Looking at an old game like World Of Warcraft Classic is always, in theory, a balancing act. These old games exist to tickle our nostalgia bones and in some cases serve as formative works and warnings for the future game designers among us. Even by keeping that in mind, this is still a product being offered to play today, so I put on my rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and dreaded going back to the old school World of Warcraft. After going at it for a while, my conclusions are that it’s still a somewhat enjoyable game but ultimately a snapshot of a different time where I had way much time for MMOs and lower expectations of what the genre could do.
I decided to go with a Night Elf Hunter because I wanted an easier experience, and the pet class seemed like it would be safe, with a creature tanking for me while I shot arrows at enemies. I got into the game and everything hit me at once, the old systems, stats, skills, strange limitations to the range you can use certain weapons, ammo for ranged attacks, all of it. Having not played ‘retail’ WoW in a bit, I almost felt like this looked a lot like how the game is right now (it doesn’t play at all the same) and I went questing.
The beginning of the game wasn’t too bad on the questing side, I had enough stuff to do and I leveled quickly enough. My lack of moves (I started with the basic shot and some melee special abilities) didn’t hit me too hard and I trucked along. There is a lot of aimless wandering in WoW Classic, having to go to your class trainers to learn new skills is particularly egregious on that front. But I kept on playing, learned a few new skills and continued doing quests. Some of them were weird and I looked up guides for most of them in order to progress through the game more quickly, which is useful because you aren’t shown exactly where you need to go in old WoW.
I knew things would be that way, but I died a fair amount of times. Fighting a bunch of enemies in a row gets really tough if you don’t have potions or if you’re not safely above their level and fighting a bunch of enemies together often spells certain doom. Having a pet helped me take a bit of the pressure off but sometimes things went south. I had help from other players in a few quests, but otherwise I managed to go through most of the content alone. I also decided to take on leatherworking and skinning to have more things to do and it was a nice distraction, but not extremely useful.
After a while the game showed its true colors as an old-school MMO; I couldn’t just keep doing quests in order in the zone I started from. I had to go all around the world and figure out what would be possible, which meant a lot of pointless wandering around. I remember that well from Maple Story (and even more in Ragnarok Online) where you just had to find what to do next and things became more difficult to enjoy. I feel like the beginning of WoW Classic (maybe the first 17 levels?) are a pretty good experience, but the more you progress, the more you have to look for the next fun thing. Maybe if I died less, I would’ve kept playing, but I decided that level 25 was as high as I would go.
I had a good time with WoW Classic, but wouldn’t really play it for fun nowadays, there are just too many great games to play to stay stuck in the past.
