Some Guild Wars players like Pre-Searing Ascalon. So much so, in fact, that there is an entire subculture in the game built around staying in that idyllic time period forever, rather than leaving the digital womb and letting the Charr take over. See, the Cataclysm, er, Searing changes the face of the world, and there’s no going back. For some, that’s perfectly fine, and they stay in the part of the game they like, fully embracing the limitations.
As no surprise to anyone, the WoW Cataclysm has some players logging back in to play the Old Azeroth before it’s gone forever. (Or at least until Blizzard caves in and allows classic servers.) Dusty over at Of Course I’ll Play It is taking a whirlwind tour of the game as a fresh Human Mage. (Thus saving me the trouble, incidentally.) Tobold is off the wagon again, soliciting opinions, and Gordon over at We Fly Spitfires is looking to try a new experience (to him, anyway). Of course, as night follows day, Syncaine upholds his honor and calls everyone “failbears” for embracing nostalgia (or maybe just for playing WoW, since his internet persona is built around hating the game).
Call it what you want, but there are players who want the “good old days” in these games, and are willing to spend their time and money on them. I’m idly curious as to how many players actually have “permapre” Guild Wars characters (permanently in the Pre-Searing world), and how that might track with the number of players who have called for “classic” servers in WoW. Blizzard is certainly loving the attention of tourists, er, former players playing fresh alts (“going, going, gone!” works for hucksters the world over), but it’s a one-time deal for them, as opposed to ArenaNet’s Pre-Searing Ascalon. As Scott noted a while ago, the parallels are significant (and thus underwhelming on Blizzard’s part).
It will be interesting to see what Blizzard does with this. Despite apparent protestations that Blizzard will never make “classic” servers, I suspect it’s only a matter of time. (They never change their policies, right?) We’ll almost certainly see private servers catering to the nostalgia crowd and running a healthy clientele.
As much as I think Blizzard is right to push the world forward with some potentially radical world shifts, I think they may bet making a bad move omitting their own Pre-Searing crowd. They have embraced the static Azeroth for too long to not see some backlash from the Old Azeroth lovers. Time will tell, but I do suspect that Cataclysm isn’t the cure to all that ails Blizzard’s flagship. It’s a good idea, and I think it will wind up being a good move in the balance, but we’ll see what unintended circumstances are afoot.
Modern MMO design is all about static worlds. I’ve lamented that more than once. The Cataclysm is a step toward a more dynamic world (inasmuch as it changes over time, anyway), so I like the idea behind it… but it’s really just swapping one static world for another. It’s almost the worst of both worlds; it’s still too static to be really interesting as a place to keep playing, but the radical changes to the game world may well annoy those who liked the old world. (Remember the fuss over the Zombie event? A lot of people like WoW to stay the way it is, so they can maintain their habitual behaviors. Changes are exit points.)
I don’t want to be a vulture, another shrill harpy calling for the demise of the Blizzard flagship (which I’m not doing, by the way, cynicism aside)… but I will be keeping an interested eye on the fallout of these changes, if only to learn how to make the most of them in one way or another. Of course, I’ll be paying keener attention to Guild Wars 2 and Dust 514. WoW is a big gorilla, but not the only horse in the race, and certainly not the most interesting one.
Edited to add:
What if they did something really weird? Say, make it so the ten day trials, in addition to their other limitations, were stuck in the Old Azeroth? To move time forward, players have to buy in. I could see Blizzard doing that in a hamfisted effort to exclude gold sellers from the New World, and to incentivize upgrading.
What I find humorous is all the people who post on Blood Elf characters asking for Classic servers. Not sure if they’re just too lazy to change their character, but I find it humorous simply because Blood Elves would not exist as a playable race.
Paladins / Druids would be put back to pure healers, Druids having to spec into Innvervate. Warriors would have a bear of a time leveling as anything but fury and would need a healer close by to even make that bearable.
I personally loved Vanilla WoW, but there’s no way I’d go back to just play on a vanilla server; there was too much wrong with the game (even though we powered through
).
It’s fine to enjoy something the first time through, but tough to play it through a second time in search for that feeling you once had. You know too much on your second runthrough that, in my opinion, detracts from the enjoyment you had originally. Ignorance is definitely bliss in this case.
I mean, if you knew how WoW would turn out 5 years in the future, the improvements (the shortcomings), would you play, or wait?
Gordon rolled a Hunter, now this is ultrafail, and while I am not a fan of Syncaine’s overly harsh take on WoW tourists and glorification of Darkfail I cannot help but agree somewhat.
