World of Warcraft: Forever's launch is going surprisingly smoothly

World of Warcraft: Forever is live, and so far the launch is holding up better than a lot of players expected.

The gates opened at 3 PM PT, and GameSpot reports players immediately hit short login queues. Getting through the queue brought up the list of rulesets, but they were grayed out and unavailable.

That lasted around 30 minutes, per GameSpot, with players requeuing and waiting to see whether the servers would come up. Then everything started working as intended.

That's a good sign, given recent history. When Blizzard opened name reservations last week, European players couldn't get in for hours and American players faced long queues and disconnects, according to a launch live blog on Steam News whose writer expected the full launch to be "spicy."

Part of the difference may be how Forever handles servers. Instead of picking an individual server, you pick a ruleset, like player vs. environment, roleplaying or player vs. player. Everyone on the same ruleset lands on what GameSpot describes as one giant mass of interconnected servers. Blizzard calls it a "realmless" approach.

Forever reimagines 2004's World of Warcraft with improved graphics and overhauled gameplay. The beta drew big crowds: developers said it put up "the craziest numbers" they've seen in 17 years, even though it was capped at level 30 and most people had to buy an expensive Skyborne pack to get in.

Now that live servers are up, all you need to play is an active WoW subscription or a friend code.