Alright, we’re going to be talking about
World of Warcraft: Classic and as these things
go I’ve gotta lay down my bona fides. I
have been playing World of Warcraft since
launch. I have been playing World of Warcraft
a lot since launch.
I have the Ivory Raptor, which involved farming
up one thousand gold within the first six
months the game was out, and I did that in,
like, three.
A few years ago Blizzard sent me this nice
little statuette commemorating ten years of
unbroken subscription to the game, which means
that this is a cute little gesture from a
company that made a game I really like, but
also kinda yikes.
I have this in-game windrider pet because
it came with this windrider plush doll that
I keep on the shelf behind my streaming setup.
I’ve done server-first raiding, I helped
three people grind to High Warlord, I have
my Brawler’s Guild rewards, Mage Tower rewards,
Swift Flight Form, and even the absurd Realm
First Illustrious Jewelcrafter.
Why did I get this? Why did I do what needed
to be done to get this?!
Point is, yes, I have played a lot of World
of Warcraft.
In August 2019 Blizzard Entertainment launched
World of Warcraft: Classic, a re-creation
of World of Warcraft more or less as it existed
in 2006, towards the end of the vanilla game’s
lifespan, after all the new content was released,
but before any expansions were added.
While not a pure recreation the deviations
are small and few, most being concessions
to the fact that WoW itself changed dramatically
over the course of its first year. For example
one of the more dramatic anachronistic changes
is the inclusion of the in-game clock, a feature
that originally wasn’t added to the game
until June 2008, almost four years after launch.
Care has even been taken to recreate period-authentic
inconvenience, such as the bespoke recreation
of spell batching originally designed to work
within the limits of dial-up internet, which
will, in turn lead to things like cancelling
an ability only for the ability to cast anyway,
or being well out of range of monsters while
they continue to hit you in the back of the
head.
But returning to the Azeroth-that-was fifteen
years later is an interesting experience.
It lays bare all the strengths and flaws of
the game and really calls attention to the
fact that World of Warcraft was kinda bad.
Alright I'm gonna just
oh
are you stuck?
yup
are you kidding me?
Well, it’s bad, but it’s also really good?
I mean, it’s still a lot of fun, but it’s
also pretty garbage. It’s garbage, but still
a classic.
Here, since I’m already in this hole let
me dig my way out.
I really like to revisit old computer role
playing games. The genre has, through most
of the history of electronic gaming, found
itself at the locus of gaming technology,
pushing both graphical capabilities and systems
complexity. They were, in their heyday, often
at the cutting edge of what the personal computer
could do and what a video game could even
be.
This, however, also means that they’re often
quite experimental, which in turn brings with
it a lot of compromises that modern players
need to make in order to engage. Controls
are typically unusual, frustrating, unintuitive,
or unresponsive, and it’s likely there’s
at least one vital game system that is utterly
inscrutable, the game assuming you have the
time, patience, and inclination to devise
its operation through brute trial and error.
Ultima Underworld is the first retail game
with a fully 3D environment, but the underlying
systems for character movement are pretty
immature. It’s not very precise with how
facing translates to direction, leading to
a lot of times where the player character
is walking forwards, but at a kind of slanted
angle.
Dungeon Master 2 has a magic system revolving
around combinations of symbols representing
abstract concepts, with no guidance on what
anything actually does. The manual gives a
bit of help by at least telling you that the
first set of symbols indicate power level,
but at the end straight up tells the player
to literally trial and error their way through.
Most of these games will allow you to just
casually soft lock all progression by throwing
away something vital, either on purpose or
by accident.
But it’s not impossible for a modern audience
to submerge themselves in the games, and once
you’re over the hump it’s generally pretty
rewarding to see what originally sold players
on Lands of Lore, Ultima Underworld, or Elder
Scrolls: Arena, to peek into the history of
modern games and see the genesis of ideas,
systems, controls, and vocabulary that persist
to this day.
Just, you know, maybe keep a walk through
or strategy guide handy.
This is much of the WoW Classic experience.
There’s several distinct humps for a modern
player to get over, things that are, by today’s
standards, hostile, unintuitive, and obnoxious,
but adapt to them and there’s an interesting
and rewarding game on the other side.
I have also found that it’s actually easier
to adjust to now than it was in 2004 specifically
because Classic is essentially a complete
product. While Blizzard hasn’t activated
all the content that Classic will contain,
we know what all of it is, which has the odd
effect of making it feel a lot more self-contained
and easier to accept the jank as just part
of the package and charm.
