On the Eve of Forever

World of Warcraft's hot new servers are going live next week with the promise of a familiar-yet-altogether-different experience from both retail and Classic. It's hard to say how Forever will work out, but it's clear from their beta's overwhelming popularity that it's going to have a lot of momentum coming in. Players of both versions of WoW have been eyeing it up and its broken through to the public conscience in a way that few MMO releases ever do. Friends of mine who haven't played WoW since they were kids are interested, and even those with no interest all know someone who can't shut the fuck up about it. It's a promising start to a version of WoW that's far more experimental than those before and so I wanted to set a marker now, before I've played, to look back on later to see how things have gone. There are a lot of questions one might ask: Will the promise of a version of WoW more concerned with the journey than the destination work out? Will power creep destroy the promise of…