I thought I’d finally escaped World of Warcraft after a decade and a half of playing it. I haven’t touched it in years. That was mostly thanks to Activision ruining Blizzard ever since they bought them out; made it real easy to dump the whole company and all their games. Then a buddy of mine started raving about the new WoW: Forever that’s about to drop in a few days (which is supposedly just a remastered alternate version of WoW, adding tons of new content and fixing all the story/gameplay mistakes the devs felt they made with the MMO over the years) and it got me curious. Now I’m back in WoW, exploring all the content I’ve missed these past few years. It did get a little better since I left. I’ve never been a hardcore raiding/leveling/grinding kind of MMO player. I like to get immersed in the world and the lore. With vanilla WoW, it took me over a year to reach max level because I was enjoying just running around and exploring every corner of the map. I had my own character backstory built, like a D&D session, and added my own personal lore alongside the game’s content. Heck, I had a last-minute grind session the night The Burning Crusade dropped, just to finally make it to max level so I could enjoy the first expansion. Supposedly, WoW: Forever plans to emulate that experience, forcing you to actually explore the world and get immersed in the lore and story. No more grinding for max levels, no more flying mounts to get from point A to B without experiencing the world under you. You’re encouraged to develop more complex professions and skills to benefit other players. You can supposedly set up campsites in the world and drop resources for others to take advantage of. And I guess they’re claiming that the max level is 100% the max level now. No matter what new content drops for it, you’ll never level up again. Gaining levels isn’t the point of this game. It has me intrigued, so I plan to check it out in a few days.