Don’t let the name fool you — World of Warcraft Classic isn’t an older version of the game that’s since been abandoned. Instead, it’s a “faithful recreation” of WoW‘s past that many veterans actually begged for. Some players have been living the World of Warcraft experience for over 15 years now, and have seen a lot of change come in that time. You can think of World of Warcraft Classic like an old photo album — it lets those old-school fans relive some of their favorite memories, but unlike a photo album, WoW Classic is interactive.
World of Warcraft Classic was released on August 26, 2019, so at the end of two months ago, the game celebrated its one-year anniversary. Warcraft fans and Blizzard alike will be keen to look back on what worked during the game’s first year and what surprises, pleasant and otherwise, arose. The spirit that epitomizes WoW Classic is its faithfulness to the early days of Blizzard’s long-running and genre-defining MMORPG. But despite its best efforts to keep things the way they were, some changes just had to be made—and for good reason. Will this mean more changes in the future? And if so, will the WoW Classic gold experience still be as classic as it’s promised to be?
You may be wondering if it’s worth starting your journey through old Azeroth now, almost one year after launch. The answer is a most definite ‘yes’. For a start, you won’t have to deal with the queues to log into the game – or the queues to kill a single quest mob because of player saturation. Of course, busier servers on big patch days may still see the occasional login queue but they are generally less common these days. With the Gates of Ahn’Qiraq now able to be opened, the game is roughly halfway through the content released for Vanilla, at least if they release subsequent patches at roughly the same speed as they were released the first time around. Here are some of the ways that WoW Classic exceeded expectations, but also some of the unexpected things that happened in Classic along the way.
WoW Classic seeks to recreate the “Vanilla WoW” experience—that is, WoW as it existed before a series of seven game-altering major expansion packs from 2007’s The Burning Crusade to 2018’s Battle for Azeroth. To achieve this, Blizzard has rebuilt the game based on archived data from back in 2005 and 2006 (patch 1.12 is the goalpost—the current game is on patch 8.1.5). The company has committed to meticulously presenting the experience exactly as it was back then—warts and all—with only a small number of unavoidable or critical changes.
That’s not to say you need a long and storied history with World of Warcraft to appreciate Classic, however. If you’re someone who plays the more modern version of the game, or if you’ve never stepped foot in an MMORPG before, you may have the desire to educate yourself about WoW‘s past. Doing so could help you understand some of the nuances of World of Warcraft. That, in turn, could help make you a better player.