World of Warcraft Forever has lit a fire under the community, from modern die-hards to those who stepped away years ago. Among them is modder ‘Arhkain,’ who was inspired by the beta for Blizzard’s reborn MMORPG to return to a project they abandoned several years ago. Dubbed ‘Retro Forever,’ the goal is to transform WoW Forever into a more immersive first-person experience, complete with combat animations. It’s still in the early stages, but it’s already picking up plenty of attention from players.
“Ever since 2004, one of the very first things I did was roll my camera all the way in so that I could see out of my own character’s eyes,” Arhkain explains. “I wanted to experience this world in the most immersive way possible.” Unfortunately, World of Warcraft was never built to be played this way, and there are no graphics or interface options to support it. In an attempt to correct this, they started experimenting with building their own solution.
“I began back in the Classic Hardcore days,” Arhkain recalls. “I started tinkering using [modding framework] WeakAuras as the vehicle to display graphics on the screen whenever something would happen, and I found it was actually pretty easy.” The hard work came with attempting to match up the correct timing for graphics and sounds. Unfortunately, “time and life got in the way, and I had to put all the files aside.”
Arhkain says they weren’t initially planning to restart the project for World of Warcraft Forever, but decided to play the beta anyway. They immediately ran into the stumbling block that WeakAuras had stopped development in response to Blizzard’s new combat mod restrictions, which also make it tougher to sync up those graphics. “If I don’t know what’s going on in the combat log exactly, I can’t put the correct image on screen.”
Fortunately, there has been some progress thanks to a WeakAuras fork called ForeverAuras. “The dev that’s been working over there has been doing amazing work,” Arhkain notes. “I have been able to hammer out the bugs in my Classic conversion for ForeverAuras. I figure we’ll start with Mage, see if there’s any interest in this kind of project, and if there is, maybe we can build a community around this and get some more hands on board to actually get first-person graphics for the other classes.”
If the 2D art you see feels familiar, it’s because the current iteration includes designs directly adapted from or inspired by Hexen, Daggerfall, and Doom. While implementing designs based on the existing 3D WoW models is theoretically possible, “I can only do so much as one guy,” Arhkain says. “it is much simpler to accomplish with 2D.” They also seem to be reluctant to turn to AI tools, which I appreciate, stating, “I think the only way to make this project go quicker is through human efforts.”
For now, Retro Forever isn’t just something you can download and play – but there’s clearly a lot of love behind the project, and the community response suggests Arhkain isn’t the only one with a desire to see this happen. “Honestly, I cannot imagine playing WoW any other way now,” they say, “it’s just the way I view the world, out of my own Mage’s eyes.”
Arhkain acknowledges that the view change has its downsides. “You don’t have that same spatial awareness that every other WoW player has, and I will admit that I have been snuck up on and killed by things that I did not see coming.” While it’s probably best not to try and run dungeons or raids in first-person, those drawbacks are the trade-off for a completely unique perspective on the MMO’s iconic world.
“I truly think that first-person perspective offers a way better gameplay experience than the top-down isometric view, in the sense that you get a real scope of the world,” Arhkain concludes. “You can see how big these creatures are supposed to be, how large these structures are. I’m really excited to develop this further and get this out there so other people can experience this as well, because it’s a game changer.” I certainly hope to see more from Retro Forever in the future.
