My thoughts on Warcraft Forever...

As an original World of Warcraft player, and a die-hard player from vanilla through to Wrath, I wanted to give my thoughts on World of Warcraft Forever. But before I can, I have to be a little lyrical.

I believe World of Warcraft is the best game ever made. There, I said it. I work in the games industry, and I genuinely feel that nothing has ever captured the zeitgeist and fired the imagination quite like it did.

Sure, it had bugs and flaws. I was among the early voices calling out Blizzard's lack of forethought around scaling levels and power. I made that clear on my appearance on Shut Up, We're Talking, all those years ago, when I founded this very blog.

My history with this game runs deep and long and old.

Would I say tired? No. I still dabbled from time to time, trying to understand the game I loved. I spent time on emulation servers. I even rolled my own, as any software engineer might.

So it's with a been there, done that, paid for it and tasted it for free perspective that I approach the Forever offering.

And honestly? I'm not going to play it.

That might be unfair to the game itself. As a standalone offering, it probably deserves my time and money. Blizzard would certainly love to have both.

But I can't bring myself to do it.

I don't trust Blizzard to preserve the game as I want it to be. I don't trust them not to wipe it away. And that lack of trust has become a deep, seemingly unbridgeable chasm.

I've watched executives wax lyrical about taking the war out of Warcraft. I've watched them gloss over that rhetoric, claim they've heard us—the players—and move on.

They haven't heard us. Not in the way that matters.

And that scares me.

I'm scared they don't understand what this game means to the wider player base. And, to be absolutely brutal, this is the game they should have made more than a decade ago.

Instead, it's arriving too late for me.

I love World of Warcraft. I always will. But I don't trust Blizzard with it any more.

Can Blizzard change that for me?

I'd love to talk to them about it. I just don't trust that they'd listen.