Classic didn't really appeal to me. Now maybe like 12 years after WoW Classic launched, Blizzard has finally done its "Classic Plus" version of the game, meaning that there are three (well, four, actually? Because there's the "Classic Classic" and the Classics that are going through the expansions) versions of their blockbuster MMO.
But this has, evidently, been a massive launch, with numbers that I've heard are around the peak of late Wrath, at the height of WoW's popularity.
While I hadn't really paid much attention to it during the Beta, I figured I'd hop in to check it out.
Because I'm basic, I guess, I rolled up an Undead Paladin with the delightfully normal (but also horror-referential) name of George Stoker, and I spent the day doing everything I could in Tirisfal Glades.
In terms of ratio from old stuff to new stuff, there is a sizable region, the Whispering Forest, which has some stuff in it, and I do think there were a couple new quests in other parts of the zone, but most of this was vintage 2004. The Whispering Forest area was inaccessible during vanilla, and only opened up thanks to Cataclysm, but there wasn't really anything to do there until Legion, when we found the tomb where Tyr had been killed in his fight against Zakazj, and where Holy Paladins, Arms Warriors, and Shadow Priests would claim their artifact weapons. (Think Strom'kalar will ever get as much of a spotlight as Xal'atath?)
Here, though, they've incorporated the lore of the kind of interquel Warcraft III expansion, Forsaken Kingdom, that they released at Blizzcon, which tells the tale of Paladins who rose as Forsaken. This does appear to have a big spoiler, actually, for the end of said campaign, so I'll be vague here.
But essentially, there's an order of Forsaken Paladins now who are figuring out their place under the Banshee Queen's banner. It's interesting - much in the way that Warlocks in most societies and Mages in Night Elf society are kind of the "taboo," "mistrusted" class, that's actually the role Paladins play among the Forsaken - which, with the Scarlet Crusade around makes a certain degree of sense. In fact, there's a faction of "Tarnished" that you have a couple of quests fighting - Forsaken Paladins who are striking against the rest of the undead. I don't know if this faction will get any broader exposure (given that Tirisfal already has the Scourge and the Crusade, it's not like there isn't enough going on there). I do like the play on words - human Paladins are members of the Knights of the Silver Hand, and silver is a metal that (despite its chemical similarities to gold) does tarnish. (Also, as an Elden Ring fan, "Tarnished" does fire up some well-trodden neural pathways.) Still, it's funny that we get this cool name for a faction, but only this one little group, while there doesn't seem to actually be a name for Forsaken paladins the way that you get things like Blood Knights, Vindicators, or Sunwalkers.
Still, most of what you do sparked a vague 20-year memory of having done these quests on my Rogue back in 2006 or early 2007.
So, how does it feel?
Well, I did see someone in chat saying "wait, so is taking a minute to kill anything while auto-attacking what all the 40-year-olds were desperate to have again?" And speaking as a 40-year-old (which I'm still kind of in denial about) I will say this: boy has class design come a long way.
It's not the same, mind you. I will say that I started playing only a couple months before the 2.0 patch came out (I can't recall how long that was active prior to the Burning Crusade launch,) so maybe there were some of these other paladin seals I hadn't remembered. But for Paladins at least, the central concept of the class is Seals and Judgments.
No, actually, it must be different, because the true old-school version had Judgment consume your seals. Paladins also get a Holy Strike attack, which is like Crusader Strike, but... Well, there's no Holy Power system, but Crusader Strike did exist prior to that for Retribution. At least so far, there's not a lot of real interaction this has with other abilities - it's just an extra bit of damage you can get in there once every 10 seconds.
But it is a far less active style of combat than what we get in mainline WoW. I know that I'm also used to playing at the level cap, with a whole lot of abilities to cycle through, but I don't think that this is going to go that far beyond what I'm using at level 14. (I did play nearly all day.)
Having played in Vanilla, there is a lot of familiarity to the way that the game plays, but I'm finding that that familiarity is for things that I was glad to see updated and improved upon. I like that most of our damage in mainline WoW is from active abilities rather than auto-attack.
Where I'm sort of more on the fence is the matter of "friction." Just like things were before Cataclysm, there's generally just one flight point per zone, and the only flight point in Tirisfal is in the Undercity. Also, there are numerous quest chains that send you back to the same place, or at least a place near somewhere you've already been. Particularly as a Paladin, doing my class quests (to get the Redemption spell) I found myself going back and forth between Brill and the Paladin's decrepit keep up in the Whispering Forest over and over, hoofing it through that Scarlet Crusade-held pumpkin farm.
This is inconvenient, and it's slow, and it makes it all take longer. But is that the point?
See, I think the ethos behind WoW Forever is to allow you to take it slow, to feel like you don't have to rush to keep up. Mainline WoW is on these seasonal cycles where you sort of feel like you're going to miss out if you're not doing everything the latest patch has come out with. If you didn't go through, say, the March on Quel'danas raid, you're going to have to wait ages to be able to run it on Raid Finder, and I suspect not a lot of organized groups are doing Normal or higher runs given that the stuff you can get pretty easily just by doing quests on the Isle of Fangs is better.
