Players have been asking Blizzard for a version of World of Warcraft that keeps the 2004 game and adds new content to it for roughly as long as WoW Classic has existed. At BlizzCon 2026, they got it, and it has a name: World of Warcraft: Forever.
It launches globally on 4 November 2026 at 3:00 p.m. PST, beta access opens on 17 September, and - this is the part that matters most - it is included with a standard World of Warcraft subscription or Game Time. No separate box, no second sub.
Where it sits in the timeline
Forever is positioned after the events of Warcraft III Reforged: Forsaken Kingdom and before Molten Core - which is to say, it occupies the narrow window at the very start of World of Warcraft, before the first raid opened and before the expansions began stacking continents onto Azeroth.
You level to 60 across the original continents. What is different is how much of that journey is new. Blizzard is adding more than 1,000 new quests, nine dungeons and two raids to a world most of the audience has memorised, alongside new reputations, skills and talents, and fresh race and class combinations that vanilla never allowed.
The new zones
Three zones were named, and each targets a different gap in the original levelling curve.
Riverglades carries more than 150 new quests across the mid-30s to mid-40s - a stretch of vanilla that has been notoriously thin ever since players stopped needing to grind through it. Mount Hyjal is an endgame levelling zone with multiple questlines, reputations to work through, and both solo and group content, finally making playable a location that vanilla famously left visible on the map and locked behind an invisible wall. Zephras Isle is a levels 1-12 starting experience, and it is where the new race begins.
The Skyborne
Skyborne is a brand-new playable race with an elemental, skybound theme, starting on Zephras Isle. Adding a race to vanilla WoW is a genuinely significant move - the original game shipped with eight, and the roster did not change until The Burning Crusade in 2007. It is also the clearest signal that Forever is not a preservation project. This is a version of classic Azeroth that will keep changing.
Dungeons and raids
Named dungeons include Hall of Thanes, Krol Dok Stronghold, Shaper Terrace and Drowned City. On the raid side, Barrow Deeps is a 10-player challenge and Hyjal Summit brings 20-player encounters - group sizes that sit deliberately between vanilla's 40-player raids and the tighter modern format.
That choice says a lot about who this is for. Forty-player raiding was the thing most Classic guilds found hardest to sustain in 2019 and 2020, and the thing most often cited as the reason people stopped. Twenty and ten are numbers a guild can actually field on a Tuesday.
What it costs
The base game is covered by your subscription. Three optional pre-purchase upgrade packs sit on top of it:
- Skyborne Heroic Pack - access to the Skyborne race and Zephras Isle, cosmetics, a mount and one Invite-A-Friend code.
- Skyborne Epic Pack - everything above, plus beta access, 30 days of Game Time and three Invite-A-Friend codes.
- Warcraft Forever Collection - the Epic Pack plus Warcraft III Reforged and the Forsaken Kingdom campaign. Available only through 11 January 2027.
A Collector's Edition is also going through the Blizzard Gear Store.
Putting the new race behind a paid upgrade is the decision most likely to generate friction, since it means the headline addition to a subscription-included game is not itself subscription-included. It is a familiar structure for anyone who has bought a WoW expansion, but this is not being sold as an expansion.
Warcraft III got a new campaign on the same day
Warcraft III Reforged: Forsaken Kingdom is live now - the first new Warcraft III campaign in over twenty years. It begins in the ruins of Lordaeron and follows the rise of the Forsaken, running to a prologue plus three story chapters, and it introduces a neutral Forsaken Paladin hero unit. It arrives alongside a 3.0 graphics update for Reforged and is on sale through the Battle.net Shop.
Given that Reforged's 2020 launch was one of the worst-received releases in Blizzard's history, a genuinely new campaign - rather than a patch apologising for the last one - is a bigger gesture than it looks.
Modern WoW is still moving too
The live game's next major update is Eclipse, patch 12.2, which brings players face to face with Xal'atath as she closes on the Worldsoul, with events playing out in the worldcore. After that comes The Last Titan, the final chapter of the Worldsoul Saga, returning to Northrend - Blizzard is holding details on that until early 2027, once Eclipse has run its course.
The net effect is three simultaneous versions of Warcraft with active development: the modern game heading into its saga finale, a re-imagined vanilla that will keep growing, and an RTS that just got its first new story in two decades. That is an unusual amount of road for a franchise that turns 22 this year.
