GetRekt Special: the 22-year road to WoW: Forever, launching 5 Nov NZT /// Cyberpunk 2077 hits 162K Steam players, its biggest comeback since Phantom Liberty /// Cyberpunk TCG gets Holophone: fixer texts and faction jobs, alpha drops 30 Oct /// First Look: Thermaltake's A1500 Dual and its whole dual-system AI lineup /// GetRekt Special: the AI takeover of gaming, from engines and Epic to Steam slop and scared indies /// New: the release schedule. Every big game, month by month, at getrekt.com/release-schedule /// Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 hits Netflix 20 Oct /// Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 lands 23 Oct
GetRekt Special: the 22-year road to WoW: Forever, launching 5 Nov NZT /// Cyberpunk 2077 hits 162K Steam players, its biggest comeback since Phantom Liberty /// Cyberpunk TCG gets Holophone: fixer texts and faction jobs, alpha drops 30 Oct /// First Look: Thermaltake's A1500 Dual and its whole dual-system AI lineup /// GetRekt Special: the AI takeover of gaming, from engines and Epic to Steam slop and scared indies /// New: the release schedule. Every big game, month by month, at getrekt.com/release-schedule /// Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 hits Netflix 20 Oct /// Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 lands 23 Oct
GetRekt Special: From “You Think You Do” to WoW: Forever, the 22-Year Road Back to Vanilla
In 2013 Blizzard told fans they didn't want old-school WoW. On 5 November (NZ time) it launches World of Warcraft: Forever, a never-ending level-60 Azeroth with new zones, dungeons, raids and a new race. Here's how a dead private server, Classic and Season of Discovery got us here, and what Forever actually is.
By GetRekt
25 October 2026
TL;DR
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WoW: Forever launches 4 Nov at 3pm PST, which is 12pm NZDT / 10am AEDT on Thursday 5 Nov. It is included with a WoW sub or Game Time.
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It is a permanent level-60 vanilla Azeroth that grows outward: 3 new zones, 1,000+ quests, 9 dungeons, 2 new raids plus Onyxia, and the Skyborne race.
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The road here: Brack's 2013 'you think you do', the 2016 Nostalrius shutdown, Classic in 2019, then Hardcore and Season of Discovery.
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Raids unlock 9 Dec. Name reservations run 27 Oct to 3 Nov, for paid-pack buyers only.
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The sore points are the paid US$30 Skyborne race, HD models clashing with SD, gold buying, and "no plans" (not "never") for a token or boosts.
In 2013 a Blizzard executive told a room full of fans they didn’t really want the old World of Warcraft back. Thirteen years, one murdered private server, a few million Classic subscriptions and a pile of experiments later, Blizzard is launching a brand-new version of the 2004 game. It has new zones, new dungeons, new raids and a new race, and it is designed never to move on. World of Warcraft: Forever launches on 4 November (that’s midday Thursday 5 November in New Zealand and 10am AEDT). This is the long, strange road that got us here.
The World of Warcraft: Forever “New Horizons” cinematic trailer.
2004: the world that ate our lives
World of Warcraft launched on 23 November 2004, and Australia and New Zealand got it the same day as North America (Europe waited until February 2005). If you were around for it, you remember: Oceanic realms, Barrens chat, corpse runs through Stranglethorn, and 40-person raids held together by Ventrilo and a single overworked raid leader.
It became the biggest thing in PC gaming. Subscriptions peaked at 12 million in October 2010, around Cataclysm, then slid. Blizzard stopped publishing the figure after reporting 5.5 million in late 2015. Along the way came eleven expansions, from The Burning Crusade in 2007 through to this year’s Midnight (March 2026), with The Last Titan teased for 2027. Each one made the game slicker and more convenient: flying mounts, dungeon finders, cross-realm everything. Each one also took it a little further from the slow, social, sometimes miserable world a lot of players actually fell for.
Twenty-two years of going back to Azeroth. Graphic: GetRekt.
2013: “You think you do, but you don’t”
At the BlizzCon 2013 Q&A, a fan asked about official “vanilla” servers. Then-executive producer J. Allen Brack gave the answer that became a meme for the next six years: “You think you do, but you don’t.”
Players went and proved him wrong anyway, on private servers. The biggest, Nostalrius, ran a fan-made recreation of the original game with around 150,000 active players and roughly 800,000 registered accounts. Blizzard shut it down with a cease-and-desist in April 2016. The backlash was immediate: a petition passed 200,000 signatures and was hand-delivered by former WoW team lead Mark Kern to Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime. That June, the Nostalrius team flew to Irvine for a five-hour meeting with Morhaime, Brack and senior WoW staff. Blizzard had been forced to admit the demand was real.
