…and there’s nothing Blizzard can do about it
Table of Contents
Introduction
More Leveling, LessGetting Lost
A More Robust Economy
Classic Raiding: A SolvedProblem?
14 Years Older, 14 YearsWiser – Attitude in Classic WoW
Conclusion
Introduction
This past BlizzCon, Blizzard announced thatWoW Classic would be coming out in the Summer of 2019. Along with it came a demo of the early leveling zones and several panels worth of information that assured the eager public that Classic would indeed be as faithful and ‘blizzlike’ as possible.
Having played through the entire demo I can agree that the game is almost exactly as I remember Vanilla being 14 years ago.
The only difference in design being the implementation of ‘sharding’, a process which splits up the player base in different instances of the same zone to alleviate some of the overcrowding in early zones.
Blizzard has also gone on the record to say that sharding would only be in the game for the first couple weeks after the launch of Classic and that they would then disable it once the player base had spread out more.
However, sharding isn’t the only thing thatVanilla players might find different about their experience. In this article, I am going to go through each of the aspects that will most likely change inClassic WoW, whether Blizzard likes it or not.
2. More Leveling, Less Getting Lost
While this might be a change for the better,leveling in Classic will most certainly be different than leveling in Vanilla.
In addition to sharding making the beginner zones much more friendly to the hordes and hordes of players storming the gates when Classic comes out, theVanilla leveling process has been studied thoroughly since the game came out 14years ago.
Since then, not only have players leveled multiple alts and characters through the beginning zones in Vanilla, but they have done so on a multitude of private servers intended to have the most ‘Blizzlike’ experience.
So while leveling a character from 1 to 60 will still be a long, arduous process, it will no longer be marred by mistakes made by players going from zone to zone, continent to continent, searching desperately for a place to level.
The zones and routes have been thoroughly mapped out by the Vanilla WoW community at large, and with the internet being much more robust in 2019, that information is just a google search away.
Is that a bad thing? I would venture to say that it isn’t, as knowing where to go and what to do doesn’t make it any less challenging and time consuming. It does take away from that exploration aspect,however.
You might not have those moments of wandering into Feralas for the first time, or running from Storm wind to Strangle thorn just for the hell of it,or getting lost trying to get to Iron forge from Darnassus on a fresh Night elf.No, those moments, just like many fond memories of Vanilla, are lost in time.
3. A More Robust Economy
This is another one that will most likely be a boon rather than a bane to the player base, though time will tell just how 14years of experience will affect the economy of Classic WoW.
There has been no concrete word on just how AddOns will work in Classic, but if the infrastructure of the game works the same as it does in retail, there is a good chance that most of the mods that work in retail will work in Classic.
This means that quite a few people will be running around with a whole host of gathering, crafting, auctioning, and gold making mods.
Now, those mods did exist back in Vanilla, but not in the same way they do now, and not as many people had them back then as will in Classic.
This will drastically affect how effective the auction house will be, and hopefully will affect the economy as a whole in a positive way.
Another thing that will most likely see a large increase in popularity is carry runs. These have steadily grown in popularity since Vanilla, and rest assured with the old 40 man raid size that there will be quite a few “Molten Core full carry master loot ON PST for prices GOLD ONLY” being spammed in trade chat.
Whether tokens will be available in Classic has yet to be discussed, but if so it will have an enormous impact on the economy of Classic. This, in addition to the differences I will cover in the next section, will have a pretty large impact on the endgame of WoW Classic.
4. Classic Raiding: A Solved Problem?
This is, in my opinion, the largest change that WoW Classic will have over Vanilla, and it’s something that simply can’t be undone. Back in Vanilla, guilds were very secretive over strategies of how to correctly defeat a boss.
Videos of boss kills were virtually non-existent,and strategies on how to itemize and play various classes and specs were hard to come by, especially for newer players.
This, in addition to the unforgiving raid requirements and difficult content, lead to a lot of the player base never really getting to see a lot of the endgame content.
Those that did rarely ever did so efficiently, and it wasn’t uncommon for the best guild on any given server to take months to complete a raid tier.
There is absolutely no way that this happens in Classic. The raids in Vanilla are very much a solved system by now. Every raid, and every boss and trash pack inside, has been thoroughly strategized and talked about to death over the last 14 years.
Rest assured even if you and your friends never played Vanilla, someone in your raid party will know exactly what to do on every boss, exactly when the trash packs are going to respawn, and exactly what buffs and gear to get to prepare.
That certainly doesn’t mean thatClassic raiding will be a cakewalk, but it will be different than how the majority of people stumbled through the content.
5. 14 Years Older, 14 Years Wiser – Attitude in Classic WoW
I hate to be the one to say this, but let’s face it: we’re not little kids any more. Even for those of us who played Vanilla when they were well into their adult years will have gotten 14 years older, 14 years wiser, and up to 14 years more experienced with video games.
What does that mean for Classic WoW? Well for starters, the grand majority of people who are interested in Classic will now have full time jobs. Some might have families and kids they didn’t have before.
Basically, WoW Classic won’t be a big of a chunk in people’s lives as it was back then. Considering how much time you will really need to put into Classic WoW to enjoy everything it has to offer, that might be an issue.
Stringing together 40-odd people to storm Blackwing Lair might be significantly more difficult now than it was back then.
However, due to the issues I talked about in the paragraph above, it might not need to be the long, arduous hours that many people put into Vanilla raiding.
With the right preparation and knowledge, raids in Classic will most likely take considerably less time to complete than they did in Vanilla, which will hopefully counteract the fact that the majority of players will have less overall time and fewer long chunks of time to play.
6. Conclusion
In essence, the game itself might not be changing from Vanilla to Classic WoW, but the knowledge and mindset of the players of the game will considerably change the way the game feels.
Everyone probably figures that there won’t be that same sense of wonder that Vanilla WoW brought so long ago, and that’s true. Nostalgia can only carry Classic WoW so far.
Thankfully, I believe that there is some truly solid game design inVanilla WoW, and the fact that Blizzard have doubled down on creating a verbatim experience for Classic WoW is something that people have been adamant about since the day they announced its release.
Only time will tell if ClassicWoW truly is the thing people have been wanting, or whether the new CEO ofBlizzard Jay Allen Brack was right – we thought we wanted it, but we didn’t.
