World Of Warcraft: Forever Team Talks Expectations, And How They Added Controller Support To WoW

2 hours ago 14

Published Sep 14, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

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World of Warcraft: Forever took the BlizzCon audience completely by surprise. While it was leaked to an extent as "WoW Classic Plus" in many circles, the actual reveal coupled with a nostalgic cutscene really helped sell the game more than just "Classic Plus."

The other big reveal was that Forever would have official controller support,a first for the franchise. While WoW has had unofficial controller support via add-ons, the fact that it'll work out of the box appeals to many fans and prospective newcomers.

I had the chance to play WoW: Forever extensively (and the new Skyborne race) live at BlizzCon 2026, and sit down with Tim Jones, Lead Game Designer, and Nora Valletta, Lead Software Engineer, to get to the bottom of what makes Forever tick.

WoW: Forever Has The Chance To Be Something Special

I kicked things off by asking about timing. WoW has been around for decades, and at this point, WoW Classic is seven years old, and has spanned multiple expansions, up through Mists of Pandaria Classic. For reference, even Mists of Pandaria is 14 years old as of this week, so the franchise has a lot of legacy behind it.

Jones was happy to answer why it felt like the best time to give the community WoW Forever:

You know, this is something that our team [WoW Classic] has always been dreaming about doing. Just a little history lesson. We started as a small group of engineers who were really kind of creating a museum piece of World of Warcraft Vanilla. Really staying true to the 'no changes' philosophy. But as the team grew and moved on to Burning Crusade, we got some designers onto the team...Holly was our producer at the time on World of Warcraft Classic...and she really had a vision for seeing what changes we could make to the game. So through things like Season of Mastery, we really started to experiment with what changes we can make to Vanilla World of Warcraft that feel grounded in a Vanilla philosophy.

We talked about the term Found Photographs, aspects of the game and its design that feel like they could have always existed in the 2004 World of Warcraft. So, you know, as we had more success with Hardcore and Wrath of Lich King Classic and Season of Discovery, our team grew bigger and had bigger ambitions. And through the trust that we gained internally and with players, we really wanted to create a version of the game that we wanted to make but with the promise that we're creating a world that is forever, that is everlasting, that will get consistent support and development from us making new content in the Vanilla design space.

In other words, it came naturally over time as the Classic team experimented with what Classic could be, and it became its own project. But as far as Forever goes, it's aiming for the even loftier goal of eliminating FOMO, and making the game fun to play at your own pace.

You know that it's one of those special things, and it's one of our core pillars that we have for World of Warcraft: Forever, the journey before the destination. It's fun to rush to endgame in any version of World of Warcraft, to level the fastest, to get into the raid the fastest, but you know, in making sure that our game is connected to the philosophies of Vanilla World of Warcraft, the pace of the game is much slower and it's deliberately slower. We want to make sure that when we're constructing new content, we're building content for players of all levels. So, if you're someone who wants to rush to the endgame and have an awesome time in our brand-new raids, more power to you. That's going to be exciting.

But if you're someone who can't put a lot of time into leveling, you can only play 30 minutes at a time, maybe a couple of days a week, you know, the beauty of this game is that you can log in, complete a couple quests, and feel satisfied about that. Make a little progress towards your level. Go to the auction house, grab a couple materials, craft something, get a couple more points in your professions. Those progression tracks have meaning forever.

And because we're not raising the level cap of 60, that means eventually you'll get to max blacksmithing, eventually you'll get to level 60. And there will be people still waiting for you at level 60. They're not moving on. There might be a raid tier above you, but there's still dungeons for you to go through and catch up. We talked about in the what's next panel, what is our catch-up system? Play the game.

Valletta offered fascinating insight into Forever's development, noting that the team drew inspiration from Classic Hardcore mode. As they put it, the starting zones just seemed that much livelier as a result of so many players dying and starting new characters, that it formed its own sense of community, which is carried forward for Forever:

We noticed just how lively the starting zones were, all the leveling zones and just how how social that experience was, after you lost your character. Your journey could be a little bit different depending on whether you knew what you decided to roll. And we've really leaned into that in Forever. You can continue to have a new journey that may not feel identical to your previous one. Maybe you're going to try a new class.

Maybe you've unlocked some legacy points, and now it's going to influence your next playthrough, right? And so there's a lot of replayability when it comes to that leveling journey. And it leads to these more chance encounters in the open world with other players. It's going to lead to those social connections and relationships that we're really trying to cultivate with Forever.

A lot of Forever is based on meaningful progression, and I wanted to get a sense of how much grinding Forever would offer. Jones was very quick to respond: "Well, I mean, in some cases it can feel like a grind," he notes. "And I think that's OK."

Jones goes on to explain that sometimes, profession-grinding can really pay off in the end, because you put in the time and provide a useful service for other players. It also uses the old-school 2004 MMO ethos, which will appeal to many old-school fans who want a different experience than Classic.

The Skyborne Elves Are A Huge New Addition

The Skyborne Elves are one of the most significant additions to Forever, and some fans are already cautious about the fact that a new race is being introduced. I wanted to get a sense of how confident the team is in introducing the Skyborne, and how they would sell it to players who aren't already sold.