Just before we jump deeper into the jank of
Classic, I do think it bears mentioning that
WoW itself exists in the context of the game
it was meant to compete with but ultimately
all but crushed: Everquest.
WoW was, from conception onwards, meant to
be the “friendly” version of Everquest,
and elements of Classic that feel exhausting
today, such as the relatively small number
of quick travel flight points scattered around
the world, were positively indulgent compared
to Everquest.
You mean you can just fly all the way across
the world? Let me go get my monocle and top
hat! Will they be serving hors d'oeuvres on
this flight?
Oh, you think there aren’t enough spiders
in Dustwallow, that it’s going to take forever
to get all the venom you need for that damn
shield quest?
Yeah, well, out here in Crescent Reach there
are three snakes!
Three!
Three snakes!
Sure, by modern standards it feels like a
pointless waste of time to make the player
return to a class trainer and spend silver
in order to acquire new abilities and improve
old ones, but when you put it in the context
of EverQuest where buying spells and learning
spells were two different things, and it was
possible to buy a spell you couldn’t learn,
and also some spells you needed to find as
drops from random monsters, World of Warcraft
was very much the “noob friendly” approach.
Why, look, you can even see all the spells
that you’ll eventually be able to learn!
Oh go, they're so expensive
Game, please, please game, I just, I just
want to buy my raptor! I just need a raptor!
That’s not to say that all the humps are
contextual improvements over EverQuest. Some
of it is just bad on its own or obviously
incomplete.
World of Warcraft was pushed out the door
probably a good six months early leading to
a pretty substantial and well-documented disparity
in quality between the stuff the developers
had been working on the longest, namely Eastern
Kingdoms and the Alliance starting zones,
and the stuff they had been working on the
least, Kalimdor and the Horde starting zones.
There’s a few standout examples, like the
area around Blackfathom Deeps in western Ashenvale
being little more than a rough draft, which
maybe looks just kinda old and junky at first
glance, but is a stark contrast when compared
to areas like Shadowfang Keep or The Wailing
Caverns.
The entire zone of Azshara is largely devoid
of quests, not completely empty but hardly
the number or density that you would expect
from a zone of its size. There’s even a
substantial number of NPC camps scattered
throughout, staged with furniture and flags,
but never populated.
and, oh god, this character is too low to
be here, oh god
F's in chat
The Paladin talent trees weren’t implemented
until the game finally launched, and were
clearly a last minute rush job, with notable
highlights being the Holy tree, ostensibly
a single-target healing specialization. Let’s
just take a short tour through this.
The first tier contains Improved Lay On Hands,
which adds a small 1 minute armour buff to
an emergency heal with an hour long cooldown,
the second tier has Revelation which reduces
the cooldown of Lay on Hands by up to 20 minutes,
giving it a mere 40 minute cooldown. The third
tier begins the chain of talents leading to
the tree’s capstone ability, and those three
talents are a damage boost to a single ability,
an aura that increases holy damage dealt by
your party, and the capstone ability Holy
Shock, an instant cast, medium range damage
spell. In the healing tree.
There was a lot of stuff like this floating
around, some of it easier to change than others,
and in a lot of ways the first year of World
of Warcraft’s life was spent just kinda
getting the game finished.
Some of the abrasive moments really just come
down to different expectations. The “massive”
in “Massively Multiplayer” was always
a lot smaller than it ever felt, most of the
heavy lifting being done by clever design
pressing players into interactions that felt
more substantial than they really were. WoW
just wasn’t actually built to have that
many players doing something in the same area
at the same time. Single quest areas can typically
only support three to eight players at a time.
Any more than that and it quickly leads to
over-competition, with players standing around
just waiting for more opponents to spawn.
While this encourages grouping up, it only
does so to a point. You can’t get credit
for most quests if there are more than five
players in your group, and a second full group
is enough to strip a quest area bare like
locusts, so paradoxically there’s a lot
of time in the Massively Multiplayer game
spent looking for places to play alone.
not for any other reason than just to like
know that you
holy crap
oh my god
see like that right there, there's the line!
That's, that's the line!
So Dan, queue it up.
I wanna die. This is.
All that said, returning to WoW as it used
to be is also an enchanting experience in
many ways. It reveals the flaws, yes, but
also the things that have held up surprisingly
well.
