With all of the recent talk about the World of Warcraft classic server, I have found myself contemplating a lot of things about the game. We recorded a podcast episode where we basically spent the entire time trying to determine just how vanilla classic would end up being. The other side effect of all of this is that I seem to be playing my horde warrior over on scryers quite a bit more than usual. Now if you were to ask me to rank the current expansions to the game that ranking would look a little something like this…
- Wrath of the Lich King
- The Burning Crusade
- Legion
- Vanilla
- Mists of Pandaria
- Warlords of Draenor
- Cataclysm
Notice that number one and number two are the second and third expansion, and that weirdly enough I rank Legion above Vanilla. What you are seeing is that my memory of these expansions and the nostalgia that colors them does not adequately represent the experience of actually playing through them. I’ve recently leveled through the Burning Crusade content in a fashion given that you end up dinging your way out of it long before you actually finish much of it. I did do Hellfire Peninsula in its entirety, the majority of Terrokar and a good chunk of Nagrand. I left the Cataclysm tainted Vanilla lands at 58 and similarly left the Outland at 68 and as a result have spent the last four levels completing pieces of Borean Tundra. The reality I am straddled with is that the zone design of the first two expansions is simply not good. I mean at the time it was released it was world better than anything Vanilla had given us and as a result felt like a breath of fresh air, however when you stack it up against modern zone design from say Legion… it is objectively not as well designed.
What I mean by this is that the quests don’t flow cleanly from hub to hub and instead it forces you to do a lot of travel time back and forth between a hub and its related spokes. All the while I was leveling through Outland and so far in Northrend it feels like I am spending a lot of time needlessly travelling between two destinations and this might have been the initial intent. However after seeing modern quest design it feels like I somehow failed and allowed my quests to get out of sync. If you fight your way through a micro dungeon with quest A you often find that upon turning in you now have another quest requiring you to go back there. It is maddening to have to wade through an army of minions to kill a boss that you were already next to and sometimes even killed while completing the first quest. The other that adds to this feeling of tedium is the mob density and having no real way to get in and out of these destinations without a heavy body count. Thankfully on my warrior racking up a heavy body count is fun, but on other more fiddly classes this causes the leveling experience to grind to a halt. The truth is it will probably have taken me twice as long to level through Outland and Northrend as it will have to push through the next three expansions.
As games mature their design ethic shifts significantly and we forget what it was actually like to play these games at the time. When it comes to Classic World of Warcraft for Project 99 in Everquest… what we are chasing is a feeling not an actual honest moment in history. I think when players say that they want to play Vanilla again… they want to return to a time when not everything was mapped out quite so clearly and they had a sense of accomplishment and discovery each time they looted a kobold (and the game subsequently froze). This is why World of Warcraft Classic is going to be the challenge it will be. That experience means different thing to different players, and none of the calculations that a game company can make actually take the social component into play. When I think of Vanilla or Burning Crusade or even Wrath, those memories involve very specific sets of individuals that no longer play the game and I might not even have contact with. For Vanilla it was the Late Night Raiders, and Burning Crusade it was No Such Raid and when Wrath launched we were excited to be the Duranub Raiding Company. Three non-guild based raids dominate those feelings and memories and the simple fact that I went through three separate raid groups tells you that there is no way to actually ever join those broken pieces back together again. All of this said I will have characters on the Classic server, and I will see how this experience actually shakes out in the end. I just feel like it is going to be exceedingly difficult to please even a fraction of the player base because we all want something different.