I think that's laudable, even if I wonder what will happen when WoW Forever turns two or even three years old. After all, WoW wasn't really all about the endgame until probably Wrath or even Cataclysm. But there's a kind of accretion of max-level characters that inevitably happens.
I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, and clearly this is something that really appeals to a lot of people. But I do wonder if, perhaps, because I've been a consistent player throughout mainline WoW's lifespan, that the nostalgia factor isn't working in the same way - I imagine some people of my generation may have fond but somewhat hazy memories of playing in the mid-2000s, but stopped playing perhaps around Cataclysm or Mists of Pandaria. For them, the big twists and turns of the last 20 years of WoW plot have reshaped the game into something unfamiliar, and this is a return to what they recognized. But for me... I've kept up with it all. Were some of the plotlines not so great? Sure. But I'm not lost.
But let's talk about that friction:
Blizzard had their own mission for this game, and far be it from me to say that it was the wrong mission. But if you were to ask me what WoW Forever should look like - specifically, what a WoW variant that tries to give us a less pressured, more relaxed approach to Azeroth ought to be - I think I'd have gone in a different direction: embracing the evolved and more active class design, but with systems in place to ensure (as they hope to do so with their "horizontal progression") that players feel fine playing at their own pace.
And genuinely, it's really something that I'm curious to see - how they intend to keep the game feeling fresh without ever raising the level cap and forcing some kind of power reset.
One of the interesting things about going back to a more vanilla-like gameplay system is how gearing works. Nowadays, in mainline WoW, a Paladin couldn't even get agility on any of their gear, because you'd only have plate armor dropping for you. But also, agility wouldn't actually do anything for you. Seeing Spirit on gear again does take me back (though anyone who plays Classic would presumably not feel so distant from such things).
Indeed, the thing I truly wonder about with WoW Forever is what it means for Classic. I have no sense of who plays Classic or how many people do compared with Retail/Mainline WoW. I briefly stepped into Classic once (ok, actually twice, because I wanted the cool frost proto-drake mount that you could get for doing the Death Knight starting experience in Wrath classic) but already I've done far more in Forever.
See, Mainline and Forever are very different, but if this is what is popular, what is the point of Classic?
The things I'm drawn to here are actually the things that keep me excited about Mainline, which is the new. We haven't had Undead Paladins (though we will in the next patch - I've already got a few Paladins, usually to try out a new race or race/class combo. I made a Tauren Paladin when they became available in Cataclysm, and my Lightforged Draenei is one, and I'll probably wind up making an equivalent of George, but with a name I can actually use on a Mainline server).
I do hope, however, that some of the ideas they have for Forever wind up in Mainline. The visuals, for example, are very cool. Tirisfal Glades gets dark at night (actually it's pretty dark during the day too,) and I love the feeling of going down a dark road with the glow of fiery braziers or ghostly streetlamps as the only illumination.
Ironically, I think part of the motivation for this is probably to call less attention to the 2004-graphics environments. But surely we could get such visual tricks in modern WoW.
I imagine there would be some really tough logistical snarls trying to implement two names in WoW. For one thing, some of my characters have their surname as their character name while others have their given name, so you'd either have to give players a way to designate which is which or my Worgen Warrior and Kul Tiran Druid would have to go Hungarian-style.
While I had initially thought to go Retribution on my Forsakadin, I actually decided I might as well have him as a tank, both because I imagine it'll make it easier to get groups for dungeons and also because in Mainline basically all of my other paladins go Ret given that my main is Prot. But given that this version of the paladin is almost unrecognizable from the Mainline one, it feels especially reasonable.
The irony, though, is that because the talents are still pretty similar to the way they worked in vanilla, the guidance I've found on a leveling build actually sees you invest your first like 12 talent points into Retribution. So I'm kind of a "Retribution Tank" right now - given that Righteous Fury is a buff you click on rather than a passive from being Protection, this kind of works.
(Fun fact, I have never taken the old Righteous Fury buff off of my main's action bars, so while it does nothing there, it's a fun little reminder of the old days. I don't think you can actually drag passives to your bars, so I've got to be careful never to remove it. Similarly, my Warlock still has his physical Soulstone on his bars.)
But yeah: despite what I said earlier, I do think Classic plays an important role as just a kind of preservation of the older version of WoW. This version, though, is maybe the one that has a less obvious reason to exist - but clearly at least for now, people are excited about it.
But for me, unless something sparks something really powerful within me, I think I'm going to stick to World of Warcraft: The Real One as the version of WoW for me.
And hey, if Forever actually manages to do what it set out to do, I should be able to hop on any time in the future and not feel like I "missed" it. You know, if.
I was going to end this post on that, but that's sort of a nasty note to do so on, and I don't want to give off that kind of shitty internet troll asshole vibe here. The way I see it, this feels like a big and interesting experiment. Is that experiment meant to prepare for some future thing, or is this a goal in and of itself?
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