On October 9, executive producer Holly Longdale and associate production director Clay Stone presented the PAX 2026 World of Warcraft: Forever panel keynote presentation. You can watch the video here (if the Twitch embed breaks or your ad/script blocker blocks it).
I transcribed the portion where they deep-dive into the early development of World of Warcraft: Forever. At any time, if you wish to view an image in its full size, use your cursor and hold the right-button and select “Open image in New Tab.”
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PAX 2026 World of Warcraft: Forever Panel Transcript
Clay Stone: What is World of Warcraft? We were coming into this, though, and we realized, you know, people flying to PAX from all around the world, and even though most folks we hope know what World of Warcraft is, we figured that might as well be a good spot to start. What the heck is World of Warcraft?
1. Intro: What’s World of Warcraft?
So World of Warcraft, for those who might not be familiar here, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. We launched this game back in 2004. It took the world by storm. Players create characters; they party together, they go on quests, they achieve and overcome incredible challenges such as fighting a large dragon.
And they’ve been doing this for a long time. That is the game side of World of Warcraft. But when I think about World of Warcraft, it’s more than just a game; it is also a world, the world of Azeroth, and its is this world that exists almost 24/7, except for when we have downtime to patch, but is available for players to log into, and over these 20 plus years, players have formed real relationships in this game.
For those of you who have played it, I’m sure that you can attest to that. It’s been this incredible experience that has continued to build on itself and become something even new from where we started out, and part of the reason for that is as we release new expansions over and over again and increase the story or expand the story and add new zones and new continents and allow players to go to space. I mean, it’s been pretty spectacular, the journey that modern game has been. But we recognized a little while ago, back in 2017, 2018, that where the game is now was really far from where we started back in 2004, 2005. And through substantial player demand and then a lot of internal demand as well, we launched something called WoW Classic in 2019.
WoW Classic was incredibly special for us and for our players. It was something that even internally we wanted really bad to explore. And the company was very hesitant about it. We were extremely nervous when we did it. We did not know how players would respond. But WoW Classic was essentially taking that original 2004- 2005 era game and returning to it. And the players trusted us so much that they even came up with the hashtag # NoChanges. Which was it? “Blizzard, please do not make any changes. We want this game to be exactly the way that it was back in 2004-2005.”
Holly Longdale: It was insane! There was like one lamp on a roadway that had a broken texture in Vanilla, and they made us change it to its broken state.
Clay Stone: Accuracy. Totally. And thank you for reminding me of that. The way that players, and we have referred to this as the vanilla game – that original version. And if anybody remembers this, when J. Allen Brack announced it on stage at BlizzCon, he said, “Some of you like vanilla.” And it was a big moment. I was watching as a fan at the time, and that was a really big moment.
Holly Longdale: Do you remember– we made the combat objectively worse. Like we put delay in it so it would feel like 2004. So there were definitely some things that we thought, okay,m well, it is accurate. It’s no changes, and players should like… yeah. I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.
| NAVIGATE - PAX AUSTRALIA 2026 - WORLD OF WARCRAFT: FOREVER KEYNOTE TRANSCRIPT | ||||
| 1. Intro | 2. Classic Releases | 3. WoW Mythos | 4. Dev Pillars | 5. Content |
| 6. Riverglades | 7. Idea | 8. Enemies | ||
