World of Warcraft: Forever has opened to some of the warmest early reception a Blizzard launch has had in years, with Eurogamer and Kotaku both coming away impressed after the first stretch on live servers. Neither outlet has published a scored review, so the verdicts so far rest on launch stability and hands-on impressions rather than numbers.
Eurogamer finds almost nothing to complain about at launch
Eurogamer called it Blizzard's smoothest launch in memory. The outlet played through the night in Europe, from around 11pm until 3:50am, and reported short login queues that kept moving, very little server lag beyond the occasional lost spell cast, and no disconnects at all for its writer, which it described as a record for a major WoW release.
The problems it did find were small. Players who rushed in the moment servers opened hit server selection boxes that could not be clicked, though backing out and rejoining the queue sorted it quickly. Senior game designer Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield acknowledged a couple of other issues: some shards on the megaservers felt underpopulated, and the boats and zeppelins that ferry players around the map were broken, with Blizzard adding temporary portals as a workaround.
Executive producer Holly Longdale posted on X that things were going well, crediting the team's preparation after what she called the wildness of the beta. Greenfield joked that he was heading home to sleep and was "Totally not playing WoW Forever until 3am."
Players on the game's Reddit board were just as surprised, according to Eurogamer, with one top post titled "I can't believe how smooth this launch is." Eurogamer noted it is hard to judge the full scale of the launch given the middle-of-the-night release time in Europe, but said it follows a record-breaking beta whose impressions were largely positive.
Kotaku falls for the tauren
Kotaku's Rebekah Valentine focused on one specific change: Plainsrunning, a tauren racial ability from WoW's original beta that was cut in favour of kodo mounts and then revived in Forever's beta. In that beta version, it let tauren gradually build speed while moving, as long as they avoided combat and kept going.
Between the end of the beta and launch, Blizzard buffed it. Tauren now gain a stack every few seconds, each worth a 2 percent speed boost, capping at 30 stacks for a 60 percent increase. Valentine points out that this matches an apprentice-level mount, normally unavailable until level 40, yet tauren have it from level 1.
She argued the slow buildup preserves the unhurried pace that fans of older WoW enjoy, since reaching top speed still means running long, uninterrupted stretches, and Forever involves plenty of travel on foot despite its new fast-travel additions.
