I have been bouncing back and fourth between retail and classic HC lately. And I have been trying to nail down, why I just seem to be enjoying HC more than Retail.
One part is certainly the burn out. I have every class at Max level. I have gotten 2kio on a few and AoTC on a few. I just finally leveled my monk the other day and went from fresh 70 to 412i in a couple hours. I do like running M+, but I have ran the raid enough between all the chars. I do a few keys on a few toons. Play different roles. Do my weekly TMOG runs. But lately I log in and nothing draws me in to do anything.
Then I log onto classic HC. The gameplay is pretty much worse in every way from retail. Classes play a lot slower, with much more restrictions on their resources. You have to take it slow and be careful. I have died several times already, and was not happy each time. But I keep logging in and playing.
What it is for me is that Retail feels like a good Lobby game. Coordinated Team based Instanced content. Fast paced, challenging and fun. But really removed from the World the game is based in. World content can just be smashed through at break neck speed, with no challenge to it. Players in the world might as well be NPCs as there is no communication or reason to communicate between them. For all intents and purposes, retail WoW is so much less an MMO than it was in the past. Not necessarily a bad thing. Just a direction the game has gone.
Classic HC, feels like an MMO. And an old MMO. Ones that were not hyper intuitive. Ones that had their quirks and flaws. But ones that had a dangerous world to explore and meet people along the way. The novelty of Classic HC will eventually wear off, but it just feels alive. There are players everywhere doing things. Grouping up to complete difficult quests. You see someone in trouble, you try to help them without putting yourself at risk too much. It is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
Thats at least my explanation and feelings about it. Retail is missing the heart of what makes and MMORPG and MMORPG. But Retail, functionally does everything better. Better classes and specs. Better dungeons. Better Raids. Better and more engaging mechanics. Better and easier travel. Convenience all around. Graphically and performance wise, it is light years better than Classic HC. All that Classic HC does better than retail, is the dangerous world and the people in it. And in essence, that is the heart of an MMO.
Retail is a better video game.
Classic is a better social experience (partially BECAUSE of the things that make it a worse video game).
(at least while it has something new to poke at. It falls off a lot at times, in a way that it didn’t during the actual time since the game was constantly refilling with new players)
If i could play the eastern kingdoms/Kalimdor at a classic pace with the current version of talents we have now i would eat it up.
It’s just something so satisfying about traversing these two large continents i just wish Classic HC had modern talents/abilities cause I’ve level some characters and these new talent trees are phenomenal for leveling but people don’t get to really see that
I think you nailed pretty well the difference between the two, but I do want to specify two things that you mentioned:
The reason why Classic Hardcore has this feeling is because of it being new - you see players everywhere and everywhere is still condensed to a small enough space that it feels like something new
It feels like an expansion
MMOs have an intrinsic problem to their design; they are supposed to emulate an entire world yet … it doesn’t do so dynamically, which means that everything will eventually cause burnout
Neither one is bad but in order to fully enjoy MMOs one has to understand and acknowledge that this is part of the gameplay loop - if one does that one can avoid burnout A LOT easier and make these games have these feelings for a much longer time and usually that means lasting until the next expansion-like feeling, which is usually patch days or for folks who like M+ most Tuesdays when people gather at the vault
But once the vault doesn’t matter anymore, you are ready for the next bit of content - which in this case was fulfilled by Hardcore Classic