Blizzard spent seven years testing WoW Forever before it said yes

Blizzard had been kicking around a permanent version of World of Warcraft since before WoW Classic launched in 2019. What finally turned the idea into a product was Season of Discovery, the experimental Classic mode it released in 2023.

Senior game designer Josh Greenfield told Bloomberg, as IGN reported, that Blizzard had considered making the classic version of the game permanent for years, but chose to ship the straight port of Vanilla WoW first and see what players did with it.

The experiment that changed the answer

Season of Discovery, released in 2023, bent Classic in ways Blizzard had never tried before: ability gems, and conversions that turned five-player dungeons like Blackfathom Deeps into full-scale raids. Its success started the internal push toward something permanent.

"That's really when the conversation started around, 'Hey, what does a permanent version of this game look like?'" Greenfield said.

Blizzard kept testing the appetite in between. It shipped time-limited Remix modes, Mists of Pandaria Remix in 2024 and Legion Remix in 2025, while the permanent-version discussion worked its way toward leadership. The internal turning point was a tech demo built around Northshire Abbey, the Human starting zone, which IGN says won over pretty much everyone at the studio and cleared WoW Forever to proceed.

The result, World of Warcraft Forever with its new raids and quests, is a Vanilla WoW experience that now lives permanently alongside the modern game. Its rulesets are where that idea, first discussed more than seven years ago, ended up.

The launch itself went unusually well for a game with WoW's launch-day history. IGN describes it as extremely smooth and almost free of server problems, with Blizzard dedicating 200TB of server memory at launch.

One thing the first days did produce was a tuning pass: a same-day hotfix nerfed flag-carrier speed in battlegrounds.

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