I got to explore LOTRO late, but hey, for me it is actually a first time, and not some misguided nostalgia!
I think classic servers would not work. WHEN is classic WoW? Before battlegrounds, before patch X?
To me, it would be the time before they nerfed my Warlocks’s totally imba FEAR more and more into nothingness. Nobody fears fear nowadays, is that not paradox? Killing Rogues in Classic WoW would be really cool, retribution for all what they did to me after level 66! :>
I fear time cannot be turned back, you cannot turn back to the good old days that sometimes where not that good. The desire to have classic WoW is for me the desire to have a bigger world and not the small continents with superfast flying mounts of today, where all meaningful action besides dailies takes place in the endgame dungeon holes.
I rather see a chance for a WoW F2P model that only allows access to the Azeroth part of the world, with some restrictions like no BGs or Arenas maybe.
BTW: I also have a pre-searing char, and people fool themselves if they think the whole game full of flowery fluff land would work. BUT designers should take a hint and examine WHAT people actually love about pre-searing. It has a very relaxed pace and gorgeous environments, a perfect showcase of what GW is capable of. The burned and scorched Ascalon turned many people off, and I think in general the dark and sinister areas in GW are really so well done that they are so depressing that they scare away a lot of people! Or they are boring brownish/blackish/yellowish zones like the Desolation, after the gorgeous Vabbi area in Nightfall this one is a real downer!
Longasc, Gordon hasn’t played a Hunter through Old Azeroth before. Is it nostalgia if you’re doing the same old quests with an alt? Perhaps more to the point, are alts content?
You both have good points about the state of “classic” WoW. I’ve not actually dug around to see exactly what people are asking for with such… but I have seen that they *are* asking for it. There is demand there, and I suspect that Cataclysm may well intensify that demand. (I’m still angling for an offline WoW, classic or otherwise, but that’s because I want to fiddle around and look around, not because I care about what class is OP or “balance” in WoW 1.0. It might make an interesting case study in comparison, I suppose.)
So Wiqd, to answer the question, I don’t particularly care which version of the game they offered as a standalone offline game. I’m not in the “give me Classic, not New Coke” camp, I’m just noting that such exists. To answer your and Longasc’s question, though, I’d expect any Classic servers started at this point to use the version of the game that immediately preceded Cataclysm. It’s just easier to keep track of on the dev side, and yes, the game has benefitted from tweaks in the years of development. I’m not sure what to expect of people who are asking for it, regarding which version they want. Ditto for private servers.
Also, Melmoth offers a bit of advice:
To The Cynics
I’m one of those Pre-Searing people myself. So much so that I pretty well hung up my spurs on the game when I found how radically things changed after the fact. Does that make me a bad gamer? (-:
Not in my book, HZ. I’ve got a character in the Pre-Searing that will stay there forever. I did move on with another character to see what else there was to see, but I always want access to the Old Ascalon, and I don’t want to keep making new characters to do that. Ultimately, one of my points is that GW allows players to do that and choose on their own what to do when it comes to the Searing. The Cataclysm won’t offer that same choice, at least, not with what I know about it so far, and I can’t help but think that might not be the ideal way to handle it.
That said, I don’t mind being wrong on that. I’ve certainly argued for dynamic, changing worlds more than once. I just don’t think that WoW can easily change player expectations. I guess we’ll see.
My straw poll results say that people currently playing WoW are really looking forward to the changes. They’ve long since left “Old Azeroth” (as they call it) behind and think of it as a lot of wasted space. I’m told the zones are empty now.
The FORMER WoW players are the ones calling for Classic Servers or renewing accounts to have a last look around.
Frankly I’m in that boat. I think gameplay isn’t the point here. I had some really great times, made some really great friends, in “Old Azeroth” and now that I know its going away, I’d like to visit one last time.
And I’m 99% sure the visit will be a big disappointment: you can’t go home again. But I liken it to hearing that the park you hung out in after high school — the one where you met your first serious girl friend and where your buddy busted his nose playing football and where the cops chased you that night because you’d stolen some beer and were drunk and disorderly — hearing that that park was being turned into a strip mall. You very well might want to go back and take one last stroll around, just to be there and reinforce those old memories to keep them fresh.
So that’s what I want to go back to WoW. Because I wonder what happened to Karen from England, and if Jim and Stacia from MN are still playing, and how Jess & Eric are doing, now that they’re married. And of course I’ll get there and none of those people will be there and it’ll all end up being kind of sad and depressing, but I *will* sit out in Westfall at 3 am, and drink a beer or 3 while I watch the lighthouse’s beam sweep across the sea, and remember old, lost friends.
