around community. Old guilds and players
are getting back together, and Classic
would never have been developed if it
wasn’t for those players clamoring for it.
Dawson, who used to lead an alliance
of two guilds, says he’s already had people
reach out about playing again, and no
conversation about the early days of
World of Warcraft is complete without
talking about the surprising friendships
that sprung out of it. That tighter sense of
community, even after it started to attract
millions of players, was in large part
thanks to finding groups for dungeons.
“The group forming experience was
sort of organic,” he says. “LF 1 more
Stratholme, right? So once you’ve found
that person and they did well and you
started talking to each other there, you
want to do it again. I remember recruiting
so many people into my guild just by doing
that, just by running dungeons and inviting
them to our raids.”
Before long, a group got together for a
PvP brawl, trekking from all over the world
for a spot of bloodletting after they settled
on a place they all remembered. They
chatted in-game and shouted across the
hall, getting the logistics out of the way so
they could get to the fighting. There might
not be pet battles, rotating world quests
or a dizzying array of dungeons and
dungeon types, but Classic will still offer
up plenty of things to do between
wandering around murdering surprisingly
tough animals, as long as people are
looking for groups and fights.
“I think there will be a lot of people who
come in and see it as an alternative or a
tourism thing, who want to see what
Classic is like, but what we’re planning for
is the people who’ll stick around,” says
Dawson. “Three weeks, four weeks after
launch, they’re in there, they’re getting
ready for Molten Core, they’re gearing up
for raids, they’re going to start doing world
bosses when that content unlocks, and
that’s what we’re looking to make sure we
have a realm population to support. There
are a lot of people who are super
interested in that experience, and we’re
committed to deliver it.”
Players are going to reach the point
where they’re ready to raid at different
times, so Blizzard’s spacing out thecadence of updates. Classic will go from
1.12 to the arrival of Naxxramas and the
Scourge Invasion two patches at a time,
largely following the original order, though
with a few exceptions.
“It’s intended to unlock the raid
progression content primarily, and also
the battleground content,” Birmingham
explains. “We wanted to make sure that
the power progression didn’t jump
immediately to the end. We wanted
people to feel like there was a sense of
progression for each of the raid tiers.”
By spreading it out, there will be time
for players to find guilds, forge (or reforge)
some friendships, and encase themselves
in the best gear before marching into
Onyxia’s Lair or the other original raids.
But mucking around in the jungle with my
level 40 orc, preparing for the endgame
seemed like a distant challenge. I was still
at the odd jobs part of my heroic journey
and trying to figure out a barely
recognizable class.
As I ran away from one raptor too
many, it dawned on me that I should
probably check out all the stuff crammed
into my hotbars. Remember when you
had lots of different tracking abilities that
could only be activated one at a time?
They’re back! It’s inconvenient, and means
you have lots of ultra-specific, mostly
useless abilities, but there’s something
reassuring about how staunchly Blizzard
is sticking to the way things were, and
there are some benefits that come along
with the little frustrations.POINTED DECISIONS
Building your hunter or mage or whatever
you pick is considerably more involved
than the modern version makes it, and
messier, but it’s liberating. With every
point put into your talents, you might be
making a terrible mistake, but that’s a little
bit exciting. It’s all small, incremental
improvements, but you’re constantly
being given decisions about your build and
new points to put into it. And there are so
many points! And paths! With all the
streamlining and class transformations,
much of it welcome, World of Warcraft has
lost some of its traditional RPG chops.
Even unintended stuff has made its
way back in, like spell batching. Because
of the way the old servers processed
player actions in batches, it allowed
players to polymorph each other at the
same time even if in reality there was a
short delay. You’ll be able to do
simultaneous polymorphing to your
heart’s content in Classic, but it had someWITH EVERY POINT PUT INTO
YOUR TALENTS, YOU MIGHT BE
MAKING A TERRIBLE MISTAKEWorld of Warc raf t Cla ssic
PREVIEW
Revisit old raids and
get some classic clobber.Walking around everywhere
is exhausting work.