I Played WoW Forever For 24 Hours, Here Are The Biggest Pros & Cons

I wanted to make a video talking about this kind of my impressions of WoW Forever of Classic Plus after the first 24 hours of having played the game. Talking about the 1 to 20 experience and how I feel about the game so far. And this is coming from the perspective of a like 2004 like OG vanilla WoW veteran, somebody who played from vanilla, a burning crusade, quit whenever Wrath of Lushkin came out. And I didn't really like try hard, play WoW for a long time until I got back in in the private server scene after the Nostalia shutdown and stuff like that with Allesium and Light Soap. Let's talk about the thing that matters. The thing that matters is the type of WoW player, the category of WoW player I am. I am the guy that quit 10 years ago and was never going to give Blizzard another chance. So now, however many years later, 2026, we have WoW forever coming out, which is, you know, the name is kind of stupid, but Classic Plus is here. The beta is here. I've played the beta for 24 hours now. From the perspective of that kind of player, I want to talk about what I've seen and how I feel and why I think the game is actually so damn good. And they are cooking kind of hard with this thing. It's kind of weird talking about this because I'm very critical. I don't really want to take the the criticism that I have or whenever whenever I critique something. A lot of times people are there's this weird kind of sense of toxic positivity that's going around. I've talked about it a bunch on stream. Like it's it's just strange, right? Critique isn't bad. Critique comes from a place of care. It comes from a place of love. Like, I love the game. I really do. I love WoW. I want I want people to love this game as much as I do. And I want this game to be the best it can be. I want WoW forever. I want Classic Plus to be the best version of WoW we've ever seen. I want this to be something that we've never seen before, the highest level. What are the pros? What are the cons? What is making this thing tick? And why do I feel the way that I do? And I know it's not perfect. I know it's not for everybody. I know there's some issues, but I I would say it's pretty much like a 9 out of 10 so far, at least like a 9.0 out of 10. And yeah, that's kind of like a high rating, but I'm talking about, you know, the the 2-day, you know, 24-hour experience going from 1 to 20 early game. I don't know how this is going to pan out going to 30. I don't know how this is going to pan out going to level 60, but I know what I know so far and playing one class and it's very, very good. The first thing I want to talk about is the reimagining of the game and giving it that feeling of how it felt. The game is not how it was back then, but it feels like how it felt back then. And they they've hit this so unbelievably hard with the updated visuals cuz you look around, you look at something, you see the texture. Just look up closeup of anything, right? I put on classic mode. I see the classic textures. I see the classic models. There's some scuff there a little bit because there's like some weird skeletal like maybe they're using different like retail skeleton. They've skinned it over with classic and kind of lipstick on a pigged it a little bit, you know, for for lack of a better phrase. But I think overall they've done a pretty good job with that for what it is. But the thing that's so impressive is they've taken the old textures and applied new technology, the volutric lighting, the fog, everything else that current day graphics cards have to offer, and they've made this world darker. They've made it more mysterious. They've made it bigger and it's all through the way things are are rendered. The different effects are rendered and it's and it's incredible. It's so damn good. The fog the fog just hit so hard. It's so impressive. So, the updated visuals actually go super super hard. I'm very impressed. I did not think it was going to be as good as it was. I thought maybe, you know, it was more smoke and mirrors than the spectacle that it is. I was wrong. I I actually think they cooked super hard. The next thing I want to talk about is new quests, but not only the new quests. We're talking about pros here. Not only are there new quests, not only are they implemented well, but how quickly you're introduced to new quests. I was talking to my friend Tips out. You know, if you're if you're a longtime Classic WoW enthusiast, you know Tips, right? Tips and I used to have a podcast together. It was ClassicCast, which we actually just rebooted. But Tibs is not, you know, he's not really doing content creation anymore. or he he works on the back end of like business stuff with me. He's not going to be on the podcast, but the podcast I just rebooted ClassicCast and it's going to be with Ampy and Guzu who are phenomenal. So, you should go follow the Classic Cast YouTube channel if you haven't already. I was talking to Tips and uh Tips brought up a point and I felt a little bit I I wasn't as adamant about this as he was, but I do think he was right. He said he thinks that if you're not immediately introduced to new quest, if you log in and it's the exact