I cannot claim to be a WOW Andy. When it comes to Blizzard, the most time I’ve spent with their products belongs to Hearthstone, and I’ve only barely scratched the surface of Classic WoW and Retail with a few characters who spent most of their time messing around.
They’re fun games, to be sure, but what they represent to someone like me, which is a pair of eyes looking into the glass house from the outside, isn’t anything impressive or particularly strong in beckoning my attention. Before we get to WoW Forever, let me explain that point in a little more detail;
Retail is a Dying Game
I knew that this was a true statement the moment I started messing around on DragonFlight some time ago. I was enjoying the leveling experience of a Tauren Druid. Healing others, shapeshifting, and dishing out some DPS spells while questing through some classic, straightforward quests. I can’t remember what exactly triggered it, but a call to join an expedition to an island of drakes (or something like that, I can’t be asked to look through and figure out what all that shit was called,) had triggered and off I went. Lo’ and behold, the introduction to the series of quests featured a talking head. A literal talking head, Cyberpunk 2077 style, floating and bobbing around as it gave me tik-tok faced directions in a call to action that sounded like a marketing scheme intended for mentally challenged middle-school students with penchants for fur-suits.
The talking head popped open, called me to action while bouncing it’s dumb, tauren face around like, again, a tik-tok user making an IRL-anime video, then closed. “Alright, so that was shit.” I told myself. But you know what? I ignored it. I got an option to teleport STRAIGHT to the start of the questline, and I could already feel my interest in the game dropping. I never associated WoW with mechanics that encouraged you to ignore its world before, but there I was. Absolutely not encouraging stuff.
Anyway, this tale could go on for quite a while (approximately 10 more minutes of me relaying to you my gameplay,) but instead, I’ll just say that after seeing the quest frames telling me where to go to recruit XYZ members of the dragonflight shenanigans and another five minutes of bouncing tik-tok heads that spoke with the sort of castrated softness you’d expect from a man who’s on good terms with Blizzards HR department, I gave up and uninstalled the game. I don’t know how anyone can enjoy that game, but damn, talk about a sunk-cost fallacy in action.
Enter Classic
Luckily, Blizzard, who is known for their greed, allows users with a standard subscription to play WoW Classic as well. A couple days after uninstalling retail, a curious itch came over me, and I installed classic. Not TBC classic or anything like that, just classic. Classic classic. Low pop servers and all: the experience was just going to be for me and my own amusement.
Same race, same class: a Tauren Druid. I couldn’t shape shift as early as I was able to in Retail, and I couldn’t move as quickly, and completing quests took a lot longer. Traveling took longer, reading the dialogue took longer (and was far superior in writing quality in the sense that it wasn’t annoying,) killing things took longer. The game, in general was slower.
I’m not the first person to say this, and you know where I’m going with all of this build-up, so here: WoW Classic has the kind of gameplay that fosters community, builds character, creates intrigue for its playerbase, and is enjoyable to master. I enjoyed the process of slowly gaining a level in classic where I only felt satisfaction in the level gained in retail. That is, the process in Classic is more rewarding than the actual reward in Retail because retails process is, I can only imagine, built for people with two brain cells by people who barely have one.
Enter WoW Forever
If it was nothing else except a classic server with fresh populations, WoW Forever would do well. I think it’s a proven fact at this point that people just love that kind of game with a strong population.
But, of course, WoW Forever promises to be more than that: horizontal progression that doesn’t seek to make itself irrelevant with expansions every year, new classes, new races, new ways to play, and a slew of new content released every so often. Forever looks more like a brand new MMO than it does a classic server.
Because I enjoy Classic so much, and because I’d like to see what WoW looks like when it isn’t an endless treadmill of increasingly trash content released every year (or however long it takes for an expansion to be released), I’m on board with WoW Forever on release. I’ll give it a fair shot, and I’ve even got a friend who wants to play it with me. We might even get passed level 20!
GLHF, Blizzard.
-E