OCTOBER 2019 MACWORLD 27the creation of WoW Classic—it diminishes
WoW’s status as a successfully versatile
cultural force.ALTERNATE HISTORY
Nothing has kept WoW relevant so much
as its success in adapting itself to
changing tastes, audiences, and play
styles. At BlizzCon, even in the wake of
other successful Blizzard games like
Overwatch, World of Warcraft still gets
many of the biggest cheers.
Sometimes Blizzard will stumble with
WoW’s design as it did with some of the
progression mechanics in the current
Battle for Azeroth expansion or the
garrisons in 2014’s Warlords of Draenor,
but it usually manages to redeem itself
with a followup patch (as it largely does
with the latest Rise of Azshara [go.
macworld.com/azsh] content drop in the
main game). Some of WoW’s changes over
the last decade have felt excessive (or at
least unnecessary), but I highly doubt WoW
would have retained so much of its
popularity had it clung to the same design
we find in Classic. And by any realistic
measure, World of Warcraft is one of
gaming’s most stunning success stories.
Part of that success, though, has a lot
to do with the fact that the game’s official
timeline has unfolded in one unbroken line
from 2004 until now. Most games feel
anchored to a certain point in history, or—quest markers, and enemies so tough that
you feel compelled to group up with other
players to beat them. Together, features
like these made World of Warcraft’s
earliest incarnation more social than its
current form, and almost 15 years ago they
helped lay the foundation for some of the
most enduring friendships of my life.
Yet it’s important to remember that
Classic isn’t a hard reset—a reboot that
gives us a truly new game with wildly
different storylines with content patches.
So far, at least, Classic looks as though it’ll
be the same World of Warcraft we knew all
those years ago with roughly the same
patch schedules and combat class nerfs,
although hopefully with fewer bugs. It’s no
doubt popular, as the launch’s massive
login queues and Twitch numbers (go.
macworld.com/twnm) confirm: At one point,
more than one million people tuned in to
watch folks slowly slaughter 30-50 feral
hogs and find themselves slaughtered by
Hogger (go.macworld.com/hogr).
But World of Warcraft Classic also feels
like a rejection of everything that has kept
WoW a relevant cultural phenomenon in
the first place. On Blizzard’s end, it slightly
looks like surrender, or at least the partial
closing of a door. Now that the original
“Vanilla” (as we called it) game is hosted
on the official game itself—instead of on
rogue servers like Nostalrius Begins (go.
macworld.com/nost), which helped spur