66 PCWorld OCTOBER 2019REVIEWS WOW CLASSIC
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 last
night’s massive login queues and Twitch
numbers (go.pcworld.com/tnum) 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.pcworld.com/hggr).
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 wecalled it) game is hosted on the official game
itself—instead of on rogue servers like
Nostalrius Begins (go.pcworld.com/nbgn),
which helped spur the 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 (go.pcworld.com/bfaz) expansion
or the garrisons in 2014’s Warlords of“Did somebody say...?” (Risen on Alleria spawning Thunderaan for the first time.)