World of Warcraft: Forever Is WoW's Biggest Launch Ever

General Gaming
World of Warcraft: Forever

Author:

Watty
Category:

General Gaming
Date:

Nov 9, 2026

Adventurers gathered around a campfire in a forest in World of Warcraft: Forever

When we covered BlizzCon, World of Warcraft: Forever was an announcement. It launched on 4 November, and Blizzard says it is the biggest launch in World of Warcraft's history. "Congratulations, everyone, you made history!" the studio posted, with executive producer Holly Longdale adding that Forever brought "the most new players for a WoW launch in 15 years."

What Forever is

Forever is a permanent new branch of World of Warcraft, sitting alongside modern WoW and WoW Classic. It returns to Azeroth as it was in 2004, set after Warcraft III Reforged: Forsaken Kingdom and before Molten Core, with a journey to level 60. But it is not a straight replay: Blizzard has added more than 1,000 new quests, new and reimagined zones including Mount Hyjal, Shen'dralas, the Riverglades and Zephras Isle, and a new playable race, the Skyborne, who can join the Horde as Windshaper shamans or the Alliance as mages. New race and class pairings include Orc mages, Troll warlocks, Undead paladins, Human hunters, Gnome priests and Dwarf shamans.

How big

Blizzard has not given a concurrent player number, but over eight million characters were created during the beta, and the studio says the launch ran on 3,924 virtual machines, 251,136 GB of memory and 70,480 CPU cores. It has already started tuning too, raising dungeon XP from monsters by 50% after player feedback.

"The biggest launch in the game's history, twenty-two years in. MMOs are not dead, they just needed somewhere new to start."

The Exiles

Why we are flagging it

World of Warcraft is not one of the games The Exiles are organised around, and we are not announcing anything. But a fresh start that is pulling lapsed players back in groups is exactly the kind of thing that gets people talking, so if you have rolled a character, say so in the Discord and see who else has.

Further reading: Blizzard: World of Warcraft: Forever Now Live | PCGamesN: WoW Forever is WoW's biggest launch ever