https://youtu.be/TcZyiYOzsSw

Holy carp! Excited! :D

They should have rewound it all the way back to Warcraft II, then I'd be excited.

TBC? Warcraft has tuberculosis now?

Man, talk about trading on nostalgia. I wonder how many people actually have it in them to face Naxxramas 40-man. I know for sure I couldn't bring myself to crawl back into Molten Core one more time.

As much as I do have fond memories of playing WoW back in the vanilla days, they're all memories of playing WoW with friends (and strangers who would become friends, at least of a sort). A decade and more down the line, I'm not sure if I would enjoy it at all without the dozens of people to chat with and group up with. And no real sense of discovery or things being new? Nah.

OTOH I would *love* to see if the folks who joined, say, post-WotLK would find anything enjoyable about vanilla WoW. I can already foresee the cries about how much tankadins and bears suck, or how OP frost mages are. Hm, frost mages. Maybe I'll go re-watch some of Faxmonkey's stuff.

If they would put up dedicated servers, apart from the rest of the dungeon finder/crossrealm stuff I would be all for it. Plaayed several times on a classic server and liked it a lot more than the neverending upgrade rng of Legion. A RPG should always be about the path not the ending. In my opinion Blizz scrapped the whole world and made only the the last raids relevant.. Ah, seeing Loch Modan again intact...

*YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWNS* It's still WoW. What do ya want?

Since I've never played WoW, some WoW-veteran would have to explain to me the significance of this. Why is it so important to get back to some old version of WoW? Does the newest version suck?

The closest I can think of is Team Fortress 2. Sure it has changed over the years (mainly meaning more different weapons and shit available, but also new maps, different gamemodes etc.) and not nearly all the changes have been positive... but I still don't see much point to go to back to TF2 five years ago, or something like that.

The other thing is, will there be enough interested players for the old classic modes? I tried playing Team Fortress Classic for a change, but there were like one or two servers in the whole world which had meaningful number of human players, so the game is pretty much dead nowadays.

That's the life of online multiplayer games, they wither and die down if players move to other games (or stop gaming altogether). Single-player games don't have the same problem, I can play Dungeon Siege just fine even if I was the last person on earth playing it.


Oh, I forgot to mention: quite a coincidence I happened to watch this Youtube video just two days ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M17RuHDSIM4

See what is mentioned at 7 minutes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M17RuHDSIM4#t=420

So is that what we are talking about, the WoW "Vanilla version" that the video has listed as an awesome game you can't play anymore? So that is coming back then, in some form?

And what is that "Elysium Project" mentioned in that video? A fan made WoW Classic? Did Blizzard buy the rights to that project?

Didn't look much into it but from some of the stuff I saw mentioned I think it's likely going to progress through the expansions again just like the base game did. So it's kind of like starting completely fresh like back in the day.

Part of the reason I don't get back into WoW these days is because I missed a lot and would feel lost if I tried it now so I can see the concept being somewhat enticing.

When Sylvanas yells "For the Horde~!!" in the new Battle for Azeroth video though, that gave me chills and tear up a little. I miss those days, it was a great time.

I never actually played vanilla (I came to WoW in TBC times) so I tried Nost server when it came out a while ago. Was surprised how difficult/slow PvE is without a party, you need to eat food to heal like every 3 fights, in regular WoW you can solo most PvE without any problems at all. I can imagine that vanilla is much more of a social game than standard WoW, with having to find party members in the actual world to do dungeons instead of just queing up.

What does excite me about vanilla servers though is being able to re-do the original zones without the changes made in Cata, like how Thousand Needles got flooded, Darkshore was devestated, Westfall also substantially changed etc etc. Many new WoW players have never actually experienced these vanilla zones how they originally were.

I played WoW from 2nd day of EU release, for 3-6 days a week, nearly every week for 7 years. I played with my wife and then our daughter joined in too.

Something Blizzard lost over the various expansions, was challenge, freedom of choice and community

Too keep making the game appealing to new players, they effectively dumbed it down. A lot.

Take the "Find the lost Guards" quest.
An NPC on the bridge tells you two of his guards are missing near a Murloc village.

Vanilla/Original WoW

The village is easy to find and marked as a general area on the map
You search the area and can see a fairly large and easily seen shield is on the floor near a hut. Its the remains for the first guard, and helps direct you to the second guard.

That shows up again as an area on the map.
This time its much harder to find. On the floor is a small section of rib cage, in the grass. It takes some hunting to find the first time.

Very often someone would be talking in the zone chat, asking where the second remains where. And almost always someone (often us) would help.

I think in the 2rd expansion, quest objects like the rib cage started to glow, making them much more obvious.

