Slip Sliding Away: WoW Classic, EQII

So, I kind of stopped playing WoW Classic. How did that happen?

I certainly wasn't planning on stopping. Up until I wasn't playing any more I'd been enjoying myself. Sort of. Self-evidently, not enough.

The thing is, Classic had slowed down. A lot. In a reply to a comment I made on his post about the fifteenth anniversary of EQII, Wilhelm said:

"I think WoW was really the sequel to EQ. It was an obvious upgrade/development of EQ and even the Blizz team has recognized this up on stage at BlizzCon. It was EQ without the suck, to borrow the phrase from DAoC. It has changed a lot over the years, but WoW Classic has given us a glimpse of how it took the EQ idea and ran with it. Even things people complained about in WoW, like instanced dungeons, were lifted straight from EQ."

And that, really, is the problem. What I always enjoyed the most in EverQuest were the early and middle levels. The starting areas, Qeynos Hills, East and West Commonlands, Steamfont Mountains, Butcherblock, Oasis, The Karanas... all those amazing, atmospheric, immersive open zones, where you could roam and explore and lose yourself in another world.

The expansions managed to extend that experience, re-making it, fresh and new, keeping the impetus going for years. Rise of Kunark was almost literally another EverQuest added to the first. Shadows of Luclin was a third. They could quite easily have been released as sequels, not expansions.

By the time EQII arrived in late 2004 it might as well have been EQ4 and WoW could have been EQ5. And all of them had the same fundamental drawback, at least as far as I was concerned: the fun came in inverse proportion to the number alongside your character's name.

As was discussed at inordinate length around this corner of the blogosphere back in August and September, WoW Classic reminded us of the reasons many of us fell in love with the genre: the worldbuilding, the pacing, the immersion, the need to think and plan and consider. The satisfaction of setting and meeting achievable goals in a manageable timeframe.

At the beginning of the journey, all of those pleasures and more come thick and fast. Every session is a round of markers met; improvement is continual and ever-present.

As the levels tick by, things slow down. Plenty of people found it slow going from the start but in the forties and fifties time crawls. Also, the exhilarating freedom that so exemplified the early game begins to dissipate. The choice of zones in which you could adventure narrows just as the time you need to spend in them increases.

Meanwhile, the invisible hands of the game gods begin to pull on your puppet strings. Where once your destiny was your own, now it seems written in code. Quest after quest directs you on where to go; the slow-going travel that once seemed natural and organic when it was your choice becomes onerous and artificial, imposed from above.

Every second quest seems to involve travelling halfway around the world to speak to someone who then sends you on to the next stop on what feels like an increasingly arbitrary journey, mostly in circles. Where early on you found yourself tasked with taking messages to the next village, now everyone you need to speak to seems to have vanished into the forests or the swamps of a faraway land. Every item so vitally needed for the next step of the ill-understood errand you've foolishly agreed to run for a stranger is only to be found on another continent, in some obscure corner that they can only describe in the vaguest terms.

Meanwhile, the game gods have become increasingly impatient at your lack of interest in the tests they created for you. Quest after quest seeks to send you underground, into dungeons filled with vicious creatures far beyond your capacity to handle. Only by banding together with others can you hope to survive, let alone prosper.

As you approach the level cap, both games ramp up in similar fashion, each level requiring palpably more effort, time and patience than the last. The difference I perceive is this: in the original EverQuest and for its first several expansions the game's developers really didn't care what you did while you played. They laid out the buffet: it was entirely up to you what you chose to consume.

Some of the "suck" Blizzard endeavoured to cut from the fat of EQ was that lack of direction. WoW Classic starts out feeling wide-open but in fairly short order, certainly by the mid-30s, it becomes apparent that there are expectations. There's a path you're expected to follow and the quests you take provide the map.

It is entirely possible to side-step all of that, should you wish. Many people choose to level their characters mostly or entirely by running instanced dungeons. It's equally feasible to ignore both quests and dungeons altogether, roaming the world like a one-person Golden Horde, laying waste to all before you. Grinding mobs to level, more prosaically.

WoW Classic, though, doesn't have the infrastructure that made mob grinding such a pleasurable pastime in EverQuest. As we discussed at length, the communities of the two games, springing as they did from the same rootstock, grew in very different directions.

There are no camps in Classic. You can't roll up at a handy spot, start killing and expect to have others come join you, settling down for a full session of chat, banter and occasional thrills as new acquaintances and old friends drop in and out. Everything in WoW is much more functional.

