In World of Warcraft: Forever you don't pick a realm — you pick a ruleset: Normal, PvP, Roleplaying, or Hardcore. Your choice determines who you can group up with and what happens to a character that dies.

In World of Warcraft: Forever, you don't choose a realm — you choose a ruleset: Normal, PvP, Roleplaying, and later Hardcore. This changes the familiar Classic setup and sets separate rules for group play, PvP, and character death.

Forever doesn't have the usual realm list on the character selection screen. Instead, when creating a character, you pick one of four rulesets: Normal, PvP, Roleplaying, and — later — Hardcore. Each ruleset is a single shared world, and you can't mix heroes from different rulesets in the same party.

What this means in practice:

• One big world per ruleset. The world is shared within a ruleset, with no split into dozens of separate realms of varying population.
• Party, dungeon, raid — same ruleset only. Normal characters can't party up with PvP characters, and vice versa. This applies to raids too: teams are built from one ruleset.
• PvP ruleset: one faction per account. If your account already has a Horde PvP character, you can't make an Alliance character in this ruleset.
• Hardcore arrives later. It's not in at launch — it'll be added later. The announced twist is permanent death: a character that dies in Hardcore doesn't come back to it, but can move to another ruleset.
• Collections and Legacy Points are shared. Achievements, collected mounts, pets, unlocked recipes, and Legacy Points all accumulate on the account regardless of ruleset. The exception is Hardcore: it has its own rules and doesn't count shared progress.

Replacing the realm list with rulesets changes how players decide where to play. In Classic, you had to compare server populations, faction balance, and type — Normal, PvP, or RP. Now, instead of dozens of fields, there's one: which type of world suits you. Where retail and other Classic branches still keep their realm lists, Forever has replaced it with exactly this choice.

The Hardcore ruleset is its own story. It's aimed at one-life players: die, and either you're done or you move to another ruleset with that same character. Even in "one life," the character still has a way forward — just in a different ruleset.

The PvP ruleset with one faction per account is a noticeable change for those used to keeping a character on each side and switching to match their group or task. Here, that won't be possible.

The Roleplaying ruleset sits in the same overall lineup, meaning RP communities get a dedicated space the same way PvP players do.