‘World of Warcraft Classic’ Is a Nostalgia Trip For a Game That Doesn't Exist

‘World of Warcraft Classic’ Is a Nostalgia Trip For a Game That Doesn't Exist



World of Warcraft doesn’t change. Except it has. World of Warcraft Classic is an attempt to capture something special—the game, as it was, when Blizzard released it in 2004. It’s a nostalgia trip for anyone who played at the time, and a curiosity for those who grew up playing different versions of it. A lot has changed in 15 years. The games industry has changed. MMOs have changed. I’ve changed. Azeroth, World of Warcraft's fictional world, is not somewhere I want to be anymore.To get more news about buy wow gold, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

When I logged into World of Warcraft Classic for the first time on last week, I chose a low population server to skip the lines, and appeared as a newly raised Undead in Tirisfal Glades, a haunted forest near the Undead capital. I spawned next to another new player named “Beanflicker.” In the general chat, someone was talking about how the only thing that had changed with him since 2004, the year World of Warcraft first released, was his hemorrhoids.

World of Warcraft was, and is, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). It’s hard to understate how much of a revelation it was when developer Blizzard released it in 2004. There had been MMORPGs before WoW, but the genre was chaotic and strange. Often, the games felt antagonistic to their players. In EverQuest, dying meant losing experience—which represented hours of play time—and it was possible to lose your corpse and all the loot that was on it. A bad death in EverQuest meant losing months of progress.

People have mocked the launch of World of Warcraft Classic for long wait times to login to servers, but this was the norm back in the day. 2001’s sci-fi MMORPG Anarchy Online was unplayable at launch. Other MMORPG’s barely functioned at all. I spent long hours of my teenage years staring at the EverQuest login screen, typing and retyping my password until I’d get into the game.

World of Warcraft was the first time an MMO struck the balance between difficult and fair. When you died in Azeroth, you had to get your corpse, but you were never in danger of losing your body forever. From the first hour, everyone playing WoW understood they were playing something different. There had never been anything quite like it, and there never would be again.