The cartoonish, exaggerated aesthetic of the
Warcraft universe, always praised as a strength
of the series, continues to shine. Even the
chunky, blatantly low-poly assets have their
own charm, and after a few minutes of play
quickly blend into the scenery.
And there are some moments of windowing, places
where the game creates a frame to guide the
player’s view, that remain stellar.
One that really stands out to me is actually
something that I had forgotten about, because
it was replaced in the changes to the game
over the years.
The opening hours of the Orc and Troll quest
lines lead the player out of the Valley of
Trials, down the road to Razor Hill, through
the pass in Drygulch Ravine, culminating in
their entrance to Orgimmar, the capital city
of the Horde. The path leading into the city
leads the player to this frame at the threshold,
the wide open space of the Valley of Honor
with the bank, flight tower, and zeppelin
framed against the sky. It is a compelling
composition. Evocative, fantastical, it’s
a moment that really strikes the imagination
and makes the world feel so much bigger than
you ever thought it would be.
The version of this moment, as it exists now,
was put into the game in 2010 with the Cataclysm
expansion. A huge portion of that expansion
was dedicated to revamping the original world’s
content, since most of it was at least six
years old, with some art assets being as old
as 2003 or even 2002. The resolution disparity
between launch content and stuff from the
second and upcoming third expansions was stark,
and it was a gulf that was only likely to
grow wider as more content was added.
Additionally players had been clamouring for
freeform flight to be added to the original
continents, a much loved feature integral
to both The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the
Lich King expansions, but the original environments
had never been designed for freeform flight.
The old world ultimately consisted of a series
of valleys scooped out of a giant mass, with
questing areas joined by large blocks of featureless
terrain, carefully hidden behind impassable
rocks and hills. The flight paths all wound
through hand-crafted vistas, designed to make
the world look fully formed and sculpted while
obscuring the giant empty spaces in between.
It was very much an amusement park facade,
and while some players enjoyed taking a peek
behind the scenery, the out-of-bounds areas
weren’t acceptable if it was going to be
something all players could access just by
flying up over the tops of the hills.
A revamp was, in a lot of ways, needed, but
a lot of what they revamped things to was
kinda questionable.
Cataclysm, as a whole, is not a fondly remembered
expansion, and a big part of that is in the
details of the decisions that were made.
Blizzard decided that rather than merely updating
the terrain and cities to look more cohesive
with newer, higher-resolution content and
rather than just filling the voids between
zones in a way that would look boring but
presentable when flying, they would instead
dramatically alter the world itself in a massive
cataclysm and advance the timeline so that
the state of the entire main world was concurrent
with the end game content.
This had some side-effects.
By advancing the timeline many of the new
zones were now sequels to their original versions,
following up on the storylines that played
out before the Cataclysm. But these new storylines
only made sense if you were already familiar
with the previous story, which was now no
longer accessible.
This kind of self-referential storytelling
is ultimately the blood of Cataclysm, with
a lot of moments in the expansion being retreads
of older moments from WoW’s history, delivered
with a cheeky smile and a wink to the camera.
Mortals that fancy themselves heroes have
entered the broken hall. Oh I do hope this
"raid" will amuse me.
In this regard the new entrance to Orgimmar
is no longer intended to welcome new players
to a wide open world, no longer framed to
spark the imagination, but a blunt shock for
old players, an overhaul of layout and aesthetic
signalling the change in leadership from Thrall
to Garrosh, a mulletted electric guitar solo
screaming “this ain’t your daddy’s Horde”.
It is incredibly trivial, but it is emblematic
of a fair criticism of how the game has evolved
over a decade and a half: increasingly focusing
inwards.
I’m not even sure I should be saying “criticism”
though, because it’s not even critical as
much as it is merely descriptive.
World of Warcraft has undeniably changed over
the years, but the “goodness” or “badness”
of most of the changes really comes down to
a question of values: what do the players
and creators like in the game, what do they
want out of the game, and what does an ideal
evening of play look like?
They’re not really questions with right
and wrong answers, and no matter what answer
you pick it probably doesn’t have some moral
implication underneath. You’re not a bad
person if you want to quietly solo queue for
dungeons and go through the game with an absolute
minimum of social friction. Likewise it’s
not a superior tier of gaming to prefer a
game with aggressive social dependency and
time-sink gatekeeping.
