World of Warcraft Classic - Review

Introduction:

            15 years later, and here we are again. World of Warcraft, that game so popular that even non-gamers heard of it. To the dismay of many mothers and low GPA college grads, it still holds itself has the most played MMO in history (probably), and for good reasons. But with each expansion, with each change, certain crowds felt isolated, to the point where it was far too removed from the original to keep playing. Over the years dedicated players have petitioned Blizzard for original, Vanilla servers of the game, and now here we have it. And I, in my absolute madness, will be making my first ever review of this 15-year-old game, an MMO no less. Holy crap, heaven have mercy on me I must be crazy.

The Problem with Flying

Riding on a dragon will always be bad-ass!

Flying, the ability to move through the air freely. Be it for work, for transport, or for pleasure, it’s a wonderful and invigorating experience. In MMOs the ability to fly is often asked for by the player base, typically by mount of course. It’s a pretty cool idea don’t you think? Who wouldn’t want to ride on a dragon, that’s badass!

One of the earliest examples of using flight in video games in an interesting that I know of is the first Final Fantasy (I am sure there are others). By the time you acquire the Air Ship in that game you have traveled to or explored most of the game’s world. Using air travel allows you to avoid the hassle of retracing old grounds, let’s you get straight to specific places in faster time, and the most important part, it can grant access to new places that were previously inaccessible. Sounds fair, doesn’t it? It’s a pretty sweet reward late into one’s adventure, and even opens up new content! But the MMO genre is different from a single player game. As I always tend to emphasize, you are not alone in the world of an MMO, you play *with* others, cooperatively, competitively, or passively. What may work in one genre does not necessarily mean it will work in another.

Legacy Servers

Classic WoW will release August 27th, 2019

The release date of Classic World of Warcraft has finally been announced, along with the release of the beta the day following the announcement. So I figured now would be an appropriate time to write about a rather new concept for the MMO genre, legacy servers.

Legacy servers for MMOs are servers that host an earlier version of said game. This can come to be as a result of high player demand or developer obligation when transferring their game to a significantly updated version. Usually the likelihood of a legacy server coming into existence by the original creators is slim, but does increase with age. For this reason private servers, illegally hosted versions, are made to help quench this demand.

And who can blame them? When you buy a game you buy it for what it is, that iteration, and arguably changes to said game is a valid reasoning to be dissatisfied with the product. However MMOs are a bit different, well, their nature is anyways. Massive MULTIPLAYER Online games do not have their players in a vacuum, rather they play with hundreds of thousands of other players, and satisfying a single individual is not on the table, and usually is not even realistically possible. Creating servers for every version of an MMO AND keeping the same “feel” of the game cannot be done, after all other players are part of the experience and splitting them up would be less than ideal. So for years an MMO will be updated pushing away and bringing in players, until a significant demand for a particular version is reached, at which point the team behind the game may consider re-releasing an older iteration as its own entity.

Wait, that’s Racist!

In my last piece I talked about how I wish for more obscure races in MMOs and briefly went into theoretical gameplay mechanics that could be done with them. I would like to talk on that a little more, but this time more in the fantasy political realm and how racial discrimination IN A FICTIONAL FANTASY SETTING can actually be beneficial.

As some of you may know, some of the earliest MMOs can have their roots be traced back to Dungeons & Dragons, and type of pen and paper game where imagination (and the Game Master) is your only limitation! A human, an elf, a dwarf, and a really short guy go on an adventure, a tale as old as Lord of the Rings (because seriously, where did you think you heard this from if you didn’t play D&D?) And throughout their journey each of them contributes in some way. Perhaps the elf is exceptional with the bow and can take out foes at a distance, the dwarf sweeps through hordes of goblins, the human swindles others with his looks, and the midget crawls into places where Health & Safety would panic. Each of them have an ability, but what about… social status?

Playable Races in MMOs, Where are the Monsters?

Recently I learned that in Vanilla World of Warcraft one of the ideas for a playable race that never got implemented were the Naga, a sea serpent race. So this got me thinking about how most MMOs have rather boring and uninteresting playable races. (We’ll get back to the Naga a bit further down).

Character creation in MMORPGs tend to boil down to 2 armed, 2 legged, humanoid, 3 sizes: small, normal, and large (the large races often have a slight hunchback), and their female equivalences being standard humans with a few more jiggle physics and different coat of paint. And while there’s nothing wrong with having traditional fantasy races such as Orcs and Elves, I seldom see anything different. Even Final Fantasy 14, a game that I did enjoy playing, its races were rather disappointing with the more “unique” ones amounting to bad cosplay. If you’re going to include cat or dragon “people” into your game you could do a little more than just slap on ears and a tail. Maybe throw in that good old fashion hunchback, or add some more fur or better yet just get rid of that damn human skin. Why the fuck does a dragon have tits?!