Going Back in World of Warcraft
I sat down and played a lot of WoW recently; felt I could write my time off as a business expense, if I wrote something about it. Because I happened to play both Shadowlands, Vanilla, and WotLK in a very short time-frame and I feel like I have something to say on it design-wise, which people might find interesting. Some notes on sandbox MMOs and private servers to boot.
I’ve gotten back into playing World of Warcraft, because of a recent conversation I had with someone playing the game’s latest expansion – Dragonflight. This quickly spiralled into the familiar entrapment of me levelling yet another Human Paladin up to the level cap, gearing up for what is essentially the most recent tier of content and experiencing all that I had missed since over the course of roughly a week. My legitimate personal experience with the game extends from the beginning of Cataclysm, until somewhere around the release of Uldir in Battle for Azeroth. This for most people would be enough to discredit everything I have to say about the game, as I happen to have been around for what is universally agreed upon and is essentially numerically quantifiable as the downfall of World of Warcraft, missing those golden years from late Vanilla up to the end of Wrath of the Lich King. The other fragment of original sin, which I carry with me into this is that I am also of the vocal minority that liked Cataclysm and have only grown fonder of it as the years have passed.
Outside of my legitimate experience, however, I have over said decade, almost pathologically, revisited every expansion from Vanilla to Shadowlands on almost every private server with a respectable playerbase, including some that barely had people in them to drive the auction house. When it was current, I couldn’t have possibly played during Vanilla WoW, as at the time, I would have been at the kindergarten, learning how to write with a crayon shoved up my nose. As such, the only way I could have played Vanilla WoW was at some point past its heyday. While not necessarily a unique position, it is an interesting one nonetheless.
While I do not have any strictly long term credentials that identify me as a hardcore WoW player, like a collective sum of achievement points, rare items, mounts, etc; I have raided through most of the raid tiers released for the game with tier-appropriate gear at least on Normal difficulty, acquired currently unobtainable items such as Corrupted Ashbringer, fished up a Sea Turtle, farmed Ashes in The Burning Crusade, got Glory of the Firelands Raider and Flametalon of Alysrazor on now essentially defunct Cataclysm servers. All this, essentially never on the same character, but always a character that is named the same, looks the same, plays the same – carbon copies of the same character in a lineage that spreads across a wild multiverse of every state World of Warcraft has ever been released in. I may not be the best at WoW, but I have put in a lot of time in WoW; enough so to where I imagine, I could pass as, if nothing else, a slightly above average player. Not casual enough to only ever fill the DPS ranks of LFR, but not hardcore enough to be in a guild pushing raids on Mythic.
I am by no means a “old WoW” purist as this might suggest, although I do have an appreciation for Vanilla in terms of it, in 2004, containing, at its core, most of the fundamental mechanics of WoW, which over the years have essentially been immutable. The moment-to-moment experience of leaving Northshire Abbey, walking to Goldshire, picking up Fishing, First-Aid and Cooking, walking through the gates of Stormwind for the first time as the music swells, just to deliver a package and pick up Engineering and Mining from the Dwarven Quarters – it’s all essentially second nature to me after a decade or so of constant reiteration.
I’d go as far as to say that those initial ten to fifteen levels, which railroad you through this arc of you just spawning into the world as a recruit, up to you entering your faction’s capital city, is essentially a vertical slice of what the next several hundred hours of the game are going to be – the one thing that has remained consistently true regardless of which expansion you are playing. Going from modern WoW back to Vanilla felt wholesome, in the sense of it essentially stripping away all that sense of rush that comes along with modern WoW, that baggage that came from years of game knowledge becoming not necessarily irrelevant, but just reduced in its scope.
Something I didn’t realise I missed in modern WoW was the random mob drops of essentially “trash items”. Gray items currently are unanimously considered junk by most players - something you can’t even equip or sell on the auction house, where at one point you might have found upgrades for you character or something more exciting if luck was on your side. This change in something as inconsequential as random trash, items that exist for the sole purpose of you getting some variety and not just looting raw gold, has devolved to the point of having addons automatically sell any item of that quality upon opening up a vendor, which essentially turns all of these items into “inconvenient gold”.
