When You Close The Door... : World of Warcraft

As the alert reader will have noticed, I haven't posted about World of Warcraft Classic for quite a while. The last time it got a post all to itself was back in mid-November, when I explained why I'd stopped playing.

I ended that post by saying "I am still going to get to 60. And I will certainly be back when Battlegrounds appear." Well, I haven't and I wasn't. And it doesn't look like I will be.

It took me a couple more months before I decided to pull the plug. I have a habit of letting subscriptions run on even though i'm not using whatever it is that I'm paying for. Then one day I found myself looking at a £5.00 sub for an Amazon Prime channel and wondering whether it was worth it...

So last week I cancelled my WoW sub. It seems a little ironic, after all the angst over Blitzchung and the boycott. Actually, in light of the lukewarm reaction to Patch 8.3 and the savaging of the Warcraft III reforge, it seems Blizzard need no outside help in dragging their stock price down.

In the end it was a fairly easy decision to make. There really hasn't been a moment since I stopped playing when I thought to myself "I miss Classic" or "I really should get back to leveling my Hunter". On the odd occasion when the game crossed my mind it was with something of a mental shudder.

The reasons for that are... strange. While it's certainly true to say the thought of grinding out those last half dozen levels in the fifties held very little appeal, what put me off the most was thinking about what the game looked like.

Which makes very little sense. I always thought WoW was a pretty good-looking game, even on the "Classic" settings I was using. I've taken a phenomenal number of screenshots as I roamed around Azeroth, most of them because I very much liked what I was seeing.

And yet, after a couple of months of EverQuest II, my eyes seem to have adjusted. It's not the greatest-looking game in the world; lots of people think it's downright ugly and in places it can be. But I'm attuned to its beauty. The very thought of staring at the different textures and surfaces of Classic for any prolonged period of time oddly set my teeth on edge.

That's just stupid and I know it is. I also know that if I logged in the feeling would dissipate and vanish in nano-seconds. But when you already don't especially want to do something, even an irrational reason adds considerable weight to your determination not to do it. Well, it does to mine...

I was more tempted to log in some of my characters in the Live game (are we still calling it "Retail"?). The graphics there are different. They wouldn't be a hindrance.

No, the bouncer on the door of Retail is the gameplay. Last time I tried to level my Hunter in the 90s it wasn't the graphics that stopped me. It was the boredom. He was trying to make some progress in the Legion expansion, which I hear is reckoned to be one of the good ones, but the quests were beyond tedious. I couldn't make myself care about any of it so I stopped.

I had a bit more luck with my Warlock in his forties or fifties (I forget which) but if I'm going to level a Warlock in that bracket I might as well go back and work on the one I left in Classic.

And then there's that superginormous elephant taking up the entire room: the Level Squish. What on earth is the point of leveling any character in Retail right now, when you know that in a few months you can do it on fast-forward, and in an expansion of your choosing? I have a vague idea I might re-sub then and level my Panda monk up in Mists of Pandaria, which everyone seems to agree is one of the best of all the expansions.

There's very little chance of me buying the Shadowlands expansion, of course. Just look at how much play I got out of Legion. It took me two years after I was given it to even log in and then I didn't like it.

I did very much like the Legion pre-events, though. They were  great. I re-subbed just to do them. If Shadowlands can come up with something as good I might do the same - and then carry on long enough to do the Pandaria thing.

I'm assuming the Level Squish will be available for everyone, whether they buy Shadowlands or not. It would be a bit weird if it wasn't, although I think I remember someone confirming that you would still be able to level the old way if you wanted to. Although presumably not at the old speed...

Anyway, I'm still subbed into early March so I could pop in for a run around before the doors swing shut. And after that I can play my under-twenties on Retail if the mood takes me. Maybe just writing this post will put me in a WoW mood. It's happened before.

For now, though, it's goodbye to Azeroth. It was fun until it wasn't, which is about as much as I expect from any game.