I have a ton of experience in WoW‘s early game, and have played through every starting zone with every class over the past 15 years. For now, I can only chronicle my early-going adventures as I trot along to that coveted level 60 cap and start tackling endgame content. I fully expect Classic‘s relevance to wax and wane, especially when huge events like the opening of Ahn’Qiraj are teed up, or someone’s “favorite patch” makes it into the cycle. But there is the potential for new journeys, new “quirks” as Blizzard decides what to do with this intriguing new project. The thing about Classic, even at the admission of its developers, is that re-creating all of those moments is an impossible task. Again, many of these ideas were done already (mostly all in Ultima Online), but the sheer popularity of WoW brought it to a different scale and allowed millions more to actually experience that entropy: for better or worse. Before you could simply “toggle it off,” world PVP caused utter chaos, leading to people quitting the game entirely. Players forged bonds looking for dungeon groups together, some of which persist to this day.
The thing about Vanilla WoW that a lot of people don’t get is that a lot of its magic wasn’t found in its strict adherence to olden RPG sensibilities (though plenty of that is still there, like the need to kite or actually use crowd control in dungeons), but the lawlessness of it all. But after entering the world of Classic, you get a quick cutscene showcasing your general area, then you start getting down to business killing boars. From then on grand cutscenes and major lore players started to usher in new questlines. Blizzard really started laying the whole “main story quest” thing on thick in the Lich King expansion, a whole four years after Vanilla WoW launched. After logging in with my Orc Warrior, one of the chief things that struck me was a distinct lack of urgency. That’s why it’s such a big deal, and players have been clamoring for it for so long, even going as far as to create unofficial servers (which are now mostly extinct or are being hunted down).īut I don’t think everyone is actually ready for it. But “Vanilla WoW” really did catapult the whole MMO scene into the stratosphere like no project did before it.
MMOs have been around for several decades ( Ultimate Online existed before nearly all of the popular ones talked about today), so games like EverQuest already have “progression servers,” and even Lord of the Rings Online, which launched in 2007, has “legendary servers” similar to WoW Classic. Now the whole “classic” thing isn’t exactly new. I’m not sure it would have been received as positively any other way. World of Warcraft Classic is out today and included in your WoW subscription fee ($15 a month).
Individual stats had to be trained, including weapon skills, talent trees needed to be meticulously vetted lest you pay a huge gold sink price to respec (re-roll your talents), raids were insurmountable for many with 40-person group requirements, and things we take for granted, like dungeon queue tools, were non-existent. It wasn’t until Burning Crusade when I’d join a server-first guild and really live that WoW life you’ve heard so much about, but while I was focusing on my university studies, I did have a max-level Orc Warlock to pass the time with.Īnd time definitely did pass rapidly, because nearly everything in “Vanilla WoW” took a while. I was there in the early days of World of Warcraft.
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