World of Warcraft: Forever takes page out of retail's book as Blizzard confirms access to add-ons will be restricted in the throwback MMO

World of Warcraft: Forever was unveiled this past weekend at BlizzCon 2026, giving us our first-ever look at Blizzard's official take on Classic+ (or, at least, the closest thing we'll get to it) – and much like the retail MMO, it won't be too supportive of add-ons, apparently.

Blizzard made waves in the World of Warcraft community after deciding to remove combat mods from the retail release, stating that it hoped to "level the playing field" with less outside help in raids and the like.

That decision wasn't too popular with folks at first, so it's not at all surprising that many of the discussions surrounding World of Warcraft: Forever online have pondered whether it too would cut add-ons out of the picture.

Well, as it turns out, the new version of Blizzard's 21-year-old MMO will indeed similarly restrict add-ons – even though they aren't in Classic.

World of Warcraft: Classic designer Tim Jones and lead encounter designer Mike Nuthals tell Kotaku as much in a recent interview, confirming that "computational add-ons" (think combat add-ons and those that automate communications and such) are something we won't have access to.

They tell the outlet, "the in-game or in-combat add-on disarmament where the programmatic, the calculations done to automate marking or communicating for players, we're going to bring that over so that players will not have access to those kind of computational add-ons."

In other words, Forever is taking a page out of retail's book here in restricting such add-ons – but it's not exactly a bad decision. Raiding in either isn't of the same caliber, after all.

Folks point as much out over on Twitter, with one person commenting, "Unless WoW: Forever combat is much harder and much more complex than I am expecting, this is not a big deal." Another adds, "The content isn't even hard enough to warrant it."

So, all in all, it's certainly not proving as unpopular a change as it did in retail – perhaps also because World of Warcraft: Forever is launching this way, rather than going on to remove a feature.

Here's hoping fans who want to use other sorts of add-ons are still able to, with all that said. Combat help is one thing, but quality-of-life is a whole other ball game – but I suppose we'll find out more when World of Warcraft: Forever releases in November.

World of Warcraft: Forever's controversial Skyborne race came from Blizzard veteran Chris Metzen himself – "We knew we wanted to add some sort of elves."