WoW: Forever's new Riverglades zone feels more like The Burning Crusade+ than Classic+, and you know what, I'm absolutely okay with that

So I've been utterly consumed by WoW: Forever, which is a relief, because it's my job to write about it—and I've been powering ahead to 40, where a deeply oldschool grind to get my first mount awaits me. Before that, though, I had an absolutely lovely time futzing around The Riverglades, one of WoW: Forever's properly bespoke zones. As in, this thing wasn't in vanilla. This was cooked up and released in November.

Having quested through most of it in a blissful fugue state with some friends, we each came to the conclusion that it all feels very 2007, rather than 2006.

The Riverglades, which you can head to at about level 38, is saturated with quests. Even more so than the revamped and revisited zones from vanilla World of Warcraft. And while it absolutely has the classic zone's sense of scale, and none of these quests have the retail aura of on-rails cutscenes about them, I wasn't actually tasting vanilla.

One of the hallmarks of older, classic-style quest design is a bunch of disparate quests that have you scattering out towards the map—Riverglades, then, feels a lot more modern, in that it uses that scattershot point-of-interest guide as a baseline, then cleverly tucks away even more quests at your destination.

In one case, fighting through a ruined village flooded with Twilight's Blade, me and my compatriot saw a quest marker underground. It took ages for us to find a basement, which then yawned out into an open cavern with shadow-infused ogres and a cunning woman trapped in a cage with her own quest chain.

At which point it clicked: Oh, I'm playing The Burning Crusade again. The template was classic, sure, but the density and the branching paths and the clever redirects—that's all Outland, baby. There's even a set of swampy flats in the middle of The Riverglades pock-marked by orcish poachers that made me say, out loud: Oh, I'm in Nagrand again. Just without the floating islands.

And you know what, having had this unexpectedly adjacent nostalgic experience, I didn't hate it.

I do hope that Forever manages to preserve its more Vanilla aspects; I've written on this site quite recently about how I've adored just going on an adventure. Heck, I had the terrible idea to do the Scarlet Monastery as Alliance recently, and the quest chain leading up to the sword I wanted forced me to run all the way across Desolace to fight level 40 skeletons. It was great.

But The Burning Crusade, in many senses, was the best of both worlds. WoW hadn't been claimed by its Cataclysm-era propensity for goofs and pop culture references over atmosphere yet, but it also hadn't stuck doggedly to its vanilla quest design that was sometimes just flat-out bad.

In fact, many of Forever's new quests, even in other zones, have been built around plugging up awkward questing gaps, or giving players more to do in zones that've been otherwise barren. Which, as it turns out, just produces Outland 2.0. If the other levelling zones Blizzard adds to Forever are as Nagrand-flavoured as the Riverglades, I really don't mind at all.

Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight