68 PCWorld OCTOBER 2019REVIEWS WOW CLASSIC
This sense of a linear
history that mimics what we
find in the real world is what
spurred the concept of the
“good ol’ days” in WoW to
begin with. It makes looking
at screenshots feel like
looking at photos from the
past. World of Warcraft has
definable eras, much as the
real world, and it’s lasted for
so long that you can even
point to different
generations of players. 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.pcworld.com/apww].) 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 andthe 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 before 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 seems liked
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 tapSneaking into Hyjal was technically breaking the rules, but it always
made people think you were cool.