A Foray into Classic

Well, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

I rolled up an undead Warlock and began playing through a bit of the starting experience. There were a few ways that I expected things to be different - no heirlooms, no streamlined abilities, old graphics, no mapping of quest objectives.

Here are some of the things I hadn't really thought about:

There's no open-tapping, meaning that you really have to hit an enemy before any other players do if you want credit. This naturally slows questing down significantly if other players are nearby.

Quest tracking is different - sometimes in subtle ways. For instance, if you track a quest, the incomplete objectives are grey while the completed ones are white, instead of vice-versa (meaning that the things you're actually more interested, like how many Mindless Zombies you still need to kill, is harder to see than the Wretched Zombies you've already filled your quota on.)

Mana runs out FAST. Basically, between each zombie you fight, you either need to sit a moment to recover or just prepare to do some stabbing with a dagger. I now remember why I played almost all Melee characters in the early days... (Though getting the Imp has made things die quickly enough that I don't go OOM as quickly.)

The game just generally goes at a much slower pace - and frankly, I think that this more than anything is what a lot of players were looking forward to. I played for maybe an hour and am still in Deathknell. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if I hit level 6 before I leave (I'm level 4 now.) With equivalent quests but with all the modern systems in place, I'm sure I would have been out of there in about 20 minutes.

There are largely cosmetic UI elements that I had forgotten about - we've seen changes to, like, the font that displays your health and mana, or the shape of enemy health bars, or the vastly, vastly different character screen (complete with prominent displays of your various magic resistances.)

I really don't know how likely I am to play through this much farther, but while I had some resistance to the obsession and skepticism to the rose-colored glasses people seemed to look back on Classic with, I do think it's kind of exciting to have this as a sort of museum piece. Games are getting to be an old enough medium that it seems important for us to preserve the various evolutionary steps they take.

Actually, I think that Classic also gives us a very clear look at how far WoW has come in its decade and a half. A lot of people complain that it's just the same game it was in 2004 and I've got to say that it really, really isn't. Some changes have been fantastic (hero classes, new races, more diverse specs and broader viability, etc.), though some of Blizzard's experiments have been less successful (Garrisons, Azerite Armor...)

But now that this exists, I think that in a way we will no longer have to hear people pining for the "good old days." Likewise, we can see how people compare the Classic and "Live" experience and perhaps reintroduce good elements that have been lost over time to the main game.

I'll confess that I've been very unmotivated to play BFA - I haven't actually beaten all bosses in any of the LFR versions of the raids (much less the Normal+ modes.) But that's not to say that we haven't had great recent stuff lately - Legion is my favorite expansion they've done, and I'm hoping that the expansion they announce in about two months and change will be similarly exciting (and good - here's hoping that the "good-bad-good-bad" pattern benefits 9.0!)