Nostalgia can be really strong sometimes… and that’s the case for World of Warcraft, the famous MMO launched in 2005 (in Europe). Do you remember all the time you’ve played on that game, rushing the max level (60 back then), completing your gear, or simply exploring those vast unknowns and nevertheless beautiful landscapes?
The strength of this game was the immersion and the impossibility to complete your journey by yourself. In fact, you had to play with other players to complete quests or dungeons in the game. Groups could host from 5 to 40 players simultaneously. The social aspect was a critical focus of the whole game.
However, time flies and the game changed a lot. 15 years later, it lost a lot of subscribers, the game went easier, skipping the social aspect for a quick leveling. A lot of long-time players, regretting the first version of the game, complained to Blizzard and asked to publish a reboot of the game. The studio answered in 2016 that they’ll never republish the first version of the game, and, more important, that players don’t realize that they don’t really want it. Link to the video “You think you do, but you don’t.”
It’s THE NEXT YEAR, when Blizzard is now part of Activision (because of its tremendous loss of money), that they announced World of Warcraft Classic in 2017. It means that they will allow the players to play the original game like it was 2005 with different servers than the current version (commonly called “retail” as opposed to “classic”). Huge surprise for all the fanbase. Link to Blizzard’s Announcement On World of Warcraft Classic That Shocked The World (BlizzCon 2017) Yep, that’s the same guy from the previous announcement. The customer is always right!
Wow Classic was launched in August 2019, players are still enjoying it today. Yet, Blizzard — Activision doesn’t want to share their data, is it because there are more players on Classic than Retail? We’ll probably never know. What we know is that the number of subscribers has increased significantly since Classic was launched. See article: WoW Classic causes biggest Subscriber increase ever
But… Is it really worth it? Blizzard decided to keep the exact same subscription system, the same as back then and the same as retail: $ 14.99 per month to access both versions of the game (Classic and retail):
I played Wow Classic day 1, and felt a lot of disappointment. Why?
As a huge fan since I was 8, I was very excited to get back to the original version, so were other people playing in private Classic servers. We can read on the internet that illegal private servers made them relive their childhood memories. Still, they didn’t feel the same about the official Blizzard version and write on forums about their frustration… So what’s wrong with WoW Classic?
- It’s very buggy. Blizzard wanted to recreate the game with its original defaults. However, some of the bugs added nothing else but frustration and were big problems back then. For instance, you could see NPC (non-playable characters) fall in the textured background, some quests are forever unavailable or your character locked in a void… Even though it’s a 15 years old game, they advertised the fact that they fixed and tested it, with pro streamers to make the hype higher… I really wonder why they decided to keep all those bugs despite the 2 years of developments between the announcement and release.
- It has capacity issues. Even though they made several “stress test” used for testing the severability to host a massive amount of players, the launch day chaotic. Still today, they don’t really manage to handle all the players. To treat it, they implemented a layering system, which clusters the player in several phases. This system allows people to play on the same servers in different states. It means that sometimes, we couldn’t play with friends being in other phases — like in parallel universes: the game considered that they were not really there. It leads to some bugs such as players can play together, and the next second, one of them disappear. This point only relates to the first months, that was terrible. They clearly didn’t get the tremendous amount of players who were interested in Classic. I know it was a way to handle this situation. Still, it was a pretty weird experiment that contradicts the “we keep the game in its original version” promise. Now I’m glad they get rid of it.
- The spirit has changed. Players think that the population would be exactly the same as in 2005. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It was a time passed, 2005 is not today: computer’s performance improved a lot, MMO was a trend, the internet wasn’t that worldwide than now… To illustrate, I’ll give examples of what I saw there. Some people are yelling at others “go bfa” (meaning: go to the current game — which is easier- and stop complaining) when they are grumbling about the difficulty of the game. Others are used to not talk with others, because of the recent evolution of the game. I’ve noticed the impatience of players, some of them leave a group of players if we don’t complete the number of players quickly enough or are leaving a dungeon if we die once. Of course, they are not all like this, but the global impression has changed.
- The subscription system is terrible for people only interested in Classic. Remind that with a subscription, you can play both games: classic AND retail (the current game). The issue is: even though they are totally partitioned games, there is no possibility to pay only for one or another. I am curious to see how many players actually play both games regularly since it seems that the philosophy of Classic and Retail players are opposed. Apart from that, it’s hard to get really fully involved in 2 different MMORPG with all the time that it implies. In short, Classic players pay $14.99 per month for a 15 years old game with no perspective to change by the future. People supposed that we pay server maintenance or GM (game masters) services, but the help system is more restricted than the 2005' one.
- We don’t know where it’s going: The communication strategy about the Classic version is quite absent: Is Classic going to evaluate to something new? Will the other expansions also be republished? Or is it only a ghost of the past ?… We don’t know. We have a forum section and several fan sites, but Blizzard communicates more about Retail than Classic. That’s okay because there won’t be any change in Classic compared to retail that is still going. But it feels like Classic is a communication strategy to convince players to play the current version of the game (retail). A good idea would have been to authorize to transfer your character to the retail version (that includes all the further expansion) when the character reaches the max level. However, it’s not something Blizzard offer, there are no links between the two versions of the game.
WoW will always be my first video game love. It was part of my childhood, and I built unforgettable memories there. It’s was a revolutionary game that, paradoxically, killed all other game developers’ perspectives to have another’s MMO that big. They annihilated all the competition by being the only great MMORPG.
Classic is the same game but takes place in a time where it’s not possible to be exactly the same. That’s a charming way to keep our memories unbroken, as they were back then and make others in this different version of the game. However, contrary to what seems to be Blizzard’s strategy, it didn’t create a need for me to play the Retail version, but to discover other video games and other universes maybe more in line with our current time!
