World of Warcraft (2004)

I dived into the Dragon Isles recently and it was a very memorable journey and top notch digital entertainment.

I played WoW Classic and BC Classic with friends and really digged it, but stopped to play both characters at round about level 35 because at that point the levelling feels horribly dragging and slow and costs more than 100 hours to reach max level. That's no time I'm willing to commit to such game.

With Dragonflight Blizzard reset the max level cap and made the leveling phase quicker and more streamlined. Playing through Dragonflight took me 30 hours and felt like a very well made and beautifully crafted AAA-RPG-Campaign.

Old WoW-heads call Retail 'a different game' and I can almost grasp what they mean after having played Classic, too, but for me the impression is still the same. WoW feels incredibally old school. After all, it's a 20 year old game that has only been modernized in terms of gameplay.

The graphics of the Warcraft world are timeless. I am a wc3-veteran and it's so beautiful that the game still just gives you the impression to be up close on the front to your Warcraft III-army. The world looks and feels exactly the same and it does not need a visual upgrade (gtfo, Reforge).

Even the icons and unit sounds are exactly the same. I play a Hunter and when I cast Primal Rage for the first time, I grow, my hands glimmer red, and a orc stampede roars in the background. It's the exact same audiovisual and gameplay effect of bloodlust by the orc shamans in wc3, my favourite unit and strategy back then. That was intensly nostalgic and beautiful for me.

WoW in general is such a quirky, colourful and almost bizarre high fantasy world that is so infantile and phantastic and over the top that it maintains a unique aesthetic that is one of a kind.

The class design is superb and reminds one of the fact that this used to be one of Blizzard's greatest strengths.

Only downside for me is that the rotation-dance as such feels slow and unengaging most of the time. It gets better and quicker as you level up, but compared to Diablo-like and From Soft-ARPGs it's simplistic and unengaging. WoW-heads make it a rocket science but manage to listen to podcasts while playing. The game is super simple, not boring, but definitely not as brainy as the community thinks it is. It's a relaxing play for a chill evening, except for the raids probably.

All in all happy to play it now, I half regret not having participated in the glorious times when it came out in the 2000s, but then again those where my teenage years and maybe I would've lost my life in this time sink hole. Not overrated, the best compliment I can give.

Starting to play with other players now and dive into the end game. Godspeed everybody!

Before anything I want to state that my experience with this game before the classic version is basically non-existent. No nostalgia goggles here. Anyways, moving on...

If I were to look only at the game alone, then World of Warcraft is truly a great example of "it's not about the destination, it's about the journey". In an era where instant gratification is all over the place in video games, WoW Classic reminds us of a time when we had to work for everything. Getting to max level, finally farming enough gold for that epic mount, preparing your character for raiding, even getting from point A to point B since not every class had access to increased movement speed...everything took time, and the sense of achievement when you finally got what you were working for is quite addicting. After all, many objectives took days and, in some cases, even weeks of farming and grinding.

When you start to include the MMO aspect is when my opinion of the game starts to sway from one side to the other. We could talk about how I made a few friends by doing the quests that forced you to party up since they were really tough to do on your own, or the really nice guilds out there that made raiding into a "me and the boiz" night. We could also talk about the absurd number of bots and hackers that ran all over the place due to developer negligence, or the gold sellers promoting their websites, which is a result of the feeling of "instant gratification" mentioned before, causing a portion of the community to be obsessed with the min-max culture and willing to buy gold from sellers to spend it on gear in raids or paying others to level them up via "boosting services".

WoW Classic was fun if you were able to find a guild that had similar goals like yours, but Blizzard's poor handling of bots and hackers, combined with the clash between gamers wanting to enjoy the journey and gamers wanting everything ASAP, created an environment where a new player could, for example, end up having a disappointing first impression simply because bad luck had that person's first interaction with other players be gold sellers and boosters just spamming chat.