World of Warcraft Classic is on the brink of an absolute disaster.
Since its inception, Classic has been driving full speed at a concrete wall. Like any game that receives significant changes, it was inevitable that the massively popular World of Warcraft would have players that preferred an older version of the game than what it’s become. For many games, this is never more than a bubbling sentiment in the community. “The latest Dragon Ball FighterZ patch ruins that game.” “Stellaris was better at launch.” “Adding neutral items made Dota 2 worse.” You hear these sorts of things all the time, but they don’t derail the game itself. (For fun, guess which one of these three I actually believe!)
World of Warcraft suffers in this matter from a higher level of emotional investment from its players. It’s not just a game to many people, it’s the game. WoW has been operating for almost twenty years, and at its peak, twelve million people were paying fifteen bucks a month to play it. Players made lifelong friends through WoW, got married because of WoW, flunked out of college because of WoW. (No mom, it wasn’t JUST WoW, ok?! I was very depressed too. These things happen.) Blizzard’s juggernaut MMO has left a huge mark on people’s lives and hearts, and their feelings about it are as potent as you’d imagine.
People were running private WoW servers since the first expansion hit, taking matters into their own hands to ensure they were playing the version of the game they liked best. But this was extreme behavior- nothing like mainstream. Sure, we’d grouse about the talent tree changes, or mourn the loss of faction identity as the Horde and Alliance gradually lost elements that distinguished them from each other, but there was no real community looking for a way to play an old version of World of Warcraft.
Until Cataclysm, that is.
The appropriately-named third expansion to World of Warcraft involved a disaster of nearly unimaginable proportions rocking the world of Azeroth. A villain from Warcraft 2, Deathwing the Destroyer, made as good as his name and shattered the land itself, warping the familiar landscape of the game beyond recognition. Blizzard had decided that the biggest obstacle to growing their player base was the old, outdated, and clunky level design of the original areas they’d built, and through an in-world catastrophe, they could wipe the board clean and redo nearly all of it. The core of the game, the continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, were massively reworked. Some areas were given a light touch, where others were aggressively rebuilt to completely change their identity. Landmarks were destroyed. Quests and storylines were erased. Familiar NPCs disappeared. And all the changes were ironclad- there was no going back to how things were before. There was no avenue to revisiting the game that WoW was at launch. That world was gone.
Players were furious. This was a game that had meant so much to them, and they’d taken so much of it and just thrown it away. In one fell swoop, the places and characters they’d fallen in love with were simply… gone. I’m of the opinion that Blizzard was fundamentally correct in its approach: the old content was the first thing you saw, and it was off-putting to new players. It did feel outdated and clunky, and pushed people away. But it was also a home to so many. Putting new players on a different track was all well and good, but offering no way to see the older content, when there was so much of it that was so well loved, and the setting itself makes heavy use of time travel and portals? It was a somewhat baffling decision to go that far.
The voices demanding access to an old version of the game weren’t just on the fringes anymore. After Cataclysm, there was a strong core of players former and present saying one thing: they wanted to go back to vanilla WoW. They wanted to see the old world again. I wanted to see the old world again. I wanted to walk the vineyard in Elwynn Forest, not see it burnt to the ground. I wanted the quiet tension of the old Deadmines, a hideout for pirates and raiders, not the amusement park ride they turned it into. I wanted to go home.
Blizzard dug in its heels. It was a matter of pride that they wouldn’t yield on this: they had new things to show you, and they didn’t want you looking at their messy old work. It’s a feeling any creative can understand- there are things I’ve published that are now gone from the internet, and I’m happier for it. I’m a better creator, I’m embarrassed by how poor that work was, and I’d rather you look at what I’m doing now, rather than spend time on something I made a decade ago. So for nearly a decade, they resisted. But World of Warcraft is a huge game, backed by a huge company, and one thing trumps all: profit. As time passed, and World of Warcraft steadily bled subscribers, the pressure mounted.
I can’t tell you what the internal meetings were like. I have never been invited to a private meeting of Activision shareholders. But it’s so easy to imagine, isn’t it? WoW was once the biggest game in the world, and no one wants to mess with a winning formula. But as the results grow less and less impressive, the voices of dissent rise. Why don’t you just give the players what they want? Surely you have an old build lying around somewhere. Fix it up and put it out. Your creative vision? You can tell me about your “creative vision” when it generates profits. Get this done.
And so, in 2019, nine years after the old world disappeared, World of Warcraft Classic was released. From the outside looking in as a former WoW player, I sneered. “So, you caved to the olds,” I laughed. “They don’t want old WoW. Not really. They want their memories of old WoW. This isn’t going to satisfy anyone.” I was telling myself as much as anyone. I wanted to go back myself, but it couldn’t be a real feeling. My memory was distorted by rose-tinted glasses, and the design wouldn’t hold up if I went back to it. I needed to move on, and not dwell on pleasant memories- and the rest of the player base needed to do the same. Quiet in my confidence, I waited for WoW Classic to be shuttered. For the bad buzz. For people to admit that it was just nostalgia, and they were wrong to ask for it.