Jones was happy to oblige:

I'll start by saying we want to build different types of content for World of Warcraft Forever. And the first category is expected content. You have your Mount Hyjal, you have your Gilneas, right? These are places in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms that people already know about. They may not have experienced what these zones look like and what the quests and stories are within the context of the time that we're in World of Warcraft, but people know that they're there. Then we have content that is new, content that people didn't necessarily expect, but it's very much grounded in historical stories.

Specifically, our new zone in Eastern Kingdoms takes story beats from Warcraft 1, where orcs were chased by humans back across the Red Ridge Mountains into this wild frontier, and help never came to reinforce these settlements. And so we get to see a generation later how those stories played out, how these people survived in this amazing gigantic zone. Geographically speaking, this place always existed in Vanilla World of Warcraft. It was never a developed space, but that empty space in that part of the Eastern Kingdoms was always there.

And so we want to tell stories like that. We want there to be some things that are unexpected and surprise people, but again, we want things like the Skyborne race and places like their Isle to still be grounded in World of Warcraft lore.

Valletta enthusiastically responded with support for the Skyborne class: "Huge plus one to everything Tim just said. I also just want to add, you know, spend some time playing the game, see how the story unfolds, see what you notice, and learn more about the lore behind the Skyborne Elves. I think folks will start to kind of get a sense of how they fit into the grand scheme of things and why they do feel so rooted in Warcraft lore."

How The Forever Lore All Connects And Flows

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Skyborne lore isn't the only new addition to Forever, as we're going to get a lot of brand-new content that has never been a part of Vanilla WoW. How does this all get sorted? Well, there are Lore Masters, and Valletta walked us through their day-to-day:

We do have help. So, there was actually a moment in time that I had a question about a Night Elf name, and so I was like, 'Oh gosh, who would be the expert? Who should I ask?' And we actually have historians that we can reach out to. They keep track of the word of truth of what the lore is, and you know many of the things that have been shared with the community publicly and also just the behind the scenes, like scripting.

It's really cool to have that as a resource for our team when we're crafting these stories. We are in a kind of time bubble and with that, you know, we can take certain liberties, not to the extent where we're going to say that Arthas never became the Lich King, or that Jaina is a secret dreadlord. Arthas is still alive in Northend in our timeline. Illidan is still in Outland.

In addition to sweeping epics and new raids, the team will also get a chance to tell smaller-scale stories: "There's so much opportunity for us to explore smaller grounded stories of what that farmhand's life is like living in such a dangerous place in such a dangerous time."

Official Controller Support Comes To WoW

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So why did controller support feel perfect for WoW: Forever? Apparently, it was just the perfect time for it, and everything came together, as Jones puts it:

For the longest time, keyboard and mouse has been the only way that you know you've interfaced with World of Warcraft and myself, I work a desk job. Coming home from work sometimes, I want to play WoW, but I don't want to have to sit at my desk again. Or my back is starting to hurt; maybe my chair is not that comfortable. Or I want to lie on the couch.

So when we think about how players interface with World of Warcraft, offering an opportunity to interface with the game in a way that might be a lot more comfortable, a lot more accessible to players, and opening that door for them seemed like the right move because it just invites more players into this world to socialize and to create those social connections that we keep talking about. It just seemed like an absolute positive. Given that we were adding this third pillar of World of Warcraft at this time, it just seemed like the right moment.

Controller support went through a lot of playtesting, so much so that it really took a long time to get things right. But having played Forever hands-on with both a mouse and keyboard and a controller setup, I can say that it works far better than expected. Buttons map to individual face buttons and the D-pad, which you can combine to bring up new abilities on the fly. It's a lot like Final Fantasy 14 in that sense.

Jones took us on a journey through the start of controller support, when it was just an idea:

One of the things I love about our team is how much emphasis we put on internal playtesting. Part of that is just making sure that we have the classic feel of dungeons. We're running Stratholme in the internal client and comparing it to what our new dungeons feel like to make sure there's parity in difficulty, damage numbers, pacing, and complexity. In those playtests, we also made sure to integrate controller support.

So whether we're doing a leveling playtest or a dungeon playtest, we usually have one or two people playtesting with the controller so that they see what it's like leveling from level one and training with a trainer and picking up items and equipping new gear and accepting quests, or what it is like being a healer in a five-man group or in a raid group and navigating through UI menus and targeting people and having a little bit more complexity.

And it's really been a joy seeing the progression that the engineering team has made, with feedback that has been given from these playtests to make sure that it is so seamless and easy to navigate through all the different menus that World of Warcraft has. For instance, pressing the select button or the start button and bringing up the radial menu and being able to navigate easily between your map, your quest log, and your bags with a controller. So, you know, there's been a lot of iteration. We're excited about the beta to come out and for players to try it for themselves and to really have the rest of our development be driven by communication and collaboration with our community on this.

So will this lead directly to World of Warcraft: Forever on consoles? Not yet, says Jones: "I'm sorry. Nothing to announce."

If Blizzard can keep to the plan of not adding FOMO-oriented content to World of Warcraft: Forever, it truly could end up being a forever experience. I can see myself diving in after completing everything in the current iteration of Retail, or just to hang out and slowly level my new Skyborne Warrior. World of Warcraft: Forever is slated to arrive on November 4, 2026, but the aforementioned beta will be held on September 17.