This is where I feel I need to acknowledge
that lot of the clamour for WoW Classic has
been controversial, fraught with ego and drama,
as a number of the high-profile personalities
leading the charge are known for their toxicity
and vitriol, having made something of a career
in the very small, but highly competitive,
niche of complaining about World of Warcraft.
they wanna make it different, they want to
do things just a little bit different! Oh,
maybe I just want group finder, hey my gear
doesn't match maybe I'll just transmog this
helmet, f* you! You're going to wear that
pink helmet and you're gonna like it. Those
chromatic boots looking like a goddamn clown
with your DPS warrior? That's you! Your f*
face? It's a square! Alright? Eight pixels?
You're gonna love it. It's gonna be the exact
same. We're not gonna give up, we're not gonna
stop. No changes!
The basic argument from these outrage merchants
is that WoW as it currently exists, is bad
unlike some point in the past where WoW was
good. And I really need to point out that
this argument has been working for over a
decade. It is not a new phenomenon by any
means.
Why having badges be given by every single
frikkin instance in the entire game is an
absolutely awful idea. Possibly, in fact,
the worst idea I have ever seen Blizzard come
up with in their entire history. Alright?
this goes beyond everything. This goes beyond
putting Naxx version 2 in the game. This goes
beyond every stupid thing they have ever done.
I mean, really. This goes beyond the whole
"hey let's give 'em some Black Temple level
epics for running Kharazan." No it goes beyond
that. It's incredibly, pants-on-head-r* in
every possible respect.
There’s no consensus on when that peak was,
when WoW was truly the best, but it’s generally
agreed by that community to be somewhere during
the first three phases of the game, between
2004 and 2010.
This has created an environment where WoW
Classic has been positioned explicitly in
contrast to Battle for Azeroth as “the real
World of Warcraft”. The pure experience,
spiritually untainted, the mythological prelapsarian
version. An experience so perfect that it
will restore World of Warcraft to the position
of cultural relevance that it held when seemingly
everyone and their dog had a subscription.
It’s effectively a church schism in video
game form.
That level of intensity in the conversation
can make productive analysis somewhat difficult,
as the arguments for that position aren’t
always coherent.
A big hitch in these kinds of public conversations
is that there’s a performance angle, and
people tend to skew towards the answers that
they believe are correct, or the answers that
they believe the audience wants to hear. The
opinion that you’re supposed to have, rather
than the answers that are true.
They tend to lean really heavily on value
statements, appeals to the things that the
wider social group believe are superior qualities,
which can lead to some hot nonsense like saying
that World of Warcraft was best when it was
hardest back in Classic which is a comical
statement because Classic just isn’t very
hard.
Now I do want to walk a fine line here because
when it comes to talking about video games
and difficulty the conversation turns into
a swamp super fast because the language that
we use to talk about the systems and interactions
isn’t particularly well developed, so people
end up just shouting the same words at each
other with different implicit meanings and
it goes nowhere.
Mainstream video games bias towards tests
of reflexes or the ability to execute a complex
pattern consistently or with precision, and
this is a thing that you’re supposed to
like and desire and appreciate.
The vast majority of the challenge in World
of Warcraft Classic, however, is extremely
simple from an execution standpoint, and is
really more of a test of patience. I’m not
saying that as a bad thing, by the way. Tests
of endurance, tests of patience, are a form
of difficulty. It is a skill that is being
tested, but it’s still not what people are
typically referring to when they say “hard
games.”
WoW Classic is a very slow game, and it punishes
mistakes with heavy time costs, but even then
it’s not exactly as taxing as a marathon,
most of the content can be trivialized, the
vast majority of it is not particularly difficult
to execute, there’s no requirement to do
it in a single sitting or a tight timespan,
and it is certainly not more difficult to
execute than basically anything that came
afterwards.
All the difficulty is piled into a willingness
to wait, to be cautious, to spend time recovering
after every. Single. Fight. And a failure
of patience is typically met with a time sink
as punishment.
So there’s this syllogism at play where
we take three suppositions A - hard games
are good, B - I liked World of Warcraft in
2006, C - I like good games.
I liked World of Warcraft and I like good
games, therefore World of Warcraft was good,
and good games are hard games, therefore World
of Warcraft must have been hard, because I
like it and I like good games.
This isn’t really that weird, people do
tend to be pretty bad at figuring out why
they like the things they like, so they just
assume that their stated values apply to the
things they enjoy.
