This isn’t meant to be any sort of serious critique - and I’m sure there have been no shortage of stories from players like myself that, after a long time away, were lured back by nostalgia to give WoW a try with the news of Classic servers; I’ve honestly just been running the gamut of emotions in my 10-ish hours of game time, bouncing back and forth from full blown nostalgic fun to complete bewilderment, and figured I’d share my experience.
For a bit of context, I last played sometime during The Burning Crusade expansion. I played in a raiding guild that, while far from the best on the server, was at least capable of reliably clearing all of the current raids prior to TBC (and we had just started getting proficient in TBC content when I quit, I believe). While I had three characters at max level - human Paladin, Mage and Warlock - and all in at least a few assorted pieces of Tier 3 or 4 or whatever the purple crystal-looking armor sets were, my main was the Paladin, which I ran as healer (I don’t think there was any other option at the time for a raiding Paladin…) and I was damn good at it - Priests had nothing on Flash of Light’s ludicrous casting speed and mana efficiency… but I digress.
Anyway, the time commitment involved just got out of hand, and a combination of personal and professional changes IRL, coupled with my inability to not “accidentally” pour 30+ hours a week into the damn game if I played it at all, forced me to completely call it quits on WoW… though not on gaming entirely. I’ve spent the last decade+ playing games much more casually, and generally avoiding MMO’s like the plague. But then I saw Classic had been re-released, and figured “Hell, a trip down memory lane would be fun! I just won’t get involved in any raiding and I’ll take it easy just screwing around taking in the sights.”
And, yes, classic was exactly what I remembered. I played through the first couple starter zones as a mage (I don’t remember much about leveling the Paladin, except that it was horrible) and had a perfectly pleasant time running about old stomping grounds up to Deadmines. It was enough to spike my curiosity about what the actual game looks like nowadays, so I logged into the current version. I’m about 10 hours in, and the experience has been a bit something like this:
“Woah, that’s a lot of races. Right, 12 years worth of expansions, duh. Okay… well I want to level fast and be able to play solo… let’s look up which class is good at that nowadays…”
“Ah, all of them, apparently? But for solo play people recommend Hunters, Warlocks, Death Knights, Druids, Paladins… hmmmm… I remember liking my Warlock, let’s do that!”
“Cool, lots of fighting going on at the starting area… and it’s on fire… that’s new… okay, quest! Let’s do thi… What?!? This is awesome! It actually tells me where to go for my quests! Sweet! Let’s kill stuff!”
“New animations look good, that’s fun.”
“Huh, I guess the newbie zone gives you super reduced resource costs and the mobs do basically zero damage… well, that makes sense I suppose. I should probably grab some food and drink from the vendors for once I leave this zone, though.”
“DING!”
“Where’s the Warlock trainer?”
“Okay… so some quests can give you special gear to do special quest-y things like this water cannon. That’s kind of fun - I wonder what other quests they’ve added like this?”
“Is anyone else online right now? I thought I saw other players, but I haven’t seen a single person say anything in General Chat… wait, is General Chat still a thing? Do I have to turn it on or is it muted or something by default? No? Guess it’s just a quiet morning…”
“Well, that’s kinda cool; you just get new spells automatically now instead of needing a trainer? I suppose that was sort of a pain…”
“Alright, time to head to Goldshire!”
“Goldshire has a flight path now! YES!”
“What the holy hell is that thing? Why is there a giant gold dragon in Goldshire? Oh, that’s a player! That’s right - they added flight to Azeroth at some point, didn’t they! And apparently some very cool looking dragon mounts, that’s awesome.”
“Ah, new music in the Goldshire Inn! A little different, but I approve. On to more quests!”
“Okay, seriously, it’s been way too long without a single word in General. SOMEONE should have asked if anyone’s doing Hogger or at the very least started an argument about proper channel use by now… after this quest remember to look up if there’s some new chat channel…”
“AH, Goldtooth!! What are you doing outside of the mine, you bastard!?!?”
