Blizzcon’s opening ceremony was interesting for WoW, in that it set forward something of a bold new path. I plan to talk more about the modern game info after panels and discussion have taken place, but I think I can reasonably sum up the Classic news and discuss my experience with Classic and how my opinion of it has shifted in a way that plays directly into what Blizzard is doing.

So Why Play Classic, Anyways?

Something I’ve grappled with quite publicly here is this – why would I play the old eras of the game I was around for? To me, I liked those old eras, but for me, they’re best left in the past. I’ve made it a point to talk about Classic being a good thing, because I do genuinely believe it is – modern WoW cannot and does not appeal to all and so having the older versions is good for that, as well as for the very real and necessary practice of cultural preservation – given that WoW shaped a generation of MMOs and is an inexorable part of pop culture for much of the last two decades, it is a good idea to have that available.

For me, I look at my experiences in those prior eras of the game as what I have come to call “imperfectly perfect.” I played them, didn’t do all the content or accomplish all my goals, but to me it feels empty to go back and play it now to try and make things up from that past era. I respect and appreciate the people who gneuinely prefer the Classic experience, especially of a given era of their choosing, but my time in it was good and I’ve moved on. For me, going back to play the old content and do it “better” feels like it would be equally as desparate and sad as someone trying to relive high school. The memories I have, positive and negative, of old WoW in any era are tied up in a pile of circumstances both within and without the game – the relationships I formed in the game, my circumstances outside of it, and the nostalgia I do feel for those bygone days is a composite product of all of those things.

Most people I know that play Classic do so because they genuinely prefer the older experience, and that’s exactly why it should exist. Maybe the current game has left them behind with faster combat and more skills that lead to higher skill floors, maybe they don’t like the lobbylike nature of the current game, the lack of emphasis on worldbuilding – it’s all valid and down to personal taste. For me, I think the thing that has resonated with me to this point is that I, more than anything, appreciate and seek novelty in my gameplay experiences, and so modern WoW has always held its own for me because it always offers new experiences, even if some of those are not particularly, well, good.

And until Hardcore Classic, I kind of concluded that I would just never really want to play Classic. Even for the eras I liked, it just felt like I would go back and relive high school – doing stuff I already did with maybe 10% new-to-me experiences for the sake of being able to say I did it. And for as much as I do like achieving things in-game, I never particularly cared that much to go back and see, say, Heroic Anub’arak 25 player with the tribute chest rewards. Would it be neat in a way to do? Sure! Do I want to invest the time into going back to see about 3 fights I never did on content? Absolutely not.

But Hardcore changes the game a fair bit.

And New

Hardcore and the idea of Classic Plus are both fascinating looks at what could be done within WoW Classic. A lot of what people like about Classic can be distilled to multiple different ideas – talent design, overall gameplay, the sense of world and scope – and all of these things could, crucially, still be delivered with changes in a way that makes the game fundamentally different but familiar.

Hardcore opened my eyes to what I actually want, personally, from Classic – the old wrapper around new experiences and gameplay. Hardcore is such a small but substantial change, because it doesn’t really change the actual class and spec gameplay, but it does absolutely transform how you interact with the world and chase your goals. Every pull changes in character drastically for it – it’s hard to remember now, but one of the biggest things about WoW compared to the genre at large at launch is how little consequence death had, which made interacting with WoW much more amenable to throwing yourself at challenges until you could break them off, where Hardcore completely changes that and means you absolutely do NOT want to do that.

It’s new, it’s novel, and it allows the Classic gameplay and design to remain core to the experience while still making something new and different. For me, this was absolutely the nudge I needed to want to play at least a bit more of Classic than I ever had before, and I have poured some number of hours into Classic Hardcore to kind of feel out the experience.

This was sort of revelatory, because while the idea of replaying even Wrath, Cataclysm, or hell Legion just isn’t appealing to me, but playing at a certain point in the game with new content added in today, whether that’s a ruleset change or actual new zones, dungeons, or even raids absolutely is. There’s a lot of room to transplant new content and new rules to the existing game as it was in a given era of WoW, to expand the things you can do with whatever your preferred era of gameplay design is. One thing that I’ve always pointed out, because I found it the most egregious fib from the Classic community, is that old WoW definitively is not difficult content – it was Blizzard’s first crack at designing most of what they’ve made their trade in the years since, and so raiding Classic is an exercise, as it ever was, in logistics more than actual gameplay difficulty, and what often was difficult was the friction of gameplay design of classes and specs versus the simple content on offer. It could still offer a challenge, but it was never that great of a challenge and there’s a fairly straightforward reason why every new content drop in Classic is thoroughly trounced in minutes, hours, or just barely days. But what if the designers of today, armed with almost 20 years of learning and improvement, could make content for those older eras? What if content was designed for Classic that takes those lessons and forms them around the class, spec, and overall design paradigm of 2004? That would be something, eh?

That’s the hope I had with my prediction post for Blizzcon 2023, the idea that some form of Classic Plus would take the stage. And, well…it did. Sort of.

Season of Discovery

Season of Discovery as a concept is a pretty cool approach to Classic, combining Holly Longdale’s experience on EQ classic server implementations and events with the desire of the community for more to do in Classic. It sets up a limited level cap (launching at level 25) and puts out ways for players to discover new abilities to drastically transform their classes – the examples given in the keynote were tanking Warlocks and healing Mages. This is coupled with new pieces of content that transform the game while still using old assets – the initial Season of Discovery endgame at level 25 will have a Blackfathom Deeps raid, which is an interesting and cool way to use one of the larger low-level dungeons of Classic.

Coupled with the new features and content is something cool and potentially terrifying – no PTR testing. On the one hand, it’s Classic – the balanace and overall design are well-worn. On the other hand, the changes are pretty substantial and so there’s reason to wonder how they’ll stick the landing on balance and ensuring that an emergent meta doesn’t strangle the game in this mode. And maybe, in truth, it doesn’t matter if it’s balanced that well, because maybe the point is just to goof around with some unique gameplay ideas without it needing to be strictly balanced.

Until the panel later today, we won’t know more, but it is an interesting first stab at something resembling bespoke new content for Classic. It fits in line with how Holly Longdale handled events on EQ classic servers and it opens up the possibility space even more into the future for even more additions of this nature to potentially come along. As an overall shift in strategy, I am very much here for it – I’d love to see them continue to roll out old expansions one at a time and then use the time between to pad out with these shifts in gameplay for existing, already-deployed eras of Classic.