And yes, to bring this back around, World
of Warcraft has undeniably changed over the
years, and the changes have collectively been
dramatic. Not just changes in terms of graphical
updates, large swaths of new content, or the
world overhaul of Cataclysm, but philosophically.
The ideas answering questions like “what
makes good content” have shifted and morphed
over the years, often subtly, sometimes drastically.
I want to remove the outrage merchants from
the equation and contrast some of these changes
honestly, because while, on a personal level,
I think a lot of people have been hoodwinked
by outrage merchants into parroting bad, syllogistic
arguments, I don’t think people are being
disingenuous when they say they enjoyed WoW
more in the past than they do in the present
and that it’s not all nostalgia.
Nostalgia is, of course, an important part
of the overall picture: World of Warcraft
landed at a really formative time for a lot
of people, a time when they were in high school
or college and had a lot of free time, and
all their friends had a lot of free time,
and their life meshed well with the pace of
the game and the game became their shared
social space. That is a potent element, but
it’s not the whole story.
The Hashtag No Changes crowd has an entire
warehouse of rose coloured glasses, but that
doesn't mean classic is devoid of value if
you aren't wearing them.
We can’t un-cross a river, but if we walk
through this we can maybe put together a reasonable
portrait of the differences and understand
why some players justifiably feel like they’ve
been left behind by the changes over the years
and in turn what Classic has to offer.
World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth is a
very busy game. There is a lot to do and the
game has a tremendous array of content for
players of all stripes, ranging from player
versus player competition to skill-testing
group content to trivial minigames and ARG-style
community treasure hunts. With fifteen years
of iteration there are very few styles of
play that aren’t accounted for, in particular
if you are in the majority of players that
prefer a social solo experience, meaning that
you like having other people around, you like
the multiplayer elements being seamlessly
integrated and not a separate game mode, but
you still prefer to spend the majority of
your time playing alone. You don’t want
to have to coordinate multiple schedules just
to play the game.
Not only is there a lot to do, but most of
it can be completed in ten to twenty minute
chunks, with group activities taking bigger
commitments of around 30-45 minutes in the
case of dungeons or a couple hours in the
case of raids, so it’s an environment where
depending on how much time you have to play
there’s almost certainly something to do
that is a structured task with concrete rewards.
Island expeditions, arena, battlegrounds,
mythic dungeons, raiding, pet battles, world
quests, professions, achievements, collections,
special events, oh my.
In contrast WoW Classic has relatively little
variety when it comes to structured tasks.
There’s dungeons, there’s quests, there’s
professions, there’s raids, and eventually
there will be PvP battlegrounds. Though, once
you get to max level, well, quests are a finite
resource, it’s not even super difficult
to complete every possible high level quest
in the game. There is a very narrow, and deliberate
channel that players find themselves in: questing
leads to dungeons, and dungeons lead to raids,
and raids in Classic mostly require 40 players,
so they’re not exactly the kind of thing
you just casually toss together with the lads.
In fact, really, in order to field a raid
of 40 players you need a pool of sixty to
eighty players, minimum, to cover for different
roles, people who need to leave early, people
who can be there on Tuesday and Thursday,
but not Wednesday, people who aren’t part
of the core group but are basically the supply
line for the raid, providing materials and
consumables.
So there’s this pretty self-evident contrast:
between the game as it used to exist, with
relatively few defined activities, and the
game as it currently exists, awash in things
to do. But that’s just a surface level analysis,
and this is where I think things get interesting,
where we see something of what has been left
behind.
All of that content, all the different tasks
and parallel progression streams, they have
been added bit by bit over the years to free
players up so that they don't feel trapped
in that narrow channel of progression where
you either found a group of people you could
raid with, or you kind of ran out of things
to do. That’s good, because there are absolutely
things about that arrangement that really,
really suck.
The requirements in terms of time, players,
and materials, effectively creates a corporate
environment, where guilds that have the resources
to raid accrue a lot of social power.
Back in 2006 it wasn’t really that unusual
for a given server to only be able to support
one or two active raids per faction.
Actually, in 2005 the server hardware itself
literally couldn’t support more than one
raid engaging Nefarion at the same time, and
groups would need to coordinate across factions
because if two groups pulled the latency would
spike, and if three or more pulled the instance
server would crash.