The Fargodeep Mine is essentially the first part of the Elwynn Forest, where you can see this, that also happens to have all the trappings of World of Warcraft in one place. It has aggressive mobs, who will for the first time take the initiative on attacking you, meaning that hypothetically, if you are underprepared, you might lose out to attrition, going too deep and not being able to come out without dying at least once. In old WoW, kobolds just happen to drop mining and herbalism reagents, linen cloth, food items and other reagents, various qualities of gear from Poor to Uncommon, and there are also at least two chests with a high chance of uncommon gear – some upgrades, others vendor trash or auction-worthy. In essence, it is a microcosm that is essentially self-sustaining in those early journeyman levels of your class any profession. The mining nodes and kobold drops enable you to sustain and level up Mining, Blacksmithing, and Engineering. The uncommon item drops enable you to practice Enchanting. The linen allows you to level up Tailoring and First Aid. The random herb drops allow you to contribute in a small part to Alchemy. Herbalism, Skinning and Leatherworking do not directly benefit from Fargodeep Mine, but its surroundings, which you need to pass through on your way to the mine, hold the boars and herb gathering nodes for you to get started in those professions as well, if not even more convenient due to their proximity to Goldshire.
It ultimately becomes a place that will be sought after by more than one player, a cornucopia of resources that you can intentionally go out into the world and farm until you’ve not only satisfied your own quota, but also those of others. I usually choose Engineering and Mining as my starting professions, which early on requires the murder of Kobolds for Linen Cloth, which is also required for, in my case, First-Aid, but is also required by others as a Tailoring reagent.
In later expansions, I have the vivid memory of making a lot of my gold by selling low-level crafting reagents, which I spent the time gathering as I was levelling, because I realised there was an underserviced niche, where the effort required by a player to go back to a zone, which may be a decade older than the latest tier of content is seen as inefficient by most people, who would prefer the convenience of just purchasing those reagents from the auction house. Me, deliberately making the inefficient decision to not rush through the ageing content in order to to reach max level as fast as possible, something often done by almost all seasoned players, who have ultimately experienced that content when it was relevant, but have since moved on, results in an economical niche to service what essentially amounts to someone going from level one to level fifty in a profession, which for me might be my afternoon collecting the ore and reagents out in the world, but for the client at the end of the line amounts to essentially a minute of staring at a progress bar, before those resources are never needed again.
Modern WoW eventually reached a point where resources such as Copper and Tin become an accidental by-product of the miniscule time spent by players in Elwynn Forest and Westfall, as their addons give them an optimised route, which ignores everything but the essentials in terms of experience points and nothing more.
Going through the same process in Vanilla on the other hand feels like you could be “that guy”. The guy who may not have reached level cap or participated in the latest tier of raiding content or reached Gladiator in PvP, but you are THE guy providing the entire server with these low-level reagents in bulk. You are “THE guy who sells Copper and Tin, so that everyone else don’t have to”. And this service you provide to the rest of the realm is essentially you coming up with your own freelance profession, which might end up with you profiting more than if you were to engage in the oversupplied market for the latest tier’s reagents.
Copper and Tin are never required in any high-level crafting recipes and they become irrelevant essentially as soon as the experience points of the zone dry up. This essentially means that players never have a reason to go back to old zones, making everything but the latest hub city and its associated zones empty and lifeless. In Shadowlands at the end of the expansion, the only zones that actually had any players in them were Zereth Mortis and Oribos. The original four zones and The Maw were essentially made irrelevant within the same expansion. Only players who were levelling and a dedicated few madmen, who are willing to collect the various ores from those zones, who engage in the lucrative profession of “old content farmer” are paid dividends for taking the time to gather one or all five of the different ores, so that some blacksmith across the realm can make some ingots for items that will already be inferior to common dungeon gear.
