c'mon boys come join me in having no life anymore https://www.polygon.com/2019/5/14/18623145/world-of-warcraft-classic-launch-date-collectors-edition i have never been so excited to play a god damn 15yr old game.
This game destroyed a lot of lives. A friend of mine dropped out of a tier 1 school setting his life back a decade. Would play this in his parents basement surrounded in his own filth for years. Another, almost lost his wife and kids over it. Thankfully I was too cheap to pay a monthly fee.
It was like heroin for nerds. The later versions toned down the addictive aspects and made it less of a life destroyer. But here it is back in all of its addictive glory.
Vanilla WoW was definitely one of the most significant events in the history of PC gaming. So many people were playing it and nothing else that it caused a slump in overall PC game sales in the mid 2000s that was misinterpreted as a decline in PC gaming. PC gaming wasn’t dying. Everyone was just playing WoW.
man, estimate the money that blizzard has made from a bunch of addicts paying $13-$15 a month for this game for years... on top of paying for the base game/expansions.. they also had crazy prices for faction/race changes, name changes, and realm transfers.. then they introduced cosmetic microtransactions and level boosts. i was kind of apprehensive about how classic would do when it launches, but the beta has been out and the feedback for the streamers currently is crazy good.
it's not about winning a game. it's about replayability. if you give someone something to chase, there will always be a purpose to keep playing. if the chase is fun and rewarding along the way, people will continue playing. classic was great because blizzard was still learning how to build the content and players were also learning the game at the same time. this allowed a lot of experimentation on blizzard's part and they could focus on the content at hand. as the game aged, more and more content came out. they also had to raise level caps. we all know the real game comes during the end game. 1-60 in classic was an extremely slow process since it was still important in the big picture. when you keep raising level games to something like 120 (currently), leveling becomes a chore, so blizz made it trivial. they also had to make things super easy (remove the elite quests and turn elites to regular mobs). dungeons became trivial content. all of the old content became abandoned and you just wanted to blaze through everything since it really serves no purpose and is just an obstacle in your way. there was no sense of community anymore since you could solo everything. they introduced a "looking for group" tool for dungeons that everybody just queued into from different servers. you auto-grouped and it teleports you into a dungeon, which is just a faceroll.. then you finish it and port back out. most of the time, nobody even talks to each other. people's answers to your question will differ from person to person. people raiding get a sense of community from within their guild. they'll get 10-20 people together and push through raids. progression through raids is a very good feeling since it's all team work. this is essentially beating the game if the guild pushes through and clears the raids of current content. way back during vanilla, guicho and I played for a while and we both pvp'd for fun.we did battlegrounds (instanced pvp) and ran around with world pvp.
A game that never ends was a selling point for a lot of people, not a downside. It’s also what made WoW such a life destroyer. If you are one of those obsessive completionist types who has to do everything in a game WoW would ruin your life.
I remember I was still obsessively playing Diablo II every night, and when WoW was announced, I vowed never to touch it because I knew I would be one of those life-destroyed casualties. I had a hard enough time managing my time between life and games already. Probably one of the most important decisions I have made. I missed out on something significant, but I honestly have no regrets about it.
So things have progressed since this released back in 2019, known as the year before covid. wow classic got the burning crusade (jan 2007), and wrath of the lich king (nov 2008) expansions. cataclysm (dec 2010) got announced. classic also got an official hardcore mode. die and you lose everything and have to start over at level 1. most recently, blizzard announced Season of Discovery for classic and launched it in Nov 2023. season of discovery is basically wow classic with some new ideas thrown in.. players were suggesting for blizzard to do this back in 2019 with the announcement of classic and here we are. The game is done in seasons, which are a few months long. Currently in this season, the level cap is 25, they have released runes for classes that are basically abilities from the future version of the game (like penance for priest). Some runes completely alter the class like tanking runes for warlock, rogues, and shamans. Healing for mages. Also they've made blackfathom deeps into a raid for level 25 "endgame" 2023, blizzard pulls me back in once again here with a 4070ti playing this old ass game