Before I stopped playing I spent several sessions in Felwood. There are a number of quests there which require you to kill twenty or thirty mobs of specific types in specific locations. These are all quests that would go much faster if people grouped up to do them in the way it was widely reported to be happening, routinely, in the game's starting zones.

By the forties, no-one is doing that any more. Not on Hydraxian Waterlords at the hours I play, they aren't. Instead we have anything up to half a dozen individuals all competing frenziedly to tag each required mob as it spawns. Occasionally a small group might roll in, usually a trio for some reason. They will proceed to monopolize the area until all of them are satisfied, while the ungrouped players who were already there make do with any odd spawns the incomers miss. Then the mini-group will leave and we all carry on as we were.

Only once in several hours over several days did I get an invite from anyone to join them at one of those hunting grounds and that, as sod's law would have it, was when I was just running through on the way to somewhere else. And, of course, I didn't send out any invites either. We are all culpable for the culture of our servers. And it seems we're all either socially inept, bloody-mindedly stubborn or just plain lazy.

The upshot of all this is that although I was still enjoying myself when I played, I was increasingly finding my enjoyment frustrated and obstructed by the mechanics of the game, by the behavior of others and especially by my own lack of desire to engage with anything remotely uncomfortable.

Still, I would have carried on logging in every day, chipping away at the levels in pursuit of my declared intent to get my Hunter to 60 before cancelling my subscription, had it not been for EQII's fifteenth birthday and the Dragon Attack event.

I only popped over to see what it was all about and to get some background and some screenshots for a blog post. I had no intention of staying. But I played EQII all last weekend and then every night this week after work, killing dragon after dragon after dragon.

In seven days I've taken so many characters through the required four kills to get the mount/illusion I've lost count. I think it's eight but it could be more. I've logged in characters on different servers to do the event and last night I even logged in my old account, put my level 95 necromancer on follow and two-boxed my way around the spires until she, too, was able to fly as a dragon.

For the first few days I was aware I wasn't playing Classic. I'd played it almost every day since launch so I felt the lack like a chore not done. By Tuesday, though, I wasn't pretending to myself that I'd do "just one more dragon" then go level up some more in Azeroth. I was at a point that I've reached so often, where I stop playing a particular MMORPG long before I'm bored or frustrated with it, without ever really deciding to leave.

After a full week of nothing but dragons I think I might have burned out on that event for a while. But I have a huge pile of dragon parts piled up waiting to be crafted and I know that while I'm doing that I'll hear "dragon up!" in chat and the cycle will begin all overt again.

It's hard to resist a call to arms, especially when it's framed with such inclusive, dynamic urgency. Chat is buzzing with common purpose in the way Classic's was six weeks ago and isn't any more. In WoW, last week when I was playing, I regularly went the best part of an hour without seeing a single person speak in general chat.

Few people need to call out to random strangers any more. Almost three months in, social networks are established. Everyone's guilded. Everyone has a friends list. Surprisingly, I'm in a guild. Actually, I'm in two. I had loads of speculative invites, all of which I turned down until I got one from a gnome-only guild and another from one for banker-alts. I accepted both. I even talk to people in them.

Even so, I don't want to take it further. To get the most out of Classic now those wonderful early levels are done I know I'd need to move into group content and I'm just not interested at the moment. It would be the worst time.

Most of my gaming is happening after work, when I'm usually tired - sometimes very tired indeed. The prospect of locking myself into sessions where other people will be relying on me to stay for a couple of hours or more, doing things that might require real attention and care, seems deeply unattractive.

Especially when compared to a place where I can come and go at will, with no penalty and no guilt. Where my presence is welcome (every EQII public event always wants more people) but not missed. Where I can feel sufficiently active to be engaged but not so active as to be unable to relax. And, crucially, where every battle ends with a genuine chance of a worthwhile reward.

After the Dragons and the puppets (didn't mention them but they're still in play, too) comes Frostfell and the expansion. It's a lot of competition for a game where my horizons seemed to have narrowed to grinding mobs for xp and materials that my crafters can't even use unless they, too, grind more levels.

This is almost exactly what happened on my original WoW run back in the Wrath of the Lich King. era. I began to run out of steam in Un'Goro Crater, struggled through Burning Crusade and tapped out at 72 in the first or second zone of the third expansion. I lasted six months there but if it hadn't been for Battlegrounds it might have been less.

Which doesn't mean I'm done with either WoW or Classic. I am still going to get to 60. And I will certainly be back when Battlegrounds appear. Whenever that is.

For all its many merits, though, I don't think Classic is going to be a permanent home. More like somewhere I visit now and again. EQII, it seems, has triumphed once more. No matter how many times I drift away it always pulls me back.