The 2004 pop culture success of World of Warcraft introduced players to
hefty level grinds, sprawling PvP, and complicated, coordinated raids on
boss lairs. It was a coming-of-age for the MMORPG genre, bringing it
firmly into the mainstream. 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 sounds simple;
almost unnecessary, in fact. But it was exactly what players wanted more
of. And it worked.
Burning Crusade Classic begins the same way it did back then. As it
should. Players sprint to the Blasted Lands south of the Eastern
Kingdoms and charge ferociously through the Dark Portal. 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. It’s just a shame that sticking with them after that
beautiful moment is so damn hard.
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. Blizzard 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.
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.Although 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.
All those memories came flooding back in my two weeks rediscovering the
place I called home as a teenager. The good, the bad, and the kind that
hit differently after spending years with countless other supposed “WoW
killers.”
As fantastical as the hype and build-up to run through the Dark Portal
was, the fatal flaw has begun to show yet again. The enemy? Nostalgia.
After the initial rush of players powered their way through WoW Classic,
the few who were late to the party struggled to reach the top. They
were brought in by the hype but spat out by Blizzard’s hardcore
group-based game design. And it’s happening again.
