Via RPS:
Blizzard On Vanilla WoW Servers
I’ve occasionally considered talking about World of Warcraft here; it was released in the tail end of 2004 which does makes it older than some of the other games we’ve reviewed. It felt a bit wrong to speak of it as an actual old game, though, given how much it’s evolved over the years. Expansions have brought new places to explore, new character classes and races, new dungeons and raids. Character class mechanics are constantly changing, re-balancing, and abilities come and go. The character graphics have received a substantial upgrade. New features like automated group-matching for dungeons add convenience.
Even the old world, where the original pre-expansion game took place, was comprehensively overhauled in 2010. A giant dragon tried to break the planet, you see. So running around the Barrens or the Wetlands is rather different to how it was a decade ago. The quests are all new, you meet different people, new castles and outposts have sprung up and old towns lie abandoned . Sometimes even the layout of the land itself changed.
Also, a lot of content that used to be aimed at max-level characters still exists but becomes irrelevant when new expansions are released. Once upon a time players at level 70 would raid Tempest Keep or Black Temple, for shiny rewards. Now there is no point; we all charge right past it, and past level 70. The monsters of those raids stand around forlornly, forgotten. We only care about raids aimed at the current max level.
WoW players are as prone to nostalgia as anyone else, and sometimes miss the Warcraft they used to play. So some clever folks have managed to set up servers running older versions of the game, some going back to the days before any expansions. No panda-people, no Cataclysm, no modern easy-mode levelling. Your level cap is 60 and you (or, er, your Dwarvern Paladin) will sweat blood and tears getting there, dammit!
So I guess this is where WoW does start to intersect with our interests here. I can totally understand the pull of returning to Wow as it used to be. I wasn’t around for the first days, what we now refer to as Vanilla, but I did sign up at the start of the first expansion, sometime early 2007. So I have my own memories of the Old World in its original state, and also Outland. I spent several weeks in the Barrens, fighting those damn quillboar and waiting for the Alliance to trash the crossroads yet again. I ran around the dungeons of Uldaman with a group who only vaguely knew what they were doing until an experienced warrior tank kindly showed us what to do. I loved exploring Azshara, with its bleak empty coastlands, before an expansion turned it into goddamn Goblin city.
The game was in many ways far more of a chore back then; endless running back and forth long distances on foot just to complete “collect 12 badger arses” quests, the difficulty in finding groups for dungeons, the difficulty accessing half-decent gear if you weren’t in a raiding guild. The hunter pet-training mechanics were especially tedious.
Yet we old-timers look back fondly on those days. Some say servers had more of a sense of community, back before they all got merged, and group-finders removed the need to socialise. Some also say you had to earn your success more back then, without epic purple lootz getting handed out like candy. Personally I thought the world of Azeroth was larger, more mysterious, before we could fly or leap to any city through a convenient portal. Plus, well, there’s always nostalgia. A hearkening back to those days when you first started WoW, to good times had with friends in you guild, and probably to when you were a more carefree twenty-something.
I’ve often thought I’d like to play on a classic server. How far I’d get though, I couldn’t say. Maybe I’d make it all the way to level 60, 70, 80, wherever they decided to freeze WoW in time? Maybe I’d join a guild of friendly, dedicated people and have great adventures raiding Karazan? Or maybe I’d run out of steam somewhere around level 32, release what a slog I have ahead of me, and realise god dammit I spent enough of my life on this game already! Seriously I could have churned out so many more retro-reviews between 2007 and 2013 if I’d never played WoW. I am not going back to that. No chance.
Anyways, what I failed to mention so far, but you’d know if you read that link at the start, is that is that these retro-servers are totally unofficial. So Blizzard doesn’t especially approve, and sometimes deploys lawyers (on griffon-back, from its shining citadel in Stormwind city) to shut them down. The obvious answer seems to be for Blizz to run some classic servers itself, but they apparently cite a bunch of technical difficulties. I’m surprised it’s that much work to install some old software on a bunch of servers, but maybe the tricky bit is making it all talk to the modern battle.net infrastructure.
They do mention turning off a bunch of the modern conveniences that speed up levelling, such as heirloom gear (fancy swords and armour you obtain on one character, then pass to another newbie hero that you create). So you’d take longer to reach max level, monsters would be tougher, you’d have to do more quests and search harder for gear. I guess that’s a compromise worth considering.
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Sometime last year, I eagerly hopped onto one of the “Pre-NGE” Star Wars Galaxies emulators. Don’t know how the old SWG player base compares to WoW’s in this regard, but I know by this point, they have pretty much left their mortal shells and transcended into ethereal beings made of raw nostalgia.
My interests were much the same – the old game used to be more social, you had to work for your rewards, there was a unique combination of time and tears poured into every successful character (or crafting venture). I still remember being in awe of the game’s player-decorated shopping malls, or running across fields of churning harvesters on Tatooine – literally as far as the eye could see. Someone put real effort and love into those endeavors, and I thought it would be nice to see even a scrap of that.
I also remembered how social the Doctor experience was. You could only heal players in hospitals (or with the right field droid, at the cost of no one knowing where to find you), so a gameplay shift pretty much consisted of triaging people as they came in and patiently sat on an open hospital bed, applying medicines you crafted in your downtime, and shooting the poop over what ate them. For someone who’s not particularly social in reality, I suppose it was an interesting change of pace, and it was certainly nice to be needed in a way that you just aren’t in any modern MMO.
And so, the emulator experience. To their credit, whoever did the reverse engineering and setup nailed it gloriously. It really is a perfectly functional version of the game as I remember first playing it. Aaaand that’s where the excitement fades. The population is dismal (no good for a social character), and in SWG’s case, the interested player base is split across a number of different emulators with their own take on “how it should be done.” It was a lonely experience, which just served to reinforce how you’re really never going to be able to go home again.
I also briefly think about exploring The Matrix Online emulator (because, apparently, I have brain damage). But they haven’t been able to replicate the combat systems or gameplay, so you’re really left to walk eternally empty streets and revisit locations that would be boarded up if there were any characters left to do the work. And that just seems depressing.
On the one hand, the idea of virtual places going extinct bothers the hell out of the retro enthusiast/archivist in me. We need to preserve these things! They belong in a museum! On the other, perhaps things just need to die. I suppose it’s not too far off from a place you visited on a vacation decades ago. Part of the mystique is not being able to easily scrape up enough money to return. If you actually did, you’d almost certainly be disappointed in the changes, and most assuredly wouldn’t have the same experience as before. Maybe it’s a good thing that every game can’t be frozen in time.
April 26, 2016 @ 8:18 pm