World of Warcraft has been around for more than two decades, so you’d think Blizzard had exhausted pretty much every trick in its spellbook by now. Apparently not. WoW: Forever has officially become the biggest launch in the franchise’s history, and it seems there’s still plenty of life left in Azeroth.
“Congratulations, everyone, you made history!” Blizzard writes in a recent social media post, thanking the community for making the launch such a success. While the studio hasn’t provided an exact concurrent player figure, the announcement puts Forever ahead of every previous WoW launch, including the original release of WoW Classic in 2019.
Executive producer Holly Longdale also shares that Forever is leading the developer to see “the most new players for a WoW launch in 15 years.” Forever launched on November 4 as a new permanent branch of World of Warcraft, sitting alongside the modern game and WoW Classic. It revisits Azeroth as it appeared in 2004, but Blizzard isn’t simply asking everyone to replay the same old adventures.
The experience introduces new storylines, quests, races, dungeons, and other additions while retaining the slower, more deliberate approach that made the original MMO such a phenomenon. There’s some serious work behind the scenes of this nostalgia trip, too. Blizzard says that the launch relied on 3,924 virtual machines, 251,136GB of memory, and 70,480 CPU cores.
WoW: Forever clearly has an audience hungry for the old-school experience, but its biggest challenge will be keeping those players around once the nostalgia wears off. If Blizzard can turn this record-breaking launch into a lasting community, it could have something rather special on its hands. After all, two decades in, World of Warcraft still knows how to make people drop everything and answer the call to adventure.