Hashtag no changes!
which meant that you needed to bend to their
schedule and maybe needed to put up with a
lot of toxicity and harassment just to play
a video game. Because of the way that the
various mechanics interact, success one week
sets players up for more success next week,
so guilds that are doing well tend to attract
more players than they actually need, while
failure can quickly lead to a social death
spiral as experienced and geared players quit
or leave, increasing the odds of further failure.
Given that these raids represent a huge time
commitment it’s not unusual for guilds to
focus on hedging their bets and playing it
safe, only bringing the best geared players
with the most optimal classes. This can make
it difficult, if not impossible, for players
coming in late, who don’t already have the
best gear and only have a few hours per week
to play, to even get an invite to a group.
So there are very good reasons for a lot of
the changes, in particular providing comparable
progression tracks for players who want to
play mostly alone or just with a small group
of four, nine, ten friends instead of listening
to thirty nine assholes screaming whenever
someone pulls whelps in Onyxia’s Lair.
The next idiot f* who goes and aggros something
they ain't supposed to is not getting any
f*ing item for the next two f*ing weeks not
to mention 200 minus f*ing DKP is that enough
f*ing motivation for you to f*ing play proper?!
This toxicity is actually a deliberate design
choice, in a sense. EverQuest, and World of
Warcraft were built on a concept of social
dependency, the idea that the game was explicitly
hostile to solo play and that it was basically
impossible for a player to be truly self-sustaining.
World of Warcraft, as the friendlier version
of EverQuest, tempered that a lot, you can
get through most of the game solo, but it’s
definitely still there.
Questing with one or two other people is substantially
faster, and much safer. Since characters often
provide a force-multiplying factor to one
another the increase in speed is more than
simply linear.
With a friend you can do higher level quests
a lot earlier, which reduces the amount of
time spent moving between questing zones and
makes it a little less likely that you’ll
have to resort to grinding just to be able
to move on to a new area.
This social dependency is kinda compelling
and interesting in its own right, but it has
a few big weaknesses, namely that it means
players are essentially at the mercy of other
players, who may or may not be nice people,
and it relies on there being other players
in the same space as one another.
Right now, in the first months after release,
WoW Classic is a lot of fun to level through
because it’s in the sweet spot where there’s
a lot of players all kind of spread throughout
the whole level range, so no matter what level
you’re at or which stage of a quest chain
you’re on there’s probably someone else
nearby who’s either at the exact same spot
or pretty close to it.
If you need help with an elite opponent that
you can’t take on solo then during prime
time it’s probably only going to take a
few minutes or so before someone else comes
along looking to do the same quest.
But as time goes on more and more players
accumulate at the level cap, and while some
players compulsively level new characters
over and over, most players focus on a single
character. The result is that as the overall
population caps out the local population in
the lower and mid-level zones drops dramatically,
and social dependency only works if there’s
other players around to be dependent on.
Back in 2006 it wasn’t even particularly
weird to be literally the only player in Stonetalon
or Desolace at any given time.
So it definitely needs to be kept in mind
that while a lot of changes have been made
to speed up leveling, to reduce social dependency,
these changes have been made to address real
problems that emerge as MMOs mature, and a
lot of these problems loom over the future
of Classic.
So Blizzard has added all of this other stuff
to provide more dynamic alternatives, to widen
the ranges that characters can quest together,
to speed up the journey from level 1 to level
120, and to ensure that players at level cap
aren’t trapped on a dead server or held
hostage by the only assholes with a raiding
guild or simply excluded entirely from group
play because they chose a class that is less
optimal than another.
But with all of that added stuff, it is possible
to reach a point where there’s simply too
much to do, where there’s so many parallel
choices, all of which are at least somewhat
comparable in terms of their worth, that it
becomes paralyzing and difficult to focus.
You can get a decent amount done even if you
only have twenty to thirty minutes to play,
but that also means that over the course of
an hour you might be rapidly pinballing between
a dozen small tasks, and the line between
variety and chaos is a fine one.
What’s more, if everything is meaningful,
if it’s all significant content that provides
a reward of appropriate value, and they’re
all on daily or weekly reset timers, well,
at a certain point it stops feeling like options
and starts to feel like an obligation.
You’re running low on runes, you should
really do your Looking For Raid runs for the
week.
Have you done your emissary quests for the
day?
Gotta get at least a +10 in for the weekly
cache.
Don’t forget your island expeditions.
Trial of Style ends at midnight.
Mythic raid Tuesday Wednesday, Heroic alt
run on Thursday
Can’t forget your PvP cache
Are you ever going to finish that achievement?