In the 3th expansion (cataclysm), each object was shown as a marker on the map in their actual location (I've lost my men, but I can tell you exactly where to find them)

At some point they even added an "ant trail" (dotted lines) that lead straight to the objects.

Gone was the challenge and that early push towards community.

Other areas.
Spell casters Mana was increased to insane amounts. In Vanilla a spell caster had to conserve mana, there was a slight delay after battle as they drank to replace mana. Last time I played ( tired to play again last year) I went the whole session constantly casting through battles and never really had to think about mana.

Spells used to have levels, now you always cast the most powerful version. Before you could choose a less powerful spell to conserve mana or cause less agro (its the Value an NPC uses to chose who to attack) or simply because that's all that was needed. It added a extra level of skill and flexibility.

WoW lost a lot of its sense of community when they added cross realm instances (an instance is a dungeon or special area). WoW doesn't have 15 million people playing on one server, they're spread across servers each hosts tens of thousand of players.

Originally a dungeon run could only be done with people on you own server. This was a double edged sword. On the negative side you needed to find people to go with you (5 people for a dungeon normally), not only that you needed to find the right class (you always needed a healer and a tank) and sometimes you just couldn't get anyone to go with you. And this was a manual process, actually typing in "Anyone up for Stockades, need a healer". This made joining guilds or at least making connections and friends really important. And that was the plus side, you got to know your community. If you did a dungeon run with someone and you enjoyed it and worked well with them, you talked to them added them to friends, joined their guild worked with them again. Likewise if someone was a jerk, you remembered them and their guild.

Oh and you had to get your character to the dungeon too.

What they did was automate the system. Click a button, select your class (healer, tank or DPS) and you entered a queue. If you where a healer or tank you got selected quickly, DPS character had to wait. But still it was on the same server, so you got to know people.

But people didn't like waiting. So they added cross server queues. Now you could be running with people from other servers. It became very, very impersonal. You entered the dungeon and just shambled or run through normally following the tank. It was a monotonous and shallow experience. Any player that didn't know the predefined route or tactics that game guides dictate were often shunned, booted or left to behind.

The other effect of these cross server instances was characters became rigidly defined as DPS, Healer or Tank. Character skill and kit layout became very rigid. You MUST have these skills and equipment, otherwise you're a bad player. Gone was experimentation and the flexibility replaced with cookie cutter templates, gone was exploring a dungeon replaced with minimum travel time for maximum loot.

Vanilla had its flaws and the expansions do have interesting ideas and content, but the third expansion just started to kill all I enjoyed about WoW.

This isn't nostalgia speaking, I've had a private WoW server running for years and have compared the experiences side by side.


Playing styles became

Are they losing subs again? This sounds like something they would only do to keep people intrested.

Doubt classic WoW would attract more that 500'000 players, may be short term with newer players players wanting to experience Vanilla. But I do think they'd get about 200'000 regular players, which isn't to be sniffed at.

Everything done to update a game is to keep players interested.

They've been losing subs for over a decade. Despite that they're probably still the most successful MMO out there, even now.

What did Everquest have when WoW came out? IIRC 125'000 players, a number thought unbeatable

The Burning Crusade (just in case wasn't a joke :P) Lot of it probably is rose tinted glasses, but dare say it'll still get its fans.

Personally, I started playing during TBC & really enjoyed the game. I accidentally got into PvP & have PvP'd in any game I can ever since, even in PvE games haha.
When WotLK (Wrath(?) of the Lich King) released, some thing seemed to get silly levels of easy. Likewise in Cataclysm.
I recall in TBC at starter zones lots of mobs around the first area that would eat you alive as soon as you looked at them. When I made an alt years later on a different server, I spawned & loads of the mobs were yellow (wouldn't attack you unless you hit them first), making the game far too easy.

A lot of the games world, you had to walk or use mounts to get to, meaning you had to fight mobs &/or players en route. Then dungeon queue & BG (battlegrounds (pvp)) got added & you could sit semi-afk in a city waiting for your queue to pop. You'd see hundreds of people just sat motionless, chatting load of crap in /chat & the rest of games world started to become barren (haha, barrens...).

Even weird basic things got removed, like if you lost ability to cast spells, you could still use your fists, but that got removed. No problem, lost spell casting (silenced by player or mob), just grab your wand (ooer!) & use that against them. But then that got removed.

Used to often chuckle in battlegrounds when killing someone with shot of the wand, which was basically the equivalent of tickling someone.


Will be interesting to see how this turns out, & what it'll cost.
If it's just part of the monthly sub, not sure it'll do so well, but time'll tell.