be disabled by default, but you can turn it on very easily by clearing your map filters. WoW Forever has the retail-style objective tracking, so it will show you exactly where to go for each quest and what you need to do,

[19:42] and then you can go hand it back in. I've seen a lot of posts about this being against the philosophy of vanilla, where you should have to read the quests to find out where to go, or ask players in chat how to complete things so it's more of a social experience.

[19:56] And I can definitely see the argument for that, but if the quest tracking wasn't included baseline, most players would just end up with the quest they had on, like they did in vanilla, like they did in classic, and Season of Discovery and Classic Anniversary.

[20:10] I don't really think it changes that much in the grand scheme of things, it's just baseline functionality instead of an add-on. Like many other things in WoW Forever, you can choose to turn it on or off and how you want to play.

[20:22] The dev team are also applying the add-on restrictions from retail to WoW Forever, so depending on how that goes, we may see larger differences to what add-ons can actually offer in this new game mode,

[20:34] so it might be better to have that functionality baseline anyway. Something else that's more or less entirely from retail is the auction house. And say what you want about the visuals, I know some players really prefer how the classic version used to look,

[20:48] but the functionality of the retail auction house is the main point I care about. You simply cannot have mega servers with a classic auction house. You just can't. It was a mess on any decently populated realm back in classic,

[21:02] and it was awful to use. The retail auction house is much better. You can quickly find and buy whatever you need in the exact quantities you need while getting the best price. There does seem to be an issue

[21:14] displaying stats on gear on the auction house right now, so hopefully that gets ironed out before launch day, but I am so happy that we have a functioning auction house in WoW Forever. Hopefully an add-on comes along

[21:26] that will give you the classic appearance of the auction house and any other UI elements that you're interested in, so we all get the best of both worlds. And then while we're on the topic of UI stuff, you know what's really neat?

[21:38] When you hover over your stats or skills in your character page, the game actually tells you what this stuff does now. Previously, you'd have to search most of these terms by yourself and how much you need, but the game is now telling you how much health one's stamina adds,

[21:52] how much mana you get for interact, how crits work, why defense is important, what crushing blows are, and even things like how hit chance works and your current chance to miss against different leveled enemies.

[22:05] Most of that stuff is going to go over a totally new player's head, sure, but if you want to dig into the nitty-gritty of why certain things are important, and why that monster three levels higher than you is absolutely trucking you,

[22:17] that's in the game now, right there on your character sheet like a good RPG. As someone who loves to know all the information about how all these things work, I thought that was pretty cool.

[22:29] But that's how we feel about the World of Warcraft Forever beta after a few days playing around with it. I am very excited to see how the journey up to level 30 differs and what new quests await, and from how things are shaping up so far,

[22:41] I could see Forever becoming a lot of players' main version of WoW. But they'll have to stick the landing on launch day and keep everyone's attention with new content later on down the road.

[22:53] It's definitely a great start to this new version of WoW, though. What do you think from what you've seen so far? Have you been playing the beta, or are you waiting for the game to launch for real before you jump in? Leave all your thoughts in the comments section below.

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