Here’s where Classic has an unexpected strength:
if there’s nothing to do, if nothing is
“meaningful”, then you are free to self-direct.
[big pause]
Let’s talk about grinding.
Oh okay, so GravyCast wants to know what is
grinding? Well. WoW slang with Crystal!
so, grinding is when you keep killing the
same mobs in a particular area just over and
over again without the guidance of a quest
oh, that didn't work out well
F's in chat
Grinding is something of a hallmark of early
MMOs. It was pretty much taken for granted
that at some point in playing the game you
would find yourself standing in a field, killing
the same enemies over and over and over again.
Just an endless, rhythmic process that only
ends when your bags are full and you decide
“yeah, I guess I should head back to town”.
If you needed money to buy skills or a mount
or new equipment, this wasn’t the most efficient
way to get it, but it was the most straightforward.
I just want my raptor!
If a questing area was too competitive, if
there were line-ups for a quest target, maybe
it was a better idea to just go over to the
less popular spot with no quests and just
grind out a level or two so you can move on.
Oh my god!
Grinding isn’t something that anyone would
really describe as compelling gameplay. It’s
not very dynamic. It is, by definition, repetitive.
It’s the kind of thing that, intellectually,
everyone feels is kinda bad in a game because
while it’s not truly pointless it’s definitely
low on point.
But that aimlessness is maybe not all bad.
Grinding is, in essence, the purest distillation
of self-directed play. There’s no diegetic
authority telling the player what to do or
how to do it, there’s just a vague incentive
and the player’s own discretion about how
to get there.
Now, this is the same incentive set that led
to the addition of all those other tasks and
options to the game, and in a sense players
in 2019 have far, far more freedom in how
they go about achieving their general goals.
So at present players have more structured
options to engage with, but what we find in
the comparison between Classic and Battle
for Azeroth is that paradoxically adding more
content, more structured activities, can make
it feel like there are fewer options.
This happens because as you add more direction,
more structure, the emotional value of self-direction
goes down, and even if self-directed, freeform
play boils down to only a few viable options,
the fact that there’s nothing telling you
to do it, well that does a lot for the illusion
of openness.
And I should say that I’m not using “illusion”
here as a pejorative. I love illusions. I
crave a well-crafted illusion, and Classic
delivers them in spades. For a while, at least.
At some point in the last 15 years, gradually,
bit by bit, the game has discarded most of
these illusions, in a lot of ways because
the players grew past them. Spend enough time
with an illusion and you start to see through
it, you figure it out, and at a certain point
you just want it to be honest with you.
And that honesty, laying out mechanics, revealing
the nuts and bolts of how it all works, just
telling players where the quests are and how
to complete them, providing a dozen alternate
ways to level, letting them fly over every
hill, it’s not a bad approach, but it’s
mutually exclusive with mystery and the illusion
of a wide-open world.
You can, in Battle for Azeroth, level up by
running around in circles endlessly killing
murlocs, but the whole time that you do it
there’s the overhanging knowledge that there’s
so many better, more efficient, structured,
organized, sanctioned, fun ways of doing it,
so why are you bothering?
In Classic, well, everything sucks, so…
you’re free: do whatever you want. Is aimless
grinding better experience than questing?
Generally no, buuuuuuut… it’s not that
much worse, either. There is a kind of freedom
in the lack of structured options. Anything
you choose to do is about as good as anything
else.
There’s a simplicity to that, a clarity
that the game has definitely moved away from.
And, again, that’s not bad. Leveling in
Battle for Azeroth is a lot more dynamic and
less punishing, but it’s also a lot more
dense, more noisy, and less meditative. It’s
a rush to get to level cap, because that’s
where all the players are.
And the thing is that for most players, that’s
what they want.
The aimless, self-directed play of Classic
is cute and interesting, but wears out quickly.
There’s only so many times you can grief
Alliance at Marris Stead before you’re just
done with it. The first time you have to wait
thirty minutes for a party member to get to
the dungeon, because they were on the other
side of the world and it just takes that long
to get anywhere, it’s a drinking game style
moment.
But, by the third or fourth time you just
really, really wish they’d turn the damn
summoning stones back on.
However, for players who not only enjoy that
illusion of open ended freedom and the pace
that comes with it, but prefer it, it makes
sense that they maybe feel like the game has
left them behind over
the years.
Horse doovres
F's in chat
