During BlizzCon 2026, Blizzard Entertainment announced World of Warcraft: Forever. In many ways, it’s a love letter to what the series used to be and a return to form. The big catch is that players will forever be level 60, and it’s supposed to capture the old-school charm the series once had. All of that may sound cool to someone who’s been playing for 20+ years. But none of that really caught my attention. This is mainly because I started playing about a year and a half ago. What did catch my attention, though, was that it was now playable with a gamepad (controller). During BlizzCon, I got hands-on with Forever using a controller while playing as Skyborne, the game’s new playable race.
Like many newly introduced races, the Skyborne can be with the Horde or Alliance. As I looked through what they offered, I noticed three main class perks. The first was called Walk on Air, which let you glide for 10 seconds. The other was Skysight, which increased my running speed by 10%. Next was Wind Blessed, a passive ability. What it did was give me a 1% buff to melee, ranged, and spellcasting Haste. Last but not least, there was another passive called Elemental Insight. This gave me a 5% damage increase whenever I was fighting Elementals.
After looking through the cosmetics, Luis TheGreat was born. Funny enough, the Skyborne backstory in a lot of ways resembles the Air Benders from The Avatar series; they’re a group of people who have channeled the air and, up until now, lived off by themselves. After I got a quick rundown on who my people were, the opening area started up, and I quickly went to the settings so I could play on the controller.
Before I even had a second to play, a menu immediately popped up explaining what each button did on an Xbox Series X controller. One thing I quickly noticed was that, when using the controller, the camera angle locks into a more third-person POV. Another thing I noticed was how the button layout works for binding.
As you might expect, Blizzard took full advantage of how to use each button. When playing, you can bind anything to each button, and after you run out of pressing them in a normal way, there’s the trigger combo. In the binding menu, you’ll be able to hold RT, and this will open a whole new set of binds for you to use; the same with LT, and another when pressing both LT and RT at the same time. To navigate the menus, I just needed to press the pause button. This opens a wheel chart that lets me navigate through all the menus that I can usually select while playing with a keyboard and mouse.
In the starting zone, I had roughly 15 minutes to explore the area. As you can expect, the area was fairly easy to run around. During that time, I hunted some dog-like and bee-like creatures. As a Druid, I was able to kill them all from a distance using some magical attacks. Once I finished killing some local wildlife, I started doing quests and talking to the starting NPCs in the area. Like a lot of games, there was one main action button that handled looting and talking. So it never felt awkward when I tried to open important menus.
After I leveled up a few times, I realized my time in the starting area was over. But thankfully that wasn’t all that was being shown off. The other part of the build had me running through dungeons.
Like last time, I made an entirely new character, and I chose the same race but picked a Warrior instead. Once I loaded into the area, I noticed that I was level 30 with various gear that supported each build type for the class I was playing. Like before, I was playing with only a controller, and it took some time to really learn how to use it properly with so much being thrown into my inventory.
But after a few minutes, I felt like I had a strong grasp on things. I was wearing better gear; I had hotkeyed some potions, food, and some basic attacks. All that was left was to find a party. After running around, I finally found a group, and I was ready to go.
All of us were extremely excited to jump into a dungeon for the first time. But none of us realized we’d made a few fatal mistakes. The first was going in without a healer. As the first fight played out, I felt extremely proud of myself because I kept up with everyone else playing on mouse and keyboard. I timed a lot of well-placed attacks and was quickly jumping through moves with ease. But once we got to the second fight, things started to fall apart.
The party — mostly me — got a bit too excited and lured in one too many enemies. Like clockwork, we all got killed right off the bat. That’s when I started to have a true World of Warcraft experience. One person I’ll never forget started yelling and shouting at all of us to do better. When that didn’t work, they started cursing about how bad the game was, how we were wasting their time, and how we could be doing something better.
While all of this was going on, I learned that I had made another fatal mistake. Forgetting to actually level up and pick new abilities. So while the fight was going on, I opened up the menu and tried to put together a decent DPS build quickly. As soon as I binded my new moves, we were all killed once again. This was when our lovely teammate decided to let us know how he truly felt by typing a bunch of colorful words. After that, they immediately left the party and left us on our own.
But it wasn’t all that bad because the second they left, my time with World of Warcraft: Forever came to an end. It was hard to believe that an hour with the game had flown by. As someone who doesn’t have that nostalgia for old-school World of Warcraft, I saw the appeal in Forever. It felt like a great jumping-off point for people who are a bit timid about trying a game with 20+ years of lore, because of the reset. On top of that, I was extremely impressed with how well the game runs on controllers, and I can’t wait to see how they improve it over time. As someone who mainly plays video games on a console, I can 100% see myself playing exclusively with a controller.
Having an hour isn’t nearly enough time to fully explore what World of Warcraft: Forever has to offer. But in that short time, I saw the game’s appeal, and I see a future where I spend as much time in Forever as I do in the base game.
World of Warcraft: Forever is scheduled to come out later this year on November 4 and will be playable on PC.
