Chugga chugga chugga chugga changes
The year is 2019. TheAmazon is on fire(the one with the trees), Disney owns Spider-Man, andWorld of Warcraftis coming out again. Well, not exactly. When vanillaWoWlaunched, Martha Stewart was convicted of a felony, Facebook had just launched, and you could not escape people impersonating Lil Jon’s infamous “YEAHHH!” in Usher’s #1 hit single “Yeah!”.
World of Warcraft Classicmay bring Azeroth back to its original state of affairs, but game development practices have come a long way since 2004. The world has changed in unfathomable ways in the past fifteen years, and whileWoWClassic strives to emulate the conditions of its original release, the gaming industry is not what it was back then.
The people coming toWoW Classicare not the same people who populated vanillaWoW. Now we have foresight. Now we have over a decade’s worth of collected knowledge and documented practice onprivate servers. What is known cannot be unlearned. Information through Discord communities, online forums, andWoWdatabases can be accessed within seconds. Players from the vanilla days and private server denizens didn’t have the luxury of an online library; they tasked themselves to construct it.
ThroughWorld of Warcraft, players were able to build their own worlds with one another. Parties form to get through difficult content, guilds band together for large-scale activities, open-world rivalries between you and members of your opposing faction are born—these aspects are largely what made vanillaWoWso enticing. It’s a hard feature to truthfully advertise because each server had its own way about things. Every “world” ofWarcrafthad its own law, its own guilds that ruled the roost of progress, its own share of disreputableninja lootersto avoid inviting to groups, and its own economy through the auction house. In vanillaWoW, accessibility was attained through each server’s community. These communities have already started forming inWoW Classicfor each server, and there’s already a sense of narrative behind their identities.
Faerlina has been dubbed the “streamer server” while Herod became the overcrowded destination spot for those looking to escapethe effect streamers could haveon their experience.Classichas already started to establish its own identity separate from any private or originalWoWserver. The worlds I experienced in vanillaWoWcannot be replicated inClassic, but brand new ones are on the horizon, and they are full of unknowns. With six phases of content laid out forWoW Classic, will Blizzard make the same design decisions as they did then? The answer seems to be in the hands of the community at large.
“If there’s some next-gen version of a happy accident, we definitely want to support that as opposed to trying to recreate the old happy accidents because they wouldn’t be an accident if we did those again,” said Lead Software Engineer Omar Rodriguez during Esfand’s recentClassiCast. Unarmored mounts were in vanillaWoW, but they will be omitted fromClassic. They were originally removed after about four months, so the only people who had them were folk who blazed a trail to level 60 and saved 1000 gold to purchase it—without knowing they would soon disappear. Even if they were included inClassic, they would not be treated the same way by the players because everyone would know they’re limited. No one had a clue back in 2004. Blizzard can recreate the game, but they cannot emulate the player experience. In that light,Classicwill be an experience entirely its own.
Blizzard has a rare opportunity to use retrospection as a tool for future blueprints. By focusing on the expansion of their community, Blizzard came to sacrifice a lot of what made vanillaWoWalluring. These adjustments were very real quality-of-life changes, but drawbacks came to light over time. Automating party finding didn’t advanceWoWin any meaningful way. Instead, it helped lock Blizzard into an inescapable expectation to supply convenience over community. A recentposton the officialWoW Classicforums describes why an addon that adds a party finder to the vanilla client is “incompatible with our social design forClassic,” and I could not smile harder reading that.
We all took part in helping each other out in vanillaWoWbecause we were discovering Azeroth together. As time went on and more conveniences were introduced, there were less inconvenient scenarios that required the player to engage in any social interaction. Solo play became skewed as a “quality-of-life improvement,” and while it did make everything more accessible to players, the game’s social core was sacrificed to make it work. Once you knew what to do, you did not need to interact with anyone to feel victorious.
Having to buy all your arrows as a Hunter was a pain that no other class struggled with, but that played a role in defining the Hunter. It was one of many inconveniences, but every class had them. Each arrow fired meant something because, whether through time or currency, it was a resource spent. Rogues needed Thistle Tea, Warlocks farmed Soul Shards—everything was imbalanced by nature and nothing guaranteed the kill. That’s what made it interesting. A lot of what we view today as inconvenient was seen as worldbuilding back then and that created the community that filled the vanilla worlds ofWarcraft. It may seem like the same game from 15 years ago, but I foresee my experience in-game to be vastly different this time around.
Now that we know what we do in 2019, I’ve come to care less about optimization. While there’s a healthy contingent of players that revel in the idea of 3-day speedruns to level 60 and clearing all the endgame content within the first week ofClassic’s launch, that’s not the only way to play. Optimal builds will be appreciated and welcome to any raid, but you do not need to be optimum in order to “win the game.”WoWalways afforded players the freedom to choose what content was meaningful to them, andClassicseems to carry that torch.
I turn 30 this November. With each passing day, I grow forevermore appreciative of my time here. Change is inevitable, and the older I get the more clearly I see that. Why, then, am I so interested in the release of an old MMO that takes up so much time? I’m in no rush to get to the end anymore. I know whereWoW’s going. We all knowwhereWoW’s going. But instead of viewing that as a disincentive to play, it loosens up the reigns for me.
The biggest reasonWoW Classicinterests me isn’t because I want to relive my past within theWarcraftuniverse and top damage meters, it’s to see howClassic’s worlds and their inhabitants develop in the context of 2019.