same thing whenever you start playing the game and leveling a new character, he thinks it's going to be a miss. I was like, I don't know about that, but I do see where you're coming from. To be fair, they didn't. The first quest that you see is still like the same quest, but it breadcrumbs you to the next quest where then you are introduced to new quests. And whenever I experienced that, I was like, you know what? Yeah, this was super important. And I do think this is actually a better way of doing it than how tips and I talked about because I think if they had done a new quest immediately, it would have been kind of like whoa, you know, they don't ease you into it, right? Because I think a lot of people are very like, especially if like you're you're a classic Andy, if you're an old school guy like me, there's a lot of things like change change. You know, a lot of people mistake me because I fit like the stereotype. I get categorized into this like 100% no changes type of person. When in reality, years ago, I was like one of the guys that was like, "Guys, we kind of need to account for the times and do make some changes here." I made videos about it. You know, you can you can easily see it. You can easily go find it. But I think the new quest implemented incredibly well. You're introduced to it quickly and it feels like, hey, something is different. Now, there are some little things with this. Like I feel like they introduce you to like primary gathering professions pretty quickly and they even like teach you how to mine off the rip and I don't really like that that much. I wish you kind of had to go to a trainer first. It's not a big deal personally like I but it is it is something you know and this is just me being like nitpicky and critiquing again and it comes from a place of love for the game. Like I I really do. I mean this is in my opinion this is one of the greatest games of all time and I think there's an opportunity here to make the best version of one of the greatest games of all time. It's super super exciting. There's never been a more exciting time to be a WoW player. Just being completely honest. But yeah, so the new quests are great. They fit into the lore. I leveled up an undead paladin for my first character. or I plan on leveling up a bunch of other characters just to get a feel and be able to give that feedback directly to Blizzard and be able to talk to them about like, yeah, I think this thing with this class or that thing with that class or that thing with that zone and be able to kind of speak from a place of uh like with with a degree of knowledge that's meaningful on these things, you know, secondhand is nice being able to forward what other people are saying, but when when you have like a like your own sort of expertise in something, I feel like you have an opportunity to add to it in the right way. You know, you can really talk about something instead of just being like here's this, fix it. So, we talked about capturing that feeling of authenticity, right? And this kind of this is all-encompassing with the quests, with the visuals, with a lot of the stuff that you see. You know, it feels like you're following the design principles of vanilla WoW, of classic WoW, but they're doing this pretty heavily. And even with the UI, they did a UI redesign, and there are some pain points of this thing. I don't like the unit frames. They're effectively the retail unit frames. A lot of people have been complaining about them, but man, let me tell you, I think the colors, vanilla Wow, classic WoW has this like stone look to everything. They took that stone look and they basically just like spruced it up with like this gray metal with bronze and red. It looks really cool. Like I personally I love the new color scheme and it's basically just like a an updated version of that old stone look and I re I personally I really really like it. Now, that's why I have a degree of disappointment whenever they didn't take that and apply it to the new unit frames like your own player health bar and then your target health bar. I think they should have made the classic version and then taken that new color scheme. So, I think it would look so good. So, I really hope that they do that. But overall, I think the UI design is positive. I think the new character screen is good. You know, when you open up your character window and you have all the stuff, it kind of reminds me of Balders's Gate 3. You can go through and you can scroll over all the stats and it explains to you, hey, this is how the stat works. Hey, this is what parry does. Hey, you scroll over defense, it talks about crushability, it talks about crit c, it talks about all this stuff. So, the layman or the new player that comes in again, very similar to ballers. It's very RPG where you can go through and you can look at a character sheet and you can learn about the game. Oh, dude, just like chef's kiss. They really, really did a good job with this. I I truly believe this. It feels like, hey, this should have been in 2004 Vanilla WoW. And if they had kept developing Vanilla WoW and kept Vanilla WoW as it was, it would have eventually gotten to the point where it looked something like this. Like