4/17/2023 0 Comments Warcraft iii demoA whistle, and they are there I realize with a burst of laughter that I have to feed my pet again. I run too fast through a field of wolves and vultures, and when my pet vanishes, it takes me a minute to remember how to call them back to my side. The sunset of westfall bathes everything in light, making it sometimes hard to tell things apart. I had forgotten how orange everything was. I’m wandering through fields of grass that look so very dated, but still look so very good thanks to some phenomenal 2004 art direction. To me, there is no cosmic dragon of death, no horrific menace of the Lich King. The big threat on the horizon is a rough and tumble gang of thieves, the defias gang. My cloak looks dinky and tattered, my gun is a flintlock rifle without any of the fancy demonic runes or otherworldly glows my future weapons would have. I’m my old dwarf hunter I may have spent way too much time in the character creator. Legal fights around these unofficial vanilla servers heated up. And more people found themselves missing ‘the good old days’. More and more expansions hit Azeroth, and continued to evolve the world, using time travel to create new storylines, adding new hidden continents. World of Warcraft Vanilla servers became popular. Maybe they enjoyed the older lore more than the fresh content that had started retconning some of the mythos. Veteran fans who had started on day one found themselves missing the older systems of gameplay, or the older feel. While it was a really fun concept that had many eager to see how the world could change, World of Warcraft was now over 6 years old. Cataclysm is also when the major lore of the game took a huge few leaps, as zones were destroyed by Deathwing, left forever altered. Entire zones were skippable because there was just so much content, and flying around on your own mounts was so accessible. Portals to multiple areas of the world were accessible anywhere. By this point, skill trees had been revised repeatedly. When Cataclysm hit in 2010, the real movement for a classic, or ‘vanilla’ WoW took hold. The final large continent of Northrend had been explored and conquered sweeping arcs with major villains that were decades old in lore were taken care of. The mythical Lich King from Warcraft III was dead by the end of it. Wrath Of The Lich King hit in 2008, for many (including myself), it was something of a capstone. Travel was made easier in some areas, while quests became easier to track. To do it, old game systems started to be modified. The revolutionary gameplay that WoW had brought to the MMORPG world had set a new bar that its players now wanted to see surpassed. While the base game had been out for two years, most fans had begun to demand fresh content and new interesting ideas. While much of the normal world of Azeroth stayed the same, this started a few voices of discontent. Azeroth was a really fun place to visit, but the moment of peak enjoyment had passed as I had grown older. When I realized real advancement just wasn’t possible without sinking in whole weekends, I knew I couldn't really ever go back and feel like I could keep up with the competetive PvP scene or the ever evolving raids. I’d visit sometimes, when a new expansion came out, but quickly found myself falling away every time. The real world called to me, with job schedules, commitments, and a relationship that was becoming serious. Nothing was really wrong, I just was ready to try other things. One day however, around 2008, I logged in, and realized I had outgrown the world of Azeroth. Or sometimes before! While World of Warcraft kept growing and expanding and mutating, I kept up along with it for years. Transforming into a surly, grumpy dwarf with a reliable rifle was one of the true joys of my weeknights, logging in right after I finished my homework. I was one of those kids, for the longest time. Entire evenings – and early mornings – were lost to adventures in the charming world of Azeroth. Many college and high school kids discovered the joys of finding forty like-minded individuals to go diving into the fiery depths of Molten Core. World of Warcraft was a game that, when it came out in November 2004, grabbed millions of fans and wouldn’t let go. Not only did they make a wildly successful jump into the world of Massively Multiplayer, they revolutionized it. The second question of course, we all know the answer to: yes, they can. “Will this be good?” I ask myself, honestly not knowing the answer. I make my character, just the way I had done when I was in college: late at night, a weird sense of anticipation in my chest.
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