OCTOBER 2019 MACWORLD 29before YouTube, and so we all kept our
boss strategies close to the chest and
experimented with occasionally wacky
tactics. (We once tried to tank the fire lord
Ragnaros with a hunter because it seemed
like maybe that was the trick. It didn’t work
out so well.) Even gear was a mystery, and
so whole books’ worth of text were written
with “theorycrafting” for optimizing what
you wore. There was always so much to
learn, and we had little idea of how our
tidy “worldview” would change with the
next big patch.
But there’s none of that now. There are
no true surprises. Anyone playing Classic
can tap a few keys and immediately know
how to defeat Ragnaros through Google
or YouTube. Even if one player insists on
not looking up anything, there’s always
going to be that one guy in the group whoplayers. This linear
history lent power to
the stories of “how it
used to be.”
WoW Classic,
though, shatters this
concept of a shared
history, and as
Classic ages, it’ll be
increasingly hard to
tell whether
someone is referring
to Classic or the
“real” version from
the mid-2000s. And with that, its world
feels a little less “real.”
NOTHING LEFT TO DISCOVER
That’s a shame, as Classic will always lack
one of the key ingredients that made the
original so appealing: discovery. (I’ve
argued this before (go.macworld.com/
nthn).) In WoW Classic as it exists now,
there’s nothing to truly discover.
The concept of exploring such a vast
and seamless world in itself felt innovative
in 2004, as the Internet was still a fun
place and the idea of playing with some
dude on the other side of the country still
felt novel. We enjoyed sneaking into
unreleased zones like Mount Hyjal
precisely because we had no idea what
Blizzard had planned for them. Videos
took ages longer to download in the days
I do miss big server events, though.