Well the *Classic* version of WoW would probably just be all 1.x patches, so before Burning Crusade. You could argue there’s many important points along the way in 1.x, like say 1.3, but all in all, I think people want WoW before the nastiness of TBC.
They want no new races, no new classes, no “innovative” raiding techniques and styles, 40 man raids, meaningful endgame instances and stories like Blackrock spire and BWL, etc.
I think WoW did well because most of the end game stuff was based around the dragonflights (black, to be specific). People like dragons in their fantasy games. TBC went all sci-fi with interdimensional fortresses and space goats. Lich King does well because … well it’s Arthas and it’s BACK on Azeroth. Cataclysm is also Azeroth and has a dragon focus. Notice anything in particular?
For me, Classic WoW would be before battlegrounds and any kind of PVP currency. World PVP was where it was at. Unbridled, Unadulterated.
Pete, a couple of years ago I found myself in the strange position of taking a job in a new high rise building a block away from a neighboorhood I’d lived in almost two decades prior. I could literally look out of my fifth story office window and see where I lived as an elementary school kid. I would park near where the toy store was in the mall they razed to make the building, the toy store where my sister and I spent a lot of time and money (her on several dozen of her hundred-plus stuffed animals).
It really was surreal sometimes, and yes, more than a little sad. You can’t ever really go back, but sometimes the ghosts of days past are healthy to spend time with, to give perspective on where you are today.
Interestingly, I find that more often than not, the most interesting photographs I take are those that show how time inevitably presses on. Rusted metal, broken buildings, roads in disrepair. Maybe I’m just a melancholic musing sort, but to me, those places where people *lived* and where time had an effect anyway are the most interesting to me. It’s not that I want to go back to the heyday, it’s that I find the effect of time and human activity interesting, especially when Mother Nature takes over. Old mining towns are awesome. A bit sad, perhaps, but there are *stories* there.
Of course, it’s not like you can tour Old Azeroth and see where Billy the Kid died, or see where some game luminary left their mark. There’s no graffiti, no real marks left by the players. It’s not so much a world as, well… just a game. Some people will miss the magic of the place feeling real, while others will want to play the game for what it is (and they may well like it more than the modern incarnation; more power to ‘em).
Me, I mostly just want to take photographs.
” It’s not so much a world as, well… just a game.”
I think this is where I run afoul of so many other people. To me it is as much a world as any other. I guess I just project myself so strongly into a place that it becomes real. Well, or as real as any other place that now exists only in my memory, if that makes sense.
Walking through the fields of Westfall or walking through the fields of a schoolmate’s families farm… both are distance memories, and the fields are now housing complexes so they’re no longer any more ‘real’ the Westfall is. Both just constructs of memory and imagination now.
Anyway, I’m sure a shrink would have a field day with me… lol
@Wiqd — As you probably know, I’m not big into PvP, but the one place I did really get into and enjoy PvP was WoW pre-Battlefields and pre-PvP reward systems. When the fights were just about defending our towns just because it was the thing to do! No one was “getting” anything out of those wars… well, no, they were getting the one thing that really matters: fun.
And because there were no points or rewards associated with it, there wasn’t much in the way of griefing, and if our side lost, no one was getting all bent out of shape. It was just a fun time.
I miss that kind of PvP quite a bit.
Well, Pete, I *wish* they felt more like worlds to me. I can certainly convince myself of it on occasion, but when I don’t seem to have the ability to make a difference in the world, it starts to just feel more like a facade than anything else. I want to be able to go find a run down building somewhere and kick in a door, or make a scarecrow out of junk. Then I could feel more like it’s a *place* that I’ve been and left a part of myself in.
As it is, I only get screenshots. It’s better than nothing, and I’m certainly interested in the worldbuilding of these MMO things, but in the end, nothing changes.
That’s why I’m slightly more interested in the Cataclysm than any other bit of WoW. I can poke around and see how things change over time, and *that* will make the place feel more alive and interesting. I don’t get to leave a bit of graffiti under the bridge by the Crossroads, but the world has moved through time to somewhen else, and that’s what I want to chronicle and experience to give myself a feeling that these worlds might just have more to offer than the endless looting of respawning XP bags with teeth.
In other words, I’m not fond of stories that don’t go anywhere. MMOs are notoriously bad with storytelling. Players can’t change anything, and the dev-created stories are bland because they can’t really show the world changing. I’d prefer both, but in the absence of player-driven world changing, I’ll be interested when the devs really make strides to change their worlds over time. (No, expansions with previously forgotten continents or space goats don’t count.)