a game like that would have looked something like this eventually. And that's the key. That is the key to this. And that's that's why I think this thing is trying to hit so hard. Again, this is the one day the 24-hour sort of experience. It's early on. It's this is the honeymoon phase. And there's going to be problems. We're going to inevitably see some things down the road, but right now, fantastic. Fantastic. It's so good. And to those same points that I made earlier, we're talking about class identity. They've made class changes, but the early level class changes that we've seen spot on with maintaining class identity. Hey, that's a paladin. Paladins do paladin things. They changed the paladin class a little bit. They added holy strike. They added sea of fury. They they've made some changes to the paladin class. Some people think paladins probably changed the most. I don't really know. In some ways, they've changed a lot. In other ways, they actually haven't changed that much. But for me, I talked about it at the beginning whenever I came back for Cataclysm. Whenever whenever Burning Crusade went to Wrath, I've had this feeling of this isn't my paladin anymore. I'm not playing my class. My class was taken away from me. And I know a lot of people like that. A lot of people like Retail WoW right now. They like the retail paladin. They like Cataclysm. They liked Wrath Paladin. And I understand it. And I actually think that they should support those types of play styles, specifically the Wrath play styleish. It's not going to be the same. I think Wrath Paladin was essentially a glorified warrior. That's a discussion for another time. But that like sort of like whack-a-ole and hit the button play style. They should provide that. They've done that. If you look at the talent trees, you can go 30 rat or really like you would go like 28 rat, 23 holy, and then you have a spell power rat build, which by the way, we had spell power r back in the day, but they've expanded on spell power r made it sort of like that whack-a-ole with cooldowns play style instead of the seal twisting auto attack play style. The intent is there to enable these sort of play styles that are going to be good for everybody. For the paladin class, it's the from a fantasy standpoint and class identity standpoint. Again, this is to my 24-hour experience and even playing with these other classes in my groups. Perfect. Like, they're doing so damn good, truthfully. Another thing, profession changes. They've made a lot of profession changes where professions effectively felt useless at low ranks, at low levels. And I haven't done too much. It's like I'm I'm around I'm in like that first set like 50 to 75. I'm in that like first level of training with blacksmithing, but there is stuff there that is good and useful. It's not a huge pain in the ass to try and craft them. It's like super expensive to try and craft something that is completely useless. That's not really there anymore. So, they've done a good job of reworking this. Now, I will say there is some cons to the profession changes. I've seen a lot of people talking about this. Hey, are they giving us a little bit too much stuff too early? And I think that's a fair criticism. You can start getting like blue items and stuff at level 10. Like requires level 10. At first I said, "No, I don't think it's a big deal." You know, it's just one piece, right? It's just one slot. But I started leveling some more and I was leveling some more and doing some more things and I was like, "Wait a second. You can get like a full set of like I'm like level 15. You have almost a full set of blue gear. Does it really matter as a veteran player?" I'm like, "It it kind of doesn't for me as a veteran player." But it's not about me entirely because I do think this does affect a veteran player a little bit. But I think that carrot on a stick is really important. And getting too many blue pieces early on makes blues feel less special. And not only do they feel less special, it makes blues feel like the standard. And blues are not the standard. That is not how vanilla out gear is set up. It's not itemized that way. You have the white items which are effectively useless. You have green which is uncommon but green is kind of the standard in vanilla. And so what happens is as you as you've taken this standard down and I want to talk about burning crusade here. So whenever you take the standard from green I said take it down you've taken it up to blue. The expectation while leveling everything is going to be blue gear and then by the time you're level 60 you need to have all epic gear all the time. I mean, I remember being level 60 going in an axe and I still had a couple pieces that were blue, you know, hand of justice blue, black hands breath blue, trinkets that you swap in, you know, maybe a ring, you know, depending on the scenario, you know, but you would have some gear on you that was blue still. And now that's not going into an axe is like you have very very very few pieces and they're often situational, but that's the extreme case. You know, in Burning Crusade, you go from, hey, uh, if you have an epic item, that means, hey, this is really good and this is nice, but