I’ve finally decided to embrace WoW Classic

I wasn’t at all a fan of the idea of classic servers the first, let’s say fifty five thousand and seventeen times I heard it.

In the time I’ve been involved in the WoW community at large I’ve always been somewhat anti-nostalgic. I mean, I was there — I played the game in 2004, and I’m still playing it in 2019. Every change I’ve heard someone complain about is a change I lived through, and I remember the reason each one of them happened. I remember being the guy forced to tank dungeons if I wanted to get to see them at all. I remember six hours stuck in Sunken Temple. I remember having to literally ride a horse aggroing devilsaurs so that my wife could get her Hunter quest finished. I remember spending hours in trade chat trying to get that Blackrock Depths run only to have that fifth player immediately attempt to hold the entire group hostage if we didn’t agree to help him or her finish an arcane quest involving the vault that would extend the length of the run by another three hours.

In short, I remember all the weird glitches and bugs and server crashes and player behavior and by and large I feel like the game has improved tremendously over the years. Why would I want to go back? So for a long time, I was fairly strongly on the “It’s a dumb idea” side of the fence.

But since it’s happening anyway, I’ve really been considering what exactly I think it means, and I’ve come up with some significant benefits to the whole endeavor. Nowadays, I’d even say I’m a cautious booster for it.

Classic will be a living museum

It’s hard for us as people to recognize just how much things have changed around us, especially because we were changing right along with them. I am absolutely not the person I was fifteen years ago. I would argue no one is the person they were then — certainly you carry your past along with you as you go, but it’s unavoidable that you’ll make choices and have experiences that will define who you become. Change is the one constant, after all. So it’s fair to say that I simply don’t remember the game I played in 2004 with anything even remotely like accuracy — both in my best and worst memories, there’s no way to guarantee fidelity.

In short, I can’t really remember the game accurately because I was changed by the game at the same time I was playing it. I am the person and the player I am today in part because I played. And that means that WoW Classic can’t possibly be an exact return to those days — and thus I have to consider what it will actually be.

I’ve come to see the game not as an attempt to reclaim the past but rather as a means to explain and explicate it — like a museum ship docked forever in a harbor, or historical recreation sites like Colonial Williamsburg or Plimoth Plantation. There’s a value in letting players who’ve never experienced the original game do so, in order to provide context as to how the game became what it is today.

Whether you loved or hated the game then and whether you love or hate the game now isn’t necessarily the issue. WoW Classic gives people the chance to go experience something much closer to an authentic recreation than any story some old grump tells about those days.

Classic could give today’s game a license to iterate

I also feel like there’s a paradoxical benefit, or at least the possibility of one. The release of WoW Classic could potentially free the modern game from having to keep certain aspects of that original game enshrined in its design.

There are always going to be discussions of what’s core in the World of Warcraft experience. One of the real possibilities for this game coming out is that it gives you and everyone else a chance to go see exactly what those core elements were, and whether or not they’re still worth enshrining today in the live game.

The player base for this MMO has aged and diversified. It is by necessity not the same as it was in 2004. When World of Warcraft launched, it had its whole future ahead of it and there was no guarantee that it would make any of the changes that it did. Today, the game is made up of those accumulated changes. In order to more clearly see that, a project like WoW Classic is an almost archaeological exercise. It becomes gaming as a dig site, excavating layers to go all the way back to that first source.

And because of that, I feel like it offers an extreme method of divesting the game today of anything that’s holding it back. If you feel strongly that X must never be changed? Well, there’s always WoW Classic: go ahead and go play there. It’s at once a wonderful means to examine what the game is now and a perfect way to allow players who never want it to change the means to play the way they want. You can have all those things that were once part of the core experience, and that means they don’t have to be there anymore on live.

There’s fun in rediscovery

Finally, I think it’s time to admit that sometimes, nostalgia is in fact fun.

I often view nostalgia through the lens of suspicion/ I’ve observed it curdle people’s ability to enjoy good things they have now simply because those good things aren’t the same as what they remember, and I’m always wary of saudade in my gaming. There’s a longing for the days of gaming that once were that I find suspect.

But it can’t be denied that the first time I saw my wife tooling around in the WoW Classic demo I found myself transported back, almost against my will. The fact is, there’s a sense of wonder that I don’t think I can explain or encapsulate to those old WoW memories. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going and every experience had this unpredictable sense of the imminence of everything. I don’t think WoW Classic can recreate that for new players, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it can trade heavily on those emotions.

Getting to see zones and characters that have been gone from the game for nearly a decade now — remember, Cataclysm launched on December 7th, 2010, so it’s been nine years this year since the classic zones were changed — has an undeniable emotional weight, both for us old fogeys that were playing back then and for players who have never seen that world. And it can be a lot of fun to go back to simpler times and just explore what is now essentially a new world by virtue of it having been gone and unexplorable for so long. In a real way, MMO’s don’t have that same ability that you can get by picking up, say, a copy of Diablo 2. If you prefer D2 to D3? You can always go back and play D2.

But if you preferred vanilla WoW? You were entirely out of luck because WoW is a persistent online space and any changes get preserved, too. There was no way to go back and play the older game — until now.

I still don’t think I’ll play WoW Classic very much. I already did. But I finally have come around to thinking it was a very good idea, overall, in terms of what it means for players and for the future of World of Warcraft itself.