People get really worked up about World of Warcraft: Classic. From an outsider’s perspective, the zealotry and passion of the fan base may seem silly, but for those who enjoyed vanilla World of Warcraft, these fan sentiments make sense. For many, the game is imbued with some of their best experiences in the medium, and for good reason. Below, Twinfinite lists six reasons why we can’t wait to dive into World of Warcraft: Classic.
6 Reasons We Can’t Wait to Dive Into World of Warcraft: Classic
Organic Communities
For all of retail World of Warcraft’s quality of life successes (or failures, depending on your viewpoint), they are stifled by a major issue: an artificial sense of community. A combination of sharding, dungeon finder, raid finder, and repetition of end game content has left the community aspect lacking. In modern World of Warcraft, you no longer feel like you’re part of a wider community, with realm identity, outside of a few RP niches, left dead and buried.
World of Warcraft: Classic is the opposite. Segregated realms, battlegrounds, world PvP, and a lack of sharding leads to an accumulation of community; in Classic World of Warcraft, your reputation on a server is central to your experience. Players who are generally toxic, grief, or ninja loot can get away with it in modern World of Warcraft, but in Classic, they quickly find they’ll be ostracized from the community for their behavior.
Conversely, players who are especially good at the game or a nice to be around will gain a good reputation. Again, none of this comes through contrived systems, instead being solely player-driven. In a way, Classic perfected an organic community driven by player action alone, and we cannot wait to experience that again. It’s easy to find friends in Classic, as the game lends itself to group play, while ensuring behavior is rewarded or punished through the players.
6 Reasons We Can’t Wait to Dive Into World of Warcraft: Classic
No Transmog
Transmogrification is something of a double-edged sword. While it’s nice for RP, creativity, and player variation, it robs players of a sense of scale and progression. When you see a player in modern World of Warcraft, their gear does not tell a story, really.
In Classic, when you see a someone in full tier 3 gear, you know they’re a badass. In retail World of Warcraft, there’s often a mishmash of different gear or an old tier set; transmog robs players the chance to stand out physically on merit. Stories of players in end game gear being followed around, cheered on, and generally adored is unique to Classic as it’s tangible evidence of progression, which is an excellent tool for in-game ambition for newbie players.
6 Reasons We Can’t Wait to Dive Into World of Warcraft: Classic
40-Man Raids
Sure, 40-man raiding had issues: it was horrible to balance, it killed older computers, and you often had to take more than a few stragglers around. However, despite its obvious problems, it felt unironically epic to enter a raid with 39 other people and take down a boss.
40-man raids also demanded a reduced standard of entry, which allowed less experienced players to learn via playing. Carrying players at a lower skill didn’t feel like a bad thing in Classic as the manpower was needed, leading to a culture where the World of Warcraft pros would coach the newbies. Raiding at that size made it feel like a massively multiplayer experience, which retail World of Warcraft has sadly lost.
Mechanics, too, allowed a margin for player deaths; in modern World of Warcraft, too many raid bosses punish individual mistakes, propagating frustration. Overall, though, 40-man raids led to moments like the one below, which are etched in Warcraft folklore:
6 Reasons We Can’t Wait to Dive Into World of Warcraft: Classic
Challenging Dungeons
Many players still have nightmares over Dire Maul, a dungeon that is run-of-the-mill in modern World of Warcraft but was a rite of passage in Classic. Classic is made up of several of these so-called rites of passage, normally around dungeons. In modern day, an instance can be cleared in roughly 20-30 minutes with little to no effort, a far cry from the game’s dungeon origins.
Each dungeon had to be meticulously planned out, especially in terms of crowd control and pulling packs. A mistimed polymorph or pull from the tank could spell death, with player’s having to react on the fly as their carefully curated plans would – more often than not – dissipate.
Thankfully, challenging content in Classic is matched by reward; despite many memories of gritting our teeth in nigh on impossible dungeons, they always felt worth it due to the loot gained and memories made along the way.
6 Reasons We Can’t Wait to Dive Into World of Warcraft: Classic
World PvP and World Events
Battlegrounds were not always in World of Warcraft. Before their introduction, the world itself was the basis on PvP. A variety of battles would naturally occur in the world itself of varying descriptions: actual wars, last-ditch escapes from a unit of opposing players, getting revenge on a player who had been ganking you for hours and, best of all, organic world PvP events. Tarren Mill, for example, is a vintage piece of World of Warcraft history, a place where Alliance and Horde players would hash it out, just because.
World bosses such as Kazzak would be hotbeds for inter-faction squabbles and all-out faction war, as guilds from the Alliance and Horde would fight for looting rights. In essence, by focusing on the world first, Classic World of Warcraft facilitated player-led, natural world events, which are still talked about today:
6 Reasons We Can’t Wait to Dive Into World of Warcraft: Classic
Finally Killing Naxxramas (Maybe)
World of Warcraft’s final tier, Naxxramas, was completed by only 23 guilds. Most of the player population didn’t even set foot into Naxxramas, as they couldn’t even attune themselves for the raid. In modern game design, making an entire raid tier in an MMO that only a tiny proportion of the game’s player base can experience seems silly, but in actuality, it drapes a segment of the player base in legend. A whole tier of content that Blizzard designed was available to rough 10% of the game’s population, with around 2% of that amount beating Kel’Thuzad, the last boss. As mentioned earlier, if you had armor or weapons from this raid, you were a certified legend in the game’s community.
Since then, theory crafting and private servers have made the raid significantly easier, but it still requires an astonishing amount of commitment and coordination to beat. As a result, players who missed out on even setting foot into the legendary raid can do so. More importantly, Naxxramas is representative of what made Classic World of Warcraft special: in-game, NPC’s treat Kel’thuzad with a grave sense of apocalyptic fear, but this fear isn’t immediately betrayed by the game itself.
Blizzard, instead, ensured that the mechanics themselves supported the lore; if a player beat Naxxramas, they were treated as a winner in the story, but more importantly, they were then treated as a champion by the community itself.
In Classic World of Warcraft, the world and community were synonymous which was – and will be – magic.
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