And who knows how many will be left to run level 70 content when casuals like me catch up. Those lagging behind will be forced to fall further. If I get there, I’ll have no social connections to get me into the group content that players level for in the first place. Without them to pad out my experience points, I’m left fighting alone, running hundreds of repetitive quests in slightly different locations until I hit level 70. And it’s happening again.Īs work and other commitments have me barely halfway through the leveling experience, it’s already become much harder to find people around my level to run the expansion’s 16 hyperspecific dungeons. They were brought in by the hype but spat out by Blizzard’s hardcore group-based game design. The enemy? Nostalgia.Īfter the initial rush of players powered their way through WoW Classic, the few who were late to the party struggled to reach the top. The good, the bad, and the kind that hit differently after spending years with countless other supposed “WoW killers.”Īs fantastical as the hype and build-up to run through the Dark Portal was, the fatal flaw has begun to show yet again. Same game, different experienceĪlthough I didn’t originally start playing World of Warcraft until the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was right around the corner, some of my fondest memories come from the 60 to 70 experience presented here - the struggle of exploring Hellfire Peninsula a little too early at 58, a disdain for the Zangermarsh zone, and growing adoration for the sweeping green plains of Nagrand.Īll those memories came flooding back in my two weeks rediscovering the place I called home as a teenager. Hundreds went in, and server sharding - a method of temporarily splitting players off into smaller servers - kept the first zone we were set to spend a dozen hours in from becoming overcrowded.īlizzard has had its fair share of disastrous online releases over the decades, but this wasn’t one of them. Without a hitch, we were able to again experience the iconic moment when waves of players charged forward together, their passion for continuing the quest they started years ago fueling their push into the unknown. Blizzard has had its fair share of disastrous online releases over the decades, but this wasn’t one of them. With no server downtime leading up to the big transition from vanilla WoW to Burning Crusade Classic, Blizzard really nailed the execution necessary to have this gigantic MMO expand like the great adventure that it is. It’s just a shame that sticking with them after that beautiful moment is so damn hard. The iconic gateway was the starting point of the Warcraft story back in the 1990s, and trudging back through it with an army of friends and future allies will never get old. Players sprint to the Blasted Lands south of the Eastern Kingdoms and charge ferociously through the Dark Portal. A great startīurning Crusade Classic begins the same way it did back then. At least, it was in the first week or two. And it worked.īurning Crusade‘s storytelling methods are basically nonexistent in the face of today’s modern MMOs, but the core experience is still a hoot. But it was exactly what players wanted more of. It sounds simple almost unnecessary, in fact. The Burning Crusade expansion years later asked players to do it all again in a sprawling new zone with more bosses, bigger backstories, and even bigger weapons. It was a coming-of-age for the MMORPG genre, bringing it firmly into the mainstream. The 2004 pop culture success of World of Warcraft introduced players to hefty level grinds, sprawling PvP, and complicated, coordinated raids on boss lairs. Create the problem, forget the solution.
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