The delineation between what is levelling content and what is the current tier of content is not as clear cut as it is in modern WoW, since in Vanilla, those zones in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor were essentially all there was to the world – i.e., the current tier was the whole world. Yes, there is a functional difference between being in Elwynn Forest – a level 1 to 10 zone, and Burning Steppes – a level 50 to 59 zone, but travelling from one to another for their unique reagents isn’t as much of a physical and mental leap as going from farming Progenium Ore in Zereth Mortis, Shadowlands to farming Copper in Elwynn Forest, Vanilla, since you’re not just travelling from one zone to the next, you’re travelling back through roughly eighteen years of content.
What WoW has never really done is give you a good reason to go back to old zones, since the new content is always carved out into some new chunk of landmass, making the old zones irrelevant. Even during the Legion expansion, when the Paladin class hall was essentially put underneath an already existing zone - Light’s Hope chapel, in the middle of Eastern Plaguelands - a zone that at the time was introduced six expansions ago and briefly refurbished three expansions ago. Yet its location was essentially irrelevant, as nothing in it or in the expansion required you to interact with anything outside of Light’s Hope chapel’s basement. You can’t even hypothesise how players riding or flying there was somehow passively giving old zones new relevance, since most players just teleported there from the latest hub city and teleported back in a much similar fashion.
World of Warcraft isn’t actually a persistent world anymore; probably never has been. I’m more of the opinion that these roleplaying mechanics, statistics and everything alongside them was pure happenstance. It is spottily documented that The Burning Crusade expansion was essentially in development as Vanilla WoW was coming out. Fundamentally, the design from WoW’s inception was to abandon the existing zones in Azeroth and go to Outland. These abandonment issues were for all intents and purposes, planned from the very start.
I could go on, fantasising about how it could be a different game where these more sandbox elements were the at the forefront, where new expansions would not only introduce new zones, but refine and more importantly redefine the purpose of the existing zones for the current state of the game. These aren’t necessarily new observations either, as “theme park” MMO has been essentially synonymous with World of Warcraft, as where this exact concept of a “sandbox” MMO has been realised in other games like Runescape, EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Black Desert Online.
Does this mean that I don’t enjoy WoW as it currently is? No, certainly not. There is however a sort of disappointment, which only ever seems to deepen as old and new get farther apart. I think it would be comical of me to suggest that Cataclysm is essentially the golden middle point between the old and the new, but I think it is at least something like that. The reason why so many players yearn to re-experience the good old days and why so many private servers have popped up over the years for essentially every expansion ever released, is because everyone has their own idea of where that golden middle is. What’s really important, I believe, is that the player has the choice to engage in that, if they so wish and I think that it is commendable that World of Warcraft is seeing some of that in the Classic re-releases.
I am however aware that as we get farther away from the days of Ultima Online, Everquest, and I suppose MUDs, the more prohibitive it will be for newer and younger players to experience that type of game, or at the very least – see the appeal in it.
Ultimately it is the players acting against that core design philosophy of always moving forward, that breeds the disappointment and the nostalgia that people have about old WoW. It’s not just mechanics or raid difficulty, it’s people starting to feel themselves and their values left behind by the times. I think it’s essentially foolish to think that WoW shouldn’t move forward, but I can also understand the desire for the old content to also be cared for in some way, instead of just being irrelevant and left to gather dust.
If a friend were to come up to you and express the desire to play WoW, would you immediately hand them the .wtf file set to the realmlist of a server running your favourite expansion, or would you hesitate and let them play the latest one and let them find out for themselves? Ultimately nowadays the question is starting to shift from “Do you want to play WoW?” to “When do you want to play WoW?”. The answer will likely continue to be either 2004, 2008 or the current year, regardless. And despite this natural design of retiring old content and moving on to greener pastures with every new expansion and everyone rushing through the old zones to get to the new, going back is ironically all that players seemingly want to do.