That said, I’m not really disagreeing. You’re right in that sometimes places exist only in our memories (or photo albums). I guess the key point in my mind is that I can compare those memories to the present and see what has changed over time and try to learn something from it. That’s harder in a virtual world that never significantly changes over time. There’s no erosion, no decay, no rust, just the same old Disneyland facade. (Though even Disneyland’s fine sheen of paint fades with time. It’s always been interesting to me to find places where they have let maintenance slip, and the illusion slips a bit. I was always the kid looking for the man behind the curtain.)
Nostalgia is a funny thing. I don’t think people really understand what they’re asking for. My main is a druid, and as Wiqd points out above, they weren’t all that fun in vanilla when I played. Sure it was kind of neat trying to make Feral work despite it being almost useless (only time I went to cat form was when I wanted to use stealth), and I have memories of how frustrating it was trying to get additional pieces of Shadowcraft even when the Rogues already had pieces that dropped. In short, I really have no desire to go back and play like that.
I expect I’m not the only one. I think people have fond memories of playing WoW back then and exploring a brand new world. Getting to max level and doing those raids with others was probably a magical experience for them. But, the same thing wouldn’t be magical today. The subsequent patches and expansions have changed the game, for better or for worse. Trying to go back is most likely to end in disappointment.
I saw this with Meridian 59, too. People always asked for a “classic” server before the expansions. The big bone of contention was the adding of “targeting” and how easy that made bow use. The thing they forget is that targeting was added because people would cheat to get the same effect on the client. Instead of getting into an arms race with the cheaters, the developers at the time just added the ability for everyone to use. Going back to the old way means going back to being (more) vulnerable to cheating.
But, nostalgia doesn’t let go easily….
Ha! I’m one of the old players who loved vanilla, and went back over the past week on a trial account to have a ‘long last look’.
Found out a couple of interesting things (to a nugget anyway)!
In no particular order:
Wow! The world actually FEELS newer because:
- I’ve been away half a year
- Trial accounts don’t let me benefit (directly) from experience.
Because I can’t play the auction house, can’t send stuff to alts, gold actually has *meaning* again. It’s weird. When I had a sub, then making characters on a new server was a pain in the bum. On a trial account, since circumstances force it, I’m actually having fun, not in spite of the difficulties, but *because* of them.
- Level is capped at 20.
Rather than being a, ‘oh poo’, it’s made stuff more fun for me because I’m actually challenged now. I’ve decided to run around and do every quest I can access before the 10 days are done and my long goodbye is done. Doing red quests in crappy gear (no ah, no nothing), and succeeding has actually made stuff fresher.
I’m also having fun trying to madly run from town to town at level 20. So far, my best ‘town’ run has been from Hillsbrad to Kargath. I managed to run far enough to get to the right rez shrine and spirit rez (haxx!) but still. It felt great, and it made me smile.
- Gear is effectively capped
Guild Wars has made me realise that I adore early gear and level caps. It makes games more fun for me. I used to know this when I played LegendMUD, but 3 years of WoW sorta made me forget that.
- I’m actually reading the quests (omg!)
While the quest dialogue (imo) is mostly uninspiring, some things are still funny. Such as… oh so YOU are Mankirk… I was wondering who all those people were talking about. And your wife. Or something. (I never read WoW quest text before this. That person looking confused in the SW throneroom while all the guards turned into dragons after the Marshal quest? that was me. -_-)
Ironically though, this trial farewell has made me realise I probably won’t resub even when Cataclysm is released, because it’s brought directly home to me how much of the entire WoW gaming model I dislike. Playing this trial account has made me realise that the things I really like in a rpg type world system are not things that are in the WoW philosophy.
This trial account has been a wonderful farewell, and has opened my eyes to stuff I hadn’t quite realised about my gaming self. It’s just unfortunate that it runs directly counter to a desire to resub.
Oooh, everyone’s talking about me
In response to the whole “Hunter thing”, I’ll say this: I try not to over analyse my whims and gaming habits. It is, after all, just a hobby. So if my mind or body tells me “go play this game”, then I happily oblige it. I don’t care if that game’s WoW or EVE or Darkfail, I’ll play it.
On another note, Tesch I loved your article! I would love to see more dynamic gaming worlds in which the devs revamp the content every year or so. Why shouldn’t they change the face of a planet after major in-game events? Would be fun to see things evole a little more.
[...] thinks that players are returning to WoW for a bittersweet [...]
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