« Raid Complexity: The Bane of the Casual Gamer | Home | Abandoning Content, With Gusto »
Hitting the Old Nostalgia Pipe
By Cameron Sorden | April 6, 2008
I was tooling around the WoW forums on Sunday afternoon when I saw this thread. Someone asked about the possibility of getting classic servers for World of Warcraft and actually got a response. Quoting from Drysc:
We were at one time internally discussing the possibility fairly seriously, but the long term interest in continued play on them couldn’t justify the extremely large amount of development and support resources it would take to implement and maintain them. We’d effectively be developing and supporting two different games.
Classic Servers, for those who don’t know, are game servers that don’t have expansion zones or content enabled and allow people to play the original game content without access to stuff like additional levels and better equipment. The fact that Blizzard was seriously considering doing that is really interesting, and it shows that they at least recognize the fact that people want to play that older content and have no incentive right now. It’s too bad that they ultimately decided not to do it. It’s not like they don’t have the spare cash to try interesting projects. On the other hand, I think I’d rather see them take that money and just go revamp older content so it’s still usable in the current game.
EverQuest was the first the major commercial game that actually implemented classic servers. They weren’t classic servers in the purest sense– the game code was the same as in the live game, lots of updated equipment and spells were kept in their modern states, and all of the UI improvements and other little things were intact. This pissed off some purists who wanted to go back to the days of the old-school client and meditating with your face in your spell-book. That wasn’t the point of these servers, though. SOE’s take on them was to call them “Progression Servers,” and the goal was to unlock the expansions in order by defeating each expansions raid bosses and completing other major objectives.
The idea was great for hardcore raid guilds that wanted to go back and re-experience the challenges that they faced back in the day, but not so great for people who just wanted to have fun and play the game in its older incarnations. That’s because the new expansions opened up as soon as all of the objectives for the current one were completed, and as you can imagine, the experienced guilds of raiders burned through all of that content pretty quickly. It was a pretty short play window for people who just wanted to wander around the Karanas and bash a gnoll or two in highpass without seeing people in Luclin-era equipment soloing stuff four levels higher than them. I’m still not sure whether I’d view the whole project as a successful experiment or not, since I’m one of the people who just wanted to goof off in the original game.
Of course, Blizzard has only had one expansion so far, so the idea of a progression server is a pretty far-fetched one. A classic server, with all of the BC improvements stripped away (sans UI improvements) is a much better idea. It could be pretty cool to go do the Molten Core thing again, or check out Black Wing Lair for some swingin’ Tier 2 epics. Am I the only one who misses UBRS raids? Clearly not.
You might wonder why people who want to play the game that way don’t just do that. I mean, the content is there, right? If people want to run the old stuff so badly, no one is stopping them. Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. For one thing, WoW has no way to turn off the experience bar. Lots of other games let you halt your advancement or divert your XP gains to other purposes (like AA points or cash). You’re going to be able to get to 63 or 64 just by running those old school raids. Second, think about how gear-oriented WoW is. When you wipe for the fifth time on C’Thun in an evening because your tank’s gear isn’t quite there yet, it’s going to be damn hard to resist the temptation to go spend 10g at the auction house and buy a green from BC that’s better. If you do allow your guild to use greens or blues from the expansion, you’re quickly going to realize that there aren’t any upgrades there for you (which takes a lot of the incentive for the raid game away).
Players trying to maintain the feel of the classic game just aren’t going to be able to do it without some support from Blizzard. You saw how Blizz feels about that for now. That’s too bad, but give them an expansion or three– they’ll probably change their minds as the amount of old content that people haven’t seen grows. At least Blizzard has the benefit of seeing SOE do something similar already, so they can prepare for it when the day comes.
Hopefully, they’ll be smart enough to save their incremental code bases.
Topics: Random |
April 6th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
There’s a third reason why they don’t just do that now too - no matter how much you want to do Cthun, you’re going to need to find another 39 people who also want to do that too. The old world is a wasteland now, finding groups even for instances is hard enough let alone 40 man raids.
April 7th, 2008 at 6:45 am
[...] discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days [...]
April 7th, 2008 at 8:31 am
The old content isn’t anything to write poems about, I’ve been there and i never want to come back. The only good raid instance was pretty much Naxxramas, until that, Blizzard was basically learning how to design them properly.
April 7th, 2008 at 9:44 am
I never buy their “it would take too many resources” line. If you wanted, as a single tech savvy individual, could download and run a pirated WoW classic server set to a single patch in a week or so. Other than keeping up with the server hardware, there is no other “development or maintenance” to be done.
The way that quote is framed, it seems as they weren’t discussing classic servers as they were more discussing “servers capped at 60 with no Outlands content”. This means each patch would also update classic servers, which IMHO is not a classic server at all.
April 7th, 2008 at 9:51 am
I don’t know, Zaphid. I had a lot of fun in Molten Core. Garumoo’s right though… I certainly don’t miss dealing with 40 people on my raid.
April 7th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I’d personally prefer a retexture/revamp/remodel of old areas and old armor.