Why Forever runs on modern code

Why build Forever on modern World of Warcraft code rather than on the Classic code base? Episode 6 of the official WoW: Forever Podcast, published on 29 October, answered with some history. Classic in 2019 started as a snapshot of World of Warcraft turned back into the game players remembered, but the live game kept changing underneath it, so changes constantly had to be pulled across. Around the Burning Crusade, the team made an effort it called the merge, meant to get things like security updates and graphics improvements automatically. Not everything was merged, the discussion said, and for a long time that left issues taking more of the team’s time than it wanted.

For Forever, the team went back to the drawing board. Classic had followed a no-changes approach, so tools that served design poorly were tolerable; a game meant to last a very long time needed something else. The episode describes starting from the more modern code, with its technology and changes, and letting data decide whether a given piece runs modern logic or Forever logic, so the work stays sustainable across projects. It also said this brought obstacles and an enormous amount of work, with recent help from engineers across the wider WoW group.

The payoff, as the discussion put it, is that Forever has picked up many performance updates made over the years. It gave a shout-out to the housing team for work it said helps Forever run well, and to the automation and systems teams, describing any improvement as now an improvement for all of WoW. It immediately added that this does not mean housing is coming to Forever. The episode gave no figures for these improvements.