In my scant free time I’ve been messing around with “classic” World of Warcraft a bit. It’s mostly just to have a change of pace from Final Fantasy 14.
FF14 is still a really good game, and I’m looking forward to the next ‘chapter’, but while I got to Chapter Two before my friends, I don’t have their availability and they blew past me in a couple of days.
So it was back to soloing the game, which prompted me to take a break from it. Blizzard also announced the return of “The Burning Crusade” (TBC) via ‘classic’ last month, which piqued my interest.
See, TBC was my favorite expansion of the game and it was generally viewed as peak-warcraft; Blizzard had transitioned from “Hey, let’s see if we can make an MMO” to “We now run the biggest game on the planet and are making ten-thousand dollars in profit per minute”… So TBC has the benefit of a couple of years of bug fixes, essentially infinite funding, and the original team that made the game in the first place was still calling the shots.
So, it was still true to the original, but better — and also pre-Activision merger which, arguably, screwed the pooch in so many ways.
Technically “Wrath of the Lich King” (Wrath) was also created before the ActiBlizz merger, but released after it — and is also regarded fondly and for many players was their fist brush with WoW.
The first actual ActiBlizz expansion was “Cataclysm” (Cata) — which literally and figuratively broke the world — of Warcraft, and is generally thought to be the beginning of the decline.
So, I’ve been puttering around with a warlock in the original 2006-ish version of the game and having quite a bit of fun.
The original game was so much more “RPG” than the post-ActiBlizz versions, where the ability to create a character was slowly supplanted with the ability to pick a cookie-cutter class. So, yeah, you can gimp yourself on original WoW by not choosing the optimal skill and ability progression — but that’s actually part of the fun. Everything is viable, and everything ultimately comes down to player skill — and apparently it’s wrong to expect players to get better at playing or something.
Anyway, I’m on the “Pagle” server, Alliance-side, as Raeshlavik the warlock. 🙂