World of Warcraft Classic
Fifteen years later, WoW is still an epic adventure.
Classic is a full recreation of World of Warcraft as it was at launch, or not long after – a sort of digital time machine that lives alongside the modern version. It’s a gruelling and often frustrating experience, but it’s also helped me rediscover why I loved Warcraft in the first place.
BETTER TOGETHER
Rose-tinted nostalgia can often be deceiving, but Classic proves that people are right to spend so much time fawning over that pivotal era of WoW’s early years.
That’s a stark contrast to the latest expansion, Battle for Azeroth, where I’m so powerful that I can accomplish almost everything alone except dungeons and raids that mandate
I play with a group. Even then, I’m provided with tools to automatically match me with a group of strangers who usually hail from other servers. Natural opportunities to make friends have become few and far between in that version of Azeroth, but they’re everywhere in Classic.
The trade-off is that Classic is an enormous investment of time with no guaranteed reward. I can spend an hour searching for a group to run a dungeon, only to have everything fall apart if our team can’t coordinate properly. But I actually prefer just how intimidating this Classic version of Azeroth feels. There’s a renewed sense of danger and adventure to zones that I’ve already spent hundreds of hours exploring, and it requires that I pay attention to my surroundings at all times unless I want to become dinner to a family of panthers. It makes Azeroth feel new.
It’s just a shame that questing in Classic is such hot garbage. It’s the best source of experience points, but many zones have too few quests and they all feel like enormous chores. Killing 12 boars in an open field isn’t all that fun, especially when the drop rate on the item needed for the quest is cruelly low. Times like these make me wish I was my level 120 demon hunter so I could round up dozens of boars and slaughter them all at once.
Though I like how challenging Classic is, there are definitely times when it
Rose-tinted nostalgia can often be deceiving, but Classic proves that people are right to spend so much time fawning over that pivotal era of WoW’s early years.
feels downtright unfair. Quests that involve braving monster-filled caves are a nightmare unless you have a friend to help because the enemy density is often too high, making it easy to pull a pack of gnolls by accident. It’s such slow going that sometimes by the time I reach my objective, all the enemies have respawned behind me.
I have often died right next to an enemy so that when I resurrect it’ll immediately attack me again and kill me. My only option in these moments is to continually run back to my corpse from the graveyard and resurrect and run for the exit. Rinse and repeat until I’m safe.
Though this oppressive danger can suck if I’m all alone, it emphasises the need to group up with other players. In the 30 hours I’ve spent playing (not including the thousands I’ve spent in modern WoW and on private vanilla servers), I’ve had to join forces with countless people to stay alive.
Being a part of this weird second zeitgeist is what’s made my return to Classic so magical. The infamous Barrens chat is back to its usual filthy nonsense, Hillsbrad Foothills is a bloodbath of open-world PVP, and major cities are often full of players offering to weave cloth bags to expand players’ inventory space at no extra charge. Playing Classic is like participating in a medieval fair or civil war reenactment – only this time we’re collectively roleplaying what it felt like to first discover World of Warcraft 15 years ago when the internet wasn’t shit.
SLOG OF WAR
Even if the community and social aspects are fun, I do have to warn you that there many punishing parts of Classic that I had forgotten about. When I die in a dungeon, for example, I don’t start at the beginning like I do in modern WoW but all the way at the nearest graveyard outside. It turns a 30 second run back to my body to one that can exceed three minutes – an infuriating trek if my group is struggling with a boss.
These rough edges, along with the awful quest system, really scrape and bruise, but they’re each an inseparable part of what made World of Warcraft the phenomenon it eventually became – a once-bizarre and mostly bloated MMO that has little to no respect for my free time but is capable of forging relationships within its crucible.
Compared to modern WoW, which desperately strives to be constantly fun and convenient, I prefer Classic – at least for now.
The enduring genius of WoW Classic’s design (shared by other MMOs like EVE Online) is that it’s okay to frustrate and piss players off every now and again. It’s what initially helped WoW transcend from mere game to something altogether different. No grand adventure is always sunshine and rainbows, and if I get deep into a dungeon and forgot to bring enough ammo, the only person to blame is myself.
CLASS ACT
World of Warcraft Classic is still the exact same MMO I remembered losing so many nights to as a teenager, and 15 years later returning to it is as fun and as frustrating as I’d hoped it would be.