it's not like the expectation to now it's the expectation in Burning Crusade thing. And I do think they should really like build this game around like the TBC prep patch era. And I actually think it has been built around that TBC pre-patch era like design-wise. That is one thing about Burning Crusade that I think was not good. And I think it does not feel vanilla. And there's a lot of people that say, "Hey, well, this is WoW Forever. It's not classic plus." No, it is classic plus. It has been stated multiple times in multiple panels that is classic plus. Holly announced it as vanilla plus. Showed the trailer, which was a a you know, was a big reference to the original trailer for whenever the game came out, and then came out and said, "Yes, this is classic plus." Right. So this this sort of mental gymnastics and weird stuff people are doing to try and argue with you and say this is not classic. It's classic plus. The influence of classic, it's non-stop. So I think when you want it to have that good strong classic feel, like the best of classic feel, I think it's probably wise to tune that gear down just a little bit. This is kind of a con of the profession changes, but it really like bleeds into something else. And it's something that a lot of people have have brought up and are worried about. And I should probably make an entirely different video about it. But it's the power scaling and the fear that people have that the power scaling is getting out of hand or that it's going to get out of hand. The truth is we don't know. And the truth is this video is just about the first 24 hours and what I've seen. And what I've seen is that yeah, maybe that could happen. So I don't really want to expand on it too much right now. That's for a separate discussion, separate video. Maybe I'll talk about it tomorrow. But it is an issue and it is like, hey, are we getting too strong too early? And everybody talks about horizontal progression. Well, when people say horizontal progression, they don't mean a straight line. Okay? I think I was one of the people that like started saying horizontal progression in reference to to a classic plus like 6 years ago. And it has kind of become this thing prevalent. Like it's very prevalent now. And what I was talking about whenever I was saying a horizontal progression, what it really was is it's a more horizontal progression than the exponential progression that you have from Burning Crusade to BWL to AQ40 to Knax. Right? You need to take this curve and you need to just, you know, bend it down a little bit. So, it's not flat, but it and it still is a little bit exponential, but it's it's a little bit more like this as opposed to like this, if that makes sense. But, I do think this is a con. I think this is something that probably needs to be monitored. That's what we have a beta for. I've actually already talked to Blizzard about it and said, "Yeah, they're they're actively looking at it, which is encouraging to me because it's like, yeah, we already know, you know, and they're like, yeah, like this this is just something like we're going to look at all the data and just see everything and just kind of see how things play out." So, good on them. The next thing I'm going to talk about the next thing that this is a very this is a very, very fun thing that I really, really like and I wasn't sure how I felt about it whenever I initially saw it. And I think you guys already know where I'm going with this. The last names are so good. They're so funny. They're stupid. They're goofy. It's been It's been one of the most fun things about the beta so far. It's just the stupid last names that we're getting and like the the full names. Why is somebody named Chad Thundercock inviting me to a group? What are these names? Everybody in Classic Plus has just has porn store names. What is going on? It's great cuz people can have the names that they want to get. But it's also just it is it is bad. It's good, but it's bad. I don't know how they're going to moderate this thing. I think for the beta they're just letting like, hey, let the kids play. But I I wouldn't be surprised if they found a way to I mean they you know they're going to dial it back a little bit at some point. But man, the the names have been so funny. I mean, creative, goofy, some have been very crass, but but a lot have been very funny and and goofy. And it's it's cool. Like, it's a fun thing. Like, this is actually a feeling that I didn't realize when you see somebody in the world with a cool name. And you know, tell me if this is a feeling that you guys have had before. you see a guy with a cool name and you're like, "Damn, that's a cool guy and it's interesting and and it sticks out to you and you might even try and engage with that person who's like, "Oh, that's crazy that you got this name." And it's a very very rare occurrence. It it's so rare, in fact, that you can afford to decrease that rarity and still get that same feeling. That's happening right now with the last names. I see people all the time with these funny names, with these goofy names. And I notice myself looking around a lot more looking around town and being like, "That guy's name is funny. That guy's name is