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World of Warcraft: Forever is fascinating from so many perspectives—not necessarily in terms of what's on offer (it is, despite my enamorment, still very much Classic WoW) but in what it means for the MMO genre at large.

It's the kind of project that usually only gets cooked up in "what ifs", a version of a 20-year old game that decided not to go for expansions, but to instead spread out horizontally. A World of Warcraft that didn't have to rush a single hour of development time. It's an attempt at not only just recreating nostalgia, but applying a fine layer of polish to that nostalgia.

Forever has over 1,000 new quests and dungeons—and having played some of them in my 50 hours with its beta, I can say that Blizzard has absolutely nailed what I've seen so far. To restore a prior version of a game is one thing, but to add new areas and content that feel appropriate to its oldschool game design feels like a magic trick.

It's like someone's dusted off a set of forbidden texts and started reading them in flawless ancient greek—a sleight-of-hand that's been dunked on as a "millenial retirement home" but, as the exact target audience for Forever, I've gotta say: Bingo night's really popping.

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