Blizzard believes many gamers became interested in World of Warcraft Forever primarily because of the game's unhurried pace

Blizzard associate production director Clay Stone told journalists why World of Warcraft: Forever is resonating with players tired of the rush. According to him, the beta shows a clear desire to play slower and not race for speed.

The game recreates an era some players see as more hardcore, yet the lack of a pushy seasonal grind feels like a breath of fresh air. Blizzard has been thinking about this question "for a little while," Stone said. The success of World of Warcraft Classic showed that the interest goes beyond nostalgia.

We saw, certainly with the success of Classic and the response to that, it was more than just a nostalgic experience for some people. The fact that they didn't leave, you know? They didn't just play for a month.

They fell in love with it all over again. Then we saw it again a lot with Hardcore in 2023. All of a sudden, now you had a whole bunch of people who'd never played the game before, but were coming in because of that slower pace, and the fact that Hardcore reinforced that slower pace for them.

Retail World of Warcraft runs on seasons, a model with both benefits and drawbacks. One downside is that players who miss the start of a season often lose the desire to begin at all. Stone said Season of Discovery ran into exactly this.

We had so many players who didn't even play Season of Discovery simply because it was a Season, even though they had friends who were saying 'this is the best version of World of Warcraft that they've ever made!' But because it was a season, it felt ephemeral, and therefore [people thought] 'I'm not going to jump in'.

World of Warcraft: Forever feels in many ways like a continuation of Season of Discovery ideas, a sort of Classic+, but in a format that isn't going anywhere.

It could be something with the times that we live in. The amount of information and noise that we're facing all the time, the distractions of all the notifications on my phone that are blaring at me everyday, but there's a real longing for that slower, more deliberate pace.

And I think something that we've seen over these past few weeks, which I'm really happy to see, is that players who are coming into WoW Forever, whether they played World of Warcraft before or not, are trying themselves not to rush it. There seems to be a deliberate pushback on this 'go go go' nature.

That doesn't mean Stone is entirely against a fast pace. Even in the beta, plenty of players are min-maxing their characters and chasing the best gear, and the developers have a soft spot for them.

We love them too. We think that they're great, and the endgame is going to be spectacular. But we're deliberately trying to build something with WoW Forever that answers that question of… 'Is it too late to start?' With an emphatic 'no' as much as possible.

Journalists link this approach to horizontal progression, which worked well in Guild Wars 2, and note the interest in seeing how Blizzard handles it.