funny. That guy's name Oh, whoops. Turn the camera. That one's bad." You know, but I'm noticing these things and it's just building that living, breathing world of what an MMO is so much more. It's It's phenomenal. It's It's so so good. Love it. I love the last names. We talked a little bit about some of the cons so far. It's It's been 24 hours. It's been like the 1 to 20 experience and there are a few things and a lot of it is things that I would shock up to beta. One of which is there's like random sound effects that have changed or like they're missing. They're different. Like the water splash when you're jumping in the water, you'll hear it's like it's it's it's kind of jarring because you're not used to the water sounding different. I don't know if it's because you're not used to it or because it just sounds bad. One thing I do know that sounds bad is the human death noise. For some reason, the human death noises. Like, why? Like, why do they change the human death noise? It makes no sense. I don't understand why they changed that. Now, these things, again, these things are very, very minor. And I want to go back to what I was saying earlier. I think Blizzard is cooking hard on this thing. And I'm being a little bit nitpicky because it kind of goes to show how how good this feels after playing for 24 hours because there's not a whole lot of like big alarming things. There's just a few pain points. I talked about the unit frames. One thing that I really don't like and the thing that I would really like to propose is the retail auction house looks like a I hate how it looks. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. But functionally, it is so much better than the classic auction house. It is. I agree. I hate to admit it, but it's true, right? The retail auction house is far more functional. And I would love for them to find a way to take the visuals, the the interface of the classic classic auction house and apply the functionality of the retail auction house to that. And I think it'll look so good. I think it'll look so clean with the new UI color scheme with the bronze and the red. And I think it'll look just again I think it'll look just I love it. I you know I'm imagining it in my head. I almost want to like mock it up with something with Photoshop and just I think it would be so good. So, I would like that for Blizzard to do that. I would like for them to take the look of the classic auction house and apply the functionality of the retail auction house to it. I want to see the seller's name. I want the cost to be on the right side. You know, I want to see all that information here. And you can't see the seller's name because you would click on it and then you go to all the listings, but I want to be able to see the seller's name without having to scroll over it. I don't know how many times I've seen somebody post something on the auction house and I'm like, "That's too expensive." So, I whisper them. I see they're online. I whisper them. They're not online. I send them an in-game mail. Hey man, I saw you had the two ring on the auction house for, you know, 4,000 gold, for 5,000 gold. Would you be willing to sell it for 4,500 instead? And they're like, "Yeah, actually, sure. I'm down." That is great. That is awesome. I think that that is something that's really good cuz you can see their names and stuff now, but it's just it's less intuitive. There's a lot of dead space. It looks like a bad like a bad work spreadsheet right now. Take the classic interface, give it the retail functionality, and I think it'll just be beautiful. It'll be a beautiful auction house. I talked about the fear of the power scaling. There's another issue with the memory leak. I have faith that they'll fix it. It's a pretty bad bug, but I have faith that they'll fix it. It's not like a design issue. It's a technical issue. So, I'm kind of less worried about it cuz like what like what can we do about it as a community giving feedback like obviously they need to fix the memory leak that you have to log out and log back in cuz your frame rate goes from like you have high frame rate then over the course of minutes it'll just like down to like 20. One thing that actually this is a actual big issue. There's already bots in the game. There's freaking hunters, level 20 hunters in Winterpring. Chinese names. All right. They're on Chinese client. They're they're running around freaking planes running, you know, crackhead torrenting just spurging out in Everlook. Probably trying to get the the cultivation thing, trying to get herbs or whatever. I'm like, bro, what? Like, are the bots beta testing their bots? Is that is that what's happening? How did they even get to Winterpring? I mean, they must have res run there. They're already level 20. Did they fly hack there? Who knows? And I'm like, man, I hope Blizzard understands this. It is a big literally log on right now and type slash who winterring slash whoeverlook/h who winterpring and look at who's there. Do it right now. You guys are probably you probably have the game open. Alt tab over. Do it right now. And and leave a comment and tell me if you see a bunch of torrent hunters there. There's no reason why Blizzard just