So I've been utterly consumed by WoW: Forever, which is a relief, because it's my job to write about it—and I've been powering ahead to 40, where a deeply oldschool grind to get my first mount awaits me. Before that, though, I had an absolutely lovely time futzing around The Riverglades, one of WoW: Forever's properly bespoke zones. As in, this thing wasn't in vanilla. This was cooked up and released in November.

Having quested through most of it in a blissful fugue state with some friends, we each came to the conclusion that it all feels very 2007, rather than 2006.

The Riverglades, which you can head to at about level 38, is saturated with quests. Even more so than the revamped and revisited zones from vanilla World of Warcraft. And while it absolutely has the classic zone's sense of scale, and none of these quests have the retail aura of on-rails cutscenes about them, I wasn't actually tasting vanilla.

One of the hallmarks of older, classic-style quest design is a bunch of disparate quests that have you scattering out towards the map—Riverglades, then, feels a lot more modern, in that it uses that scattershot point-of-interest guide as a baseline, then cleverly tucks away even more quests at your destination.

In one case, fighting through a ruined village flooded with Twilight's Blade, me and my compatriot saw a quest marker underground. It took ages for us to find a basement, which then yawned out into an open cavern with shadow-infused ogres and a cunning woman trapped in a cage with her own quest chain.

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