2017 to 2019: Blizzard blinks
At BlizzCon 2017 (3 November), Blizzard announced World of Warcraft Classic. When it launched on 26 August 2019 (27 August here), it was chaos in the best way: login queues of an hour or more, Hogger memes everywhere, and more than 1.1 million people watching on Twitch at once. Streamers like Asmongold pulled hundreds of thousands of viewers just to watch people kill boars in Durotar. The “you think you do” crowd had the last laugh.
2021 to 2025: the Classic treadmill
Then Blizzard did what Blizzard does: it re-released the expansions, in order. Burning Crusade Classic (June 2021), Wrath Classic (September 2022), Cataclysm Classic (May 2024) and Mists of Pandaria Classic (July 2025). Each progression step was fun for a while, but the problem became obvious. Classic was meant to be the version that stood still, and it kept marching forward into the exact changes vanilla fans had walked away from. Every jump split the community: progress, stay behind on an “Era” realm, or wait for a fresh start.
Classic was supposed to stand still. Forever is Blizzard’s attempt to make that permanent. Image: Blizzard Entertainment.
2021 to 2024: the experiments
Alongside the treadmill, Blizzard started poking at vanilla itself:
Season of Mastery (November 2021): a faster, harder seasonal reset of vanilla. Interesting, but it fizzled.
Hardcore (August 2023): official one-life realms, inspired by a community addon that had blown up on Twitch. Die once and your character’s done.
Season of Discovery (November 2023): the big one. New runes and abilities, reworked raids, level-capped phases and genuinely new content layered on top of vanilla. It was Classic Plus in everything but name.
20th Anniversary realms (November 2024): fresh vanilla realms with a few modern comforts, which have since moved on to Burning Crusade.
Season of Discovery is where Forever was born. Associate Production Director Clay Stone told PC Gamer that the response to it “blew us away”, and that’s “really when the discussions began.”
2023 to 2026: Blizzard’s worst-kept secret
“Classic Plus” (vanilla, but with new content that never moves to the next expansion) had been the community’s dream for years. Blizzard spent three years almost saying it. In late 2023, WoW boss Holly Longdale framed Season of Discovery as the experiment. Leaks came and went, including a 2025 4chan post about a seasonal “Infinite Classic+” and a mostly wrong forum “insider” this June. In January 2026 Blizzard promised clarity on Classic’s future at BlizzCon, and in May it reportedly brought Classic content creators to its HQ for a closed-door look. By the time BlizzCon rolled around, an internal Classic build codenamed “Camelot” was the worst-hidden thing in gaming.
On 12 September 2026, at the end of the BlizzCon opening ceremony, it became official.
A new permanent home, a new beginning that never ends.
Holly Longdale, VP and executive producer, World of Warcraft, at BlizzCon 2026
The Skyborne, Forever’s new race, star in the reveal cinematic. Image: Blizzard Entertainment.
So what is WoW: Forever?
Forever is a separate game version in the Battle.net app, built by the Classic team. It’s set after Warcraft III: Reforged’s new Forsaken Kingdom campaign and before Molten Core, outside retail WoW’s continuity. The biggest rule: the level cap stays at 60 for good. Blizzard’s pitch is that the game grows “outward, not upward”, with new zones, stories, abilities and gear instead of new expansions that leave the old world behind.
Blizzard’s headline numbers at launch: three new zones, more than 1,000 new quests, nine new dungeons, two new raids, a new battleground and the new Skyborne race.
New zones: Mount Hyjal, the Skyborne starting area Zephras Isle (levels 1 to 12) and the Riverglades in the Eastern Kingdoms, plus expanded original zones.
Nine new dungeons: Hall of Thanes under Ironforge, the Ruins of Lordaeron, a Wetlands Excavation Site, the City of Dalaran, the open-air Drowned City off Stranglethorn, Krol’dok Stronghold, Alcaz Island Prison, the furbolg Blackmaw Hold and the titan facility Shaper’s Terrace.
Raids from 9 December: the 10-player Barrow Deeps (Illidan’s old prison under Hyjal, 8 bosses), the 20-player Hyjal Summit (13 bosses) and a returning 40-player Onyxia’s Lair.
New battleground: the Darkspear Islands.