can't go in and just scorched earth just ricking the culling of the bots Arthus style. That's what they should do. And they've talked about how hard they're going to go on gold sellers. They need to go that hard on the bots. It is it is the number one biggest sort of uh community goodwill thing that they can do to shut it down. They got to shut it down. It's so many people are like, you know, it's going to suck if it's just littered with bots. It's going to and I and I understand this is just the beta. I understand it's just the beta, but it's about sending a message, not, you know, to to the community. People want to see like active defense against the dark arts. They want to see that. They want to see that stuff shut down. Oh, there's one more thing there. There's there's one last thing that, you know, after the first 24 hours, I've noticed there's some random spell effects, the animations. People keep saying the animations are retail. I'm like, no, they're not. They're not retail animations. I'm looking at them, the the melee swings and all that, but I realized, wait a second, you're talking about the spell effects, the the way the models move for like swinging a weapon for melee that, you know, it's the right animation. The way you're casting a spell is the right animation, but the spell effects there, I think there are a lot of like retail animations mixed in, and it's jarring to a lot of people. For some things, it's probably okay for some. For other things, you're missing some flavor and some iconic sort of looks like the Paladin judgment spell. It's just like a yellow little flash on their chest. It's a little yellow flash on their chest. Whereas in vanilla and Burning Crusade, boom, the hammer comes down. It's cool. It's like it's like a hammer that slams down on them real real quick. I I want to see that, you know, and I hope that for release they get this stuff sorted where they go in and certain spells, especially like particularly the iconic ones, are fixed and they they bring in the good stuff. So, that's pretty much it. I mean, there's some other stuff that I'm indifferent on. Like, you could argue that it's just, you know, good. Me personally, I'm indifferent on it. Like, I'm indifferent on the camping system. I think it's kind of cool, but I don't really care that much about it. I do think it's kind of cool, though. I also controller support. I think it's kind of cool, but I don't really care that much. I do use it to like make my camera smoother whenever I'm streaming or just like running around or whatever and like, you know, when you're panning the camera. So, that's kind of nice. I'm kind of indifferent on it. I personally don't really care that much. It seems like a lot of people really like it, though. And I think that's a positive thing. Overall, to kind of bring it all back around again, I pointed out a few nitpicky things. There's a couple that are obviously more important than others, but man, I would say it's like a legit 9 out of 10 so far. It It really is. Depending on how you really feel about those things that I mentioned, some people aren't going to care at all. Some people are going to care a lot more. I would understand thinking that it's not really quite as good or even better than what I think it is right now. But man, honestly, for the for the first time in I don't know how long it might be in 20 years, there's a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of faith that you know what, maybe maybe Blizzard's cooking a little bit. Maybe they're figuring it out. You know, we might be going somewhere with this thing. And it is such an exciting time to be a WoW player. And it really feels like it feels like WoW is back, baby. It really does. So, let me know what you guys think. Let me know how you guys feel. Leave a comment, like the video, subscribe. I do a lot of different stuff here. Uh, you know, how I started the the core of what I always did was Classic WoW. I will always love Classic WoW, but we talk about a lot of different games. We do, you know, I kind of think of my channel as trying to be the cross-section of IRL and gaming. I'll go to gaming events and all that kind of stuff and also play other stuff. And we do a lot of different things here. This is a variety channel at this point, but the heart, we're always going to love classic W. We're always going to want the best for Classic WoW. And it feels like we might actually be getting the best for Classic WoW. It might actually be just right over the horizon. Let's see. Let's hope for the best. Let's keep giving the feedback that we give. Let's keep being positive about it and and trying to give feedback in the best most constructive way possible and let's see where this takes us. Yeah, cautiously optimistic is I think is a fair way of putting it, but still optimistic. So everything is SPN TV on Twitch, on YouTube, on Discord, on Reddit, Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, Kick, Rumble. Everything is SPF TV. Follow me everywhere. Sub everywhere. Do all that stuff. Uh follow me. Don't follow me in real life, but follow me everywhere else. Everything is SFAN TV. Thank you guys so much for watching, and we'll see you guys in the next video.