The backlash never came. The community seemed… happy, in a bizarre and confusing way. There wasn’t a lot of chatter, just people playing this old game, and enjoying themselves. And when I finally caved and needed to know myself, I booted up World of Warcraft Classic and found a world I’d dearly missed, and design that WoW had left behind, but hit as hard as ever. The shadows were dangerous, the victories were hard-fought. The friction that had long been sanded away in non-Classic WoW was here in all its rough charisma, reminding you of the joy of difficulty and obstacles to success. And it wasn’t just a one-off release, either: there were clear plans to keep updating Classic with more things to do.
Content from the original WoW was rolled out in phases, and then in 2021, they released World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic, a Classic version of the first expansion. Oh, so they were going to do Classic versions of the expansions too, huh? And the moment that was clear, a timer started ticking. So you’d do phases of Burning Crusade content for a number of months, then you’d announce Wrath of the Lich King Classic, based on the second expansion (and incidentally, the all-time height of WoW’s popularity). You’d launch that, then do waves of Wrath content.
And then what?
No, seriously: and then what? Are you going to do Cataclysm Classic? That’s like announcing Marvel vs Capcom Infinite Classic! Nah gang, people were so mad at Infinite they went back to its predecessor Marvel vs Capcom 3! The release of Cataclysm, and what it did to the game, is the reason people want a Classic release at all! At that point, the whole project has no meaning, and very likely won’t appeal to an audience either. It’s not like any areas have been erased from the game in the time since Cataclysm– Blizzard certainly learned their lesson and never did that again. So what would even make this “Classic?” The level progression? The class balance? Is that really worth its own servers, its own executable?
If you’re like Scanline Media staffer Kyrie, this is the point where you joke, “What about WoW Classic Classic?” But, uh. They already did that. No, seriously: they actually already did that. If you mean going back to the beginning again, they are running WoW Classic servers that don’t have any expansions, just the base game. You can go play that. Or if you’re being even more cartoonish and silly, and saying “make it more Classic than it ever actually was,” well… this year they started WoW Classic Hardcore servers. WoW used to be so much harder and more obtuse- that’s part of that Classic feel, yeah? So what if we took it to the logical extreme and made Classic servers where if you die once, your character gets deleted? Yeah. They did that. It’s more classic than Classic. It’s frankly unhinged, and the fact that people have not only leveled to 60 without dying in its unforgiving world that wasn’t designed for this, but even beaten the hardest raid in the game like that is a testament to obsession, tenacity, and just sheer What the Fuck-ery.
geared up, and beaten the game’s first raid, Molten Core, all without dying. They frighten me as much as they impress me.
So let me take you back to the question: and then what? What the hell do you do? You’ve been driving full speed for four years now, and it’s been a blast. I have problems with some of the choices made with WoW Classic, but I’ve still had my fun with it, and they’re even planning on addressing a long-running objection of mine in the next patch. But from the outset, you’ve known that this road is a dead end. And yet you’re not slowing down, you’re not telling any passengers that you’re planning on stopping. So what is the plan?!
I’ve discussed the possibilities with my friend Liam, host of Level With You, a WoW Classic podcast. Liam’s far more of a WoW vet than me, and also much more experienced with the Classic project. Their idea is that Blizzard might adapt the dungeons and raids of Cataclysm as a wave of content scaled for Wrath of the Lich King, without ever adding its areas or redo of the old world. Then you can just move on to the next expansion like Cataclysm never happened. It’s a fascinating possibility, but I wonder if Blizzard is ok cutting Cataclysm up like that. It feels like admitting defeat- as established, that’s not historically been a strength of theirs.
They could also add Cataclysm in its entirety while giving you a way to access the old content. It’s not unprecedented- there are locations in non-Classic WoW where you can switch between new and old versions of a zone. That’s talking about individual zones, so it’s a few orders of magnitude larger to ask them to do it to the whole world… but there’s no reason they couldn’t. They could just skip Cataclysm entirely, and move straight to the well-liked Mists of Pandaria. Or I suppose they could just stop. They could announce that Wrath of the Lich King Classic is as far as the Classic project goes, and it will now run without any further major content patches.
Cataclysm is not a bad expansion, but the way it was handled lacked understanding of the community, and the foresight to see how it would hurt the game long-term. Three expansions later, in 2016, Legion would once again put the future of WoW into question. At the time, I wrote that Legion was such a thorough cashing of all the lore and story they’d written to that point that I was worried they’d have nothing good left afterwards. In the subsequent expansions Shadowlands and Dragonflight, that prediction proved devastatingly accurate. Once again, WoW had burned its own beloved content and ended up weaker for it.
There are ways to do this right. The possibilities for the future for WoW Classic are bright- this could be the chance to do it all again, to make the best possible version of a beloved game! Personally, I prefer the path of adding the expansion but leaving a way to see the old world still, but I’m willing to consider other possibilities. Unfortunately, we’re talking about Blizzard. As much as I respect their imaginative design and the games borne from it, their support of those games over time has been wildly inconsistent. Ask the Overwatch community how that’s going. Ask the StarCraft community how that’s going. And shit, ask the WoW community if Cataclysm was a good idea, or how well Blizzard followed up the climax that was Legion. Am I optimistic about the future of WoW Classic? No. No I am not.
Buuuut they are finally adding the Group Finder back in, so maybe there’s hope they can swallow their own arrogance and save the game. Even if they can’t, I can once again party queue for the Deadmines, and that experience is truly worth its weight in gold.
