THE TOP STORY
Blizzard returns to happier times.
It’s a weird thing when the most exciting news out of Blizzcon this year is that World of Warcraft: Classic and Warcraft III: Reforged— a top-to-bottom remake of the original—are both arriving next year. I’m not complaining, though, as I’d never refuse an opportunity to go back and play some of PC gaming’s most formative games, especially if they have a brand-new coat of paint. Blizzard surprised everyone in the weeks before Blizzcon by announcing that there’d be a playable demo of Classic for all virtual ticket holders. It was a clear signal that, despite Blizzard initially humming and hawing about how long Classic would take to develop, things were moving along at a faster pace than we predicted. It wasn’t all that surprising, then, that Blizzard also announced that Classic would be released in the summer of 2019.
And, after playing several hours of said demo, it’s clear that Classic is coming together perfectly. Though I’d forgotten just how painfully esoteric some of its systems were, it was exciting to jump back into WoW almost exactly as it existed back in 2006 before expansions like The Burning Crusade ushered in an era of evolution and iteration that would see it change into a fundamentally different kind of game.
Being a modern WoW apologist, I took my first steps into the Barrens with a hearty dose of scepticism. Surely nostalgia had sweetened my memories of adventuring here so
I took my first steps into the Barrens with a dose of scepticism
many years ago. But what I found was an MMO so divorced from modern WoW that it feels wrong to compare the two. They’re just so different, and I love that.
World of Warcraft: Classic is slow, ugly, and sometimes outright boring. But that relaxed, uncompromised pace also makes it easier to settle into the world and feel connected to it. It’s fun to be excited over a minimal gear upgrade, or when I finally remembered where to find Mankirk’s wife in that famously hard-to-solve quest. It’s just nice to play in a version of Azeroth that isn’t all about how quickly I can farm Azerite or whatever.
Memory lane
Warcraft III: Reforged, however, is a very different kind of nostalgia trip. Blizzard is completely overhauling the graphics and animations, but still using the same base game engine so that original Warcraft III mods should still work. It’s the Warcraft III you remember only it’ll look much better, and it’s coming early 2019, too.
Amid backlash over announcements like the mobileonly Diablo Immortal, it’s easy to criticize Blizzcon 2018 for being a lacklustre show. But the kid in me, the one who just wants to spend an evening playing Warcraft III mods or exploring Felwood, doesn’t care. Steven Messner