Class shake-up: talents rebalanced so every spec is meant to be viable, new abilities for all nine classes, dual spec at level 40, and six new race/class combos: Undead Paladin, Dwarf Shaman, Orc Mage, Troll Warlock, Human Hunter and Gnome Priest.
No realm list: you pick a “ruleset” instead (Normal, PvP, RP and, added this week, RP-PvP), with Hardcore coming after launch. Collections and a new account-wide “Legacy” reward system carry across your characters.
Price: access is included with a normal WoW subscription or Game Time, and it’s new characters only.
Zephras Isle, the Skyborne starting zone. Image: Blizzard Entertainment.
The Skyborne are Highborne elves who made a pact with wind spirits and built a civilisation in the skies, until the spirits vanished. You pick a faction at creation: Horde Skyborne can be Shaman, Alliance Skyborne can be Mages, and both get Warrior, Hunter, Rogue and Druid (with new druid forms). Their racials include Walk on Air, a short glide.
The scope grew as development went on. Stone told PC Gamer: “Our original pitch internally was: We’ll do four new dungeons, and the next thing we know, we’re doing six… nine.”
The World of Warcraft: Forever gameplay trailer.Nine new dungeons, from Ironforge’s depths to a titan facility in Un’Goro. Image: Blizzard Entertainment.
The bits that stink
It’s not all Hyjal sunsets. The big one is the Skyborne race sitting behind a paywall. The game is included with your sub, but the new race is in paid packs, with the Heroic Pack at about US$30, and beta access was only for the more expensive Epic Pack and Collection buyers. One player’s tally of a big official forum thread had 59% of replies against it. Then the Skyborne turned out to be the beta’s fourth most popular race (about 20% of characters, according to GamesRadar citing Classic.io data). People complain loudly and buy anyway, and Blizzard knows it.
There’s a Collector’s Edition too, of course. Image: Blizzard Entertainment.
Art clash: the Skyborne’s modern HD models looked jarring next to everyone else’s 2004-era models. Blizzard agreed and says classic-style Skyborne models are coming in early 2027, not at launch.
Gold buying: real-money gold trading was already an issue in beta, and Blizzard says it will “aggressively” shut down suspicious gold.
Streamer gravity: one report says a huge streamer guild dominated the beta’s PvP, prompting Blizzard to make changes. Tuning a game around Twitch is how you lose the people who just want to quest with mates.
Token and boosts: Clay Stone told YouTuber Destin there are no WoW Token or character boosts, with “no plans” for them. Note that’s “no plans”, not “never”. We’ll be watching.
For NZ and Aussie players
Launch: 3pm PST on 4 November, which is 12pm NZDT Thursday 5 November, 10am AEDT, and 7am AWST.
Name reservations: open 1pm PDT 27 October, which is 9am NZDT / 7am AEDT Wednesday 28 October, and run until 3 November. You get up to three names, but only if you bought one of the paid packs or the Collector’s Edition.
Raids: unlock 9 December (US date), so 10 December for us.
Oceanic play: Forever doesn’t have traditional realms. Recaps of Blizzard’s answers suggest Oceanic players will be on Australian data centres within the Americas region, but Blizzard’s official posts don’t spell it out clearly. Check before you plan your launch-day sickie.
The level cap is 60, forever. Image: Blizzard Entertainment.
Our take
Credit where it’s due: this is the version of WoW people have begged for since before Classic existed, and Blizzard actually built it. It didn’t just re-release a CD from 2004; it added nine dungeons, a new raid tier, new zones and class fixes, with a hard promise that 60 stays 60. If the content keeps coming, Forever could be WoW’s answer to Old School RuneScape, which proved years ago that “old game, new content” can outlast the shiny main version.
But let’s not pretend Blizzard has suddenly gone soft. It took a petition, a dead private server, five Classic re-releases and three years of teasing to get here. And the first thing Blizzard did with its “permanent home” was stick the new race and beta access behind a paywall. The real test isn’t launch week, with its queues, nostalgia and streamers. It’s next winter: whether the roadmap lands, whether “no plans” for a token stays true, and whether Blizzard can resist turning this into another treadmill. Get those right and Forever might really be forever. Get them wrong and it’s just Classic with a $30 elf.
Are you rolling on day one? What class, what ruleset, and are you paying for the elves? Tell us in the comments, or find a guild in the GetRekt Discord. There are already Azeroth vets in there arguing about Hunter pets.
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