Month One: WoW Classic

It's been almost exactly a month since the launch of WoW Classic so I thought it might be time for a recap. I only thought of doing this half an hour ago, while I was closing in on Level 20 with my Warlock, so don't look for any detailed analyses or amazing insights!

When Classic was announced it barely registered. I was five years late to the WoW party. I have a Vanilla nostalgia rating of zero. As the months passed, people with a closer attachement to Azeroth than mine became increasingly excited and even impatient for the thing to arrive. My own interest grew somewhat.

Obviously it was going to be a Major Genre Event and you never like to miss out on one of those. Also I was pretty sure I could mine Classic for a few blog posts. Always an incentive. And it would be a (weak) chance to experience somethinng (not much) like the original launch frenzy. Maybe.

My expectation, which I expressed freely and often in comments all over the place, was that I'd play for a week or two, write a bunch of posts about it, then move on (or more likely back) to something more to my taste. I was all but certain I wouldn't be renewing my subscription when the first month ran out.

Well, I renewed my sub a few days ago. If I ran one of those activity monitors that a few bloggers swear by it would probably show the huge majority of my PC time these last few weeks was taken up either by Classic or by Blogger, where 60% of all my posts since August 27th have been about the game. For the last month I've either been playing Classic or writing about it.

I've also played it for more hours and with greater intensity than any MMORPG since the launch of Guild Wars 2 seven years ago. I wasn't expecting to get bitten this hard again until and unless Brad ever gets Pantheon out the door.

I've thought long and hard about why this is. I've written a bunch of lengthy posts about it and left comments almost as long on the threads of other bloggers, many of whom have been wrestling with the same concerns. I wouldn't claim I've gotten to the bottom of the mystery but I have come to one important conclusion: Classic works becasue it has the kind of consistent, considered, coherent design that we haven't seen in a very long time.

This, I think, accounts for more of the reasons why the game clicks with me than any other single explanation. Classic runs like finely-tuned clockwork. Every piece meshes seamlessly with every other and together they drive the machine forward.

The effect Classic has on some players.

By comparison, other MMORPGs are a hotch-potch of mismatched parts, many of which don't fit together and some of which actively grind against each other. Take Guild Wars 2, for example. I've played it for seven years so it clearly has a lot going for it but with the best will in the world no-one could say it has ever been either coherent or finely-tuned.

Take the languishing, desperate World Vs World as a prime example. It's a walking disaster now (even though I still enjoy it, on occasion) but when was it ever anything else? I wrote a post in October 2012, just a couple of months after launch, which I titled "What's Wrong With WvW".

Back then I outlined four problems:

1. Free Server Transfers
2. Orb Bonus For World That Needs It Least
3. Ladder-Style Server Matching System 
4. Night Capping (not as much fun as it sounds) 

Of those, the only one that's been fixed in seven years is #2, for which ANet's nuanced response was to remove the entire Orb mechanic and replace it with... nothing. The Ladder has been tweaked and fiddled with and as a result is now even worse than it was. Free Server Transfers, now Paid Server Transfers, remain one of the most contentious issues as does night-capping, now expanded to include all "off-hours" play.

ArenaNet launched a major MMORPG with three disparate game modes, none of which had any synergy at all. All of those modes were compromised, flawed and poorly implemented at launch (sPvP crashed and burned as an eSport, a huge number of PvE events were bugged for months - some for much longer than that). In the succeeeding years Anet showed little sign of understanding how to fix any of their mistakes, nor in knowing what a fully-integrated, holistic MMORPG ought to look like.

Based on what I see and experience in Classic, the Blizzard team of the Classic era suffered few doubts, either over what their game should be or how to make it function exactly the way they wanted it to. Everything seems to have been designed to within an inch of its life and yet nothing feels stilted or formal or forced.

The much-discussed "difficulty" of Classic consists almost entirely of two things: patience and forethought. The developers evidently expected their players would be willing to stop and think before they acted. They trusted players to read quest text and NPC dialog, understand it and act on it.

Finally getting Unending Breath was one of the highlights of the last month's play for me.

They had no intention of facilitating any kind of "action" gaming as we understand it now, even though, in comparison to the MMORPGs the designers themselves played and loved, they were providing a smoother, faster (yes, faster) and easier overall experience.

When WoW launched in 2004 I chose not to play it for two reasons. Firstly, after three months of beta and two weeks of Live, I was already committed to EverQuest II and, secondly, everyone I knew in-game at that point was of the same opinion of World of Warcraft; it was a kiddie MMO.

I'm glad I didn't play it back then. I think I would indeed have found it "too easy" and "for kids". Five years later, when my views on many things, not least MMORPGS, had mellowed, I came to WoW and found it surprisingly good fun. A decade on from then I find I've changed enough that the recreation of the original game suits me almost perfectly.

Classic has most of the elements I love in games of the era that preceded it; a plethora of complex, interwoven systems that reward patience and close attention; combat that relies on the brain more than the fingers; pacing that allows plenty of time for thought.

I find that pacing almost ideal. Much though I love EverQuest, these days the pace of progress I enjoyed in the early years of the 21st century is just too glacial. I've proved that to my own satisfaction when playing on Progression servers over the years.

Unlike Isey, I don't see myself ever finding my happy place on P1999, even with that new server smell. Very much to my own surprise it's the accelerated pace and increased convenience of Classic that hits the sweet spot.

Amusing myself by making my Voidwalker run through the water while I stay on the shore. Serves him right for moaning all the time.

Which is ironic considering just how much the pacing and satisfaction of Classic's gameplay is built on inconvenience and what seem to many to be some very rough edges indeed. I guess it depends where you're making your comparisons.

Those "rough edges" are, of course, nothing of the kind. Almost without exception they are well-thought-out design choices, intended to structure and direct gameplay. All the running, all the fetch and carry quests, all the side-trips and searching and unexpected discoveries, the wandering vendors and elusive trainers are there to ground you in the world.

If you don't like that then, in 2004/5 at least, you really didn't like MMORPGs. That's what the genre was at the time and Blizzard, doing what they were known for, took what others had created and polished it until it glowed.

And that's why we have so much controversy over whether Classic is immersive or tedious, addictive or alienatiing. In the decade and a half since WoW launched, the entire genre it bootstrapped into the mainstream has fractured, split and changed out of all recognition.

We live in a world where PokemonGo and Dark Age of Camelot are supposedly both part of the same family. Where Black Desert Online can offer combat that largely consists of hammering one mouse button while EverQuest II can accomodate six hot bars of skills, most of which you might use in a single fight.

It's no surprise to me that players are deeply split over Classic and Retail. They're different games that appeal to different audiences. It's not aboout whether one is "better" than the other; it's about which one you want.

It seems I want Classic. No-one could be more surprised than me.