World of Warcraft: Forever came out last night. Those who stayed up were prepared for the usual from major WoW releases: long queues, disconnects, and server lag. However, save for a few minor hiccups here and there, things went off without a hitch.
Eurogamer can report first-hand that for European players who stayed up from, let’s say 11pm – 3:50am last night, the login queues were short and constantly moving. Those who were very keen to get in the moment servers went live ran into unclickable server selection boxes, but backing out and re-joining the short queue fixed this problem swiftly.
Here’s the World of Warcraft: Forever launch overview trailer.Watch on YouTube
Once you got in, there was very little server lag save for a lost spell cast or two, nor were constant random disconnects that would boot you out into the cold (I didn’t get disconnected once – a record). As far as WoW launches go, an incredibly smooth first day.
This was acknowledged by World of Warcraft developers, such as executive producer Holly Longdale who wrote on X: “At the risk of jinxing things, so far so goodish which is crazy by itself. The team prepared a lot since the wildness of Beta. And this launch was crazier than the insanity we imagined but thankfully the team built plans and contingencies. They are incredible in my opinion.”.
Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield, a senior game designer on World of Warcraft Forever, addressed some minor issues that did pop up. These include a zone population problem: in basic terms the megaservers split players into different shards, and some of these felt a bit empty of players. There was also a quirk with the various big boats and zeppelins dotted around the map, which were busted. Temporary portals were added to provide a workaround.
“Thanks for everyone making this a great, super smooth launch,” Greenfield wrote. “I’m going to head home and ‘go to sleep’ now. Yep, sleeping. Totally not playing WoW Forever until 3am. Nope.”
The reaction to this silky smooth launch has some players flabbergasted. “I can’t believe how smooth this launch is” is the title of Reddit user Arizhela’s post, currently topping the WoW Forever board. They continue: “I fully expected to not be able to play today, but I logged in with no queue and no lag.”
Another post, created in the early hours of this morning, is dubbed: “Never take a day off for launch, they said” in which a WoW player regrets not booking some time off from work this week, expecting problems. “You’ve been finessed son,” replied user SnooWalruses3948, while SirePuns shared in the shock: “The advice was sound, but this time around the developers hired a witch I tell you. The code must’ve been witchcraft, the hardware must’ve been blessed by a witch as well.”
It is unclear just how well World of Warcraft: Forever’s launch was, given the unsocialable and employment-averse release time in the dead of night for us Europeans, but it follows a record-breaking beta period in which many hopped back into the MMO. Impressions from this beta were largely positive, the magic of the old MMO seemingly recaptured.