WoW Classic review: smooth return to 2006

September 2, 2019 An earlier version of this review was based on the upgrade in beta tests of WoW Classic. It has now been updated after a week of play after its full launch.

World of Warcraft Classic is also identical to the original WoW 2006 1.12 patch version that developer-publisher Blizzard can handle. Even if it works on WoW's modern engine, you'll never know it when you play: it's all about the reality of the game almost 13 years ago.

At the time, World of Warcraft was a revolutionary success. He revolutionized massively multiplayer online games in the West, where the audience had never exceeded half a million visitors in the EverQuest era. The Activision-Blizzard parent company does not publish Warcraft's current subscription numbers, but while they are certainly down from the next 10 to 12 million glory ratings, most estimates rank them well in seven digits. Fifteen years after its launch, World of Warcraft is still performing.

One of the reasons for this popularity is WoW's accessibility to the genre. Everything from exclamation points to the heads of the quest givers – so players do not have to talk to all the NPCs to know which ones have a mission – to the idea that it's possible to level by doing only quests, rather than creak them endlessly. "By killing monsters again and again, helped bring new MMO players into WoW's embrace." The bright colors and the slightly caricatured aesthetic of the game allowed to emphasize this opening, this concept that everyone could play, and play that he played.

I've been playing Warcraft more or less continuously since the last days of extensive alpha testing, about six months before the November 2004 release of the game. Returning to Classic's 1.12 patch after 13 years, I was surprised at how much game is still relevant. Yes, the graphics are big and terrible compared to the modern game. The almost constant voice play and the feeling that all major quest centers are organized in one scenario are missing.

But the difficulty of the classic upgrade, compared to that of modern WoW, forces your attention on the upgrade itself rather than on the final. If you are not in a first world guild, it will probably take you at least a few weeks to reach age 60 and prepare for the raid. And this is a good thing.

I found myself doing things I would never have done in modern WoW, where I always strive to level and maximize. I enjoyed the leveling process for the first time in a decade. It was fun in the betas, but it's even better live. That's because, for every bump and queue of servers and slow named groups that need to kill, there are groups of players by my side that frankly include the nicest players I've seen in the game … all time.

Need a bag to hold things? Someone will sell it at cost. Do you see someone killing things that you also have to kill? They will invite you to group you. And in some cases, they will line up to give everyone the opportunity to fall for a quest if they wait their turn. Watch this amazing screenshot of Don Mears player:

It's a line of people at play who are patiently waiting to kill Grik'nir the Cold at Dun Morough. Mears is one of thousands of people who have seen similar lines on a wide variety of servers in North America and Europe. There is a stack of these screenshots on Twitter. I have never seen this kind of cooperation or play among the people of Warcraft, ever. For those who say "look, people have become nice as they were vanilla", I'll tell you: I played vanilla WoW. A lot. Too much. This has never happened.

People in Classic are nicer that people with vanilla were. They may need to be successful in the game or adults who now remember the kindness of kindness and respect for this (partially imagined) norm. But the end result is that WoW Classic has been a very good place to be this week.

Yes, the content of the quest is largely the same as in the modern game, although many areas have been redeveloped over the years and the rediscovery of these ancient quests is often a nostalgia. The vast, unbroken expanses of zhevra runners without grass and hooves in Crossroads, as well as the Defias bandit and gnolls collections "you can not draw one", are a welcome sight after the ravages that Cataclysm and others expansions inflicted thereafter. these areas.

But the #nochanges Classic approach, which has quickly become a meme, really stands out. Nothing in the original game has been simplified – or "summoned", to rephrase a sentence, to give you a boost at level 60. The implementation itself is very sweet; most of the remaining bugs are original, intentionally left in the game and now to "wanted behavior". Only the frame surrounding the game – possibility to send Battle.net whispers, the launcher itself and similar furniture index that it is not 2006.

It remains to be seen how many players remain with Classic after the attack that flooded its servers last week. The director of the game, Ion Hazzikostas, in an interview with me before the launch, said that Blizzard hoped that each of the servers would fall into a single "layer" of players, a few thousand, a few weeks after the game's launch. -being to establish more servers – what Blizzard has en masse – but this suggests a long-term population of one-tenth or less of the players expected the day of launching some servers.

This seems about right for a game entirely based on the memory principle. Nevertheless, for those who stay on this well-implemented path, unique rewards await you. And some of them are the players they will meet.

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