In 2018 we have dungeon matchmaking, easy quest tracking, and the equivalent of an entire Pokémon MMO stuffed in as an extra feature. Of course, getting back on the horse of vanilla mechanics is a rough ride if you’re used to the huge effort Blizzard have since put into the game’s user experience. When I logged into Classic, people were standing around chatting about Chuck Norris. This major questing hub was also the central meeting point for the infamous Denizens of Barrens Chat, the text chatroom solely for people playing in that area of the map. Suddenly, WoW Classic is glowing, and it’s not just due to all the nostalgia.Īfter logging in and rapidly recreating my first ever character (Thorox, the Tauren Arms Warrior - easy, given there’s far less choice in Classic), I found myself in one of the most iconic locations in the game’s history: The Crossroads, a hub of Horde tents and a postbox in the middle of the dead, dry plains of the Barrens. But bump it up to the top setting and the game fills out the terrain with wavy grass, nicer skyboxes and better lighting. Sure, if you’re running it on an older computer, or one with less graphical capability, it’s probably going to look about the same as you remember it, save for the resolution. Most noticeable is the ability to boost the graphics past what was achievable over a decade ago, as well as the current version's secondary settings for when you’re in a raid or battleground instance. Though Classic is much larger than its launch edition, it’s had some quality of life stuff bundled in this time. WoW has always run on a strange hybrid of new and old cod. It tells you it’s copying files, rather than downloading them, but the file size is a fraction of WoW’s current total. The BlizzCon demo this week presented us with a playable leap back through time. Blizzard have made no secret of how they feel about unauthorised versions of the game, but the time has finally arrived for an official one. There’ve been opportunities to experience it like that before, of course, if you were willing to dip your toe into the waters of the private server community. In 2017 Blizzard announced World of Warcraft: Classic, a way to play WoW near-as-dammit as it was when it first came out.
I took one step into Azeroth and began a journey that still hasn’t ended. It was also the house where, on Christmas Eve 2005, I came home with a copy of World of Warcraft, an exciting new game based on the lore of a strategy game I already loved. It wasn’t a bad house, but my view of it was compromised by all the other places I’d lived since. It felt strange, walking into rooms filled with memories, where everything felt smaller, older. When I was in my late twenties, I went back to visit the house I’d grown up in.