“Uhhh… hmmm… are there difficulty settings now? Do I have this on easy mode? I just face-tanked Goldtooth… and my spells seem to still use basically zero mana. Maybe they just keep the training wheels on through the starter zones now? I guess it’s kinda nice not having to eat and drink after every. Single. Fight. Just don’t get overconfident, I’m sure they’ll get harder soon.”
“I AM THE LIVING EMBODIMENT OF GOD ON EARTH, PATHETIC KOBOLD SCUM! FEAR MY POWER!”
“Okay, let’s check out Stormwind!”
“Isn’t that Tier 1 armor on that level 23 character? How the hell? Can you do Molten Core at level 20 or something now? I’ll have to look into that…”
“The fountains have water!”
“Okay… they’ve added a ton of mounts. I’m pretty sure there are 20 different mounts in my line of sight right now… is that a mini pirate ship??? Alright… a little off the rails… but 12 years of content will do that I suppose…”
“The new Keep is legit. No more idiot kid standing around in the middle of a big empty room. Who’s the king dude, though? Looks like the guy from the cinematic… Remember to read up on the lore at some point… back to questing!”
“Man, I must be on it, I haven’t run into a single mob that has been too high level… though come to think of it I don’t think I’ve seen super low level mobs either…”
“Oh damn, where’s the talent tree? I probably have a bunch of skillpoints to spend!”
“Ah, nevermind then…”
“Westfield sure is different… THEY KILLED BLANCHY???” NOOOO!"
“Where are the Defias?”
“Okay, seriously, I get wanting mount options, but this is getting a bit absurd… I just got passed by a mecha spider, a giant mosquito thing, and a sidecar motorcycle with a driver in a suit within the same breath… kinda killing the general aesthetic here, in my not-so-humble opinion…”
“What’s this popup thing? Suggesting I play Deadmines… okay… so I just click here to join a group? That’s convenient… Oh, and I can look for groups for these other dungeons at the same time? Never heard of them, but why not?”
“So… I guess it will let me know when it finds me a group? I should probably stay near a flight path so I’m ready to get wherever I need to go… crap… what if I don’t have a flight path for the Dungeon it puts me in a group for?”
“A group has been found! Let’s do this! Where do I… oh… I’m here? Where is here?”
<start typing intro explanation that I have no idea what I’m doing to the group, stop before I can finish>
“Oh, damn, the tank is pulling mobs already. Okay, screw it… I remember how to dungeon: wait for the tank to gather them up, shoot the same mob the tank is targeting, don’t pull agg - CRAP, right, voidwalker bad!”
“Annndddd… everything’s dead. Is that a boss? He’s dead too… oh, loot! Am I a jerk if I just grab this? How do we distribute loot now? Is there still /roll? Ah, someone else just looted something… aannnddd everyone’s moved on to the next boss… guess this is mine? I’m coming guys, wait for meeeee!”
“I still have no idea what I’m doing or why I’m here. What’s the story for this dungeon? Who are we killing? Why are there so many werewolves? Everyone is leaving… was that the main boss? Are we done already? We didn’t need any crowd control at all? Did anyone even type a single word?”
“And I’m instantly back to Westfall… okay, note to self, instant dungeons aren’t really my thing. Hopefully those can still be done more organically in the open world rather than just with that queue system…”
“I still seem to have near limitless life and mana. I haven’t died once. When do the training wheels come off?”
“I’ve had a horse since level 20!?!”
“I need to slow down. These map quest markers are great, but I no longer have any concept of what I’m doing or why. I’m just burning through the experience, slow down, dude!”
And that’s about where I’ve left off… there definitely seem to be a bunch of Quality of Life improvements, and I’m kinda thrilled that it looks like I can experience the content at any pace from blazing fast to slow and methodical (though I’m finding it a bit too easy to fall into speed running everything). As a Warcraft fan from the original strategy game, I’ll probably stick with it long enough to soak up the lore developments since TBC, now that it would appear doing so won’t require thousands of hours and a dedicated 4 hour nightly raid schedule… but all of these changes will definitely take some getting used to!
