World of Warcraft Classic was released on August 26, 2019, so at the end of last month, the game celebrated its one-year anniversary. Warcraft fans and Blizzard alike will be keen to look back on what worked during the game’s first year and what surprises, pleasant and otherwise, arose.
With the Gates of Ahn’Qiraq now able to be opened, the game is roughly halfway through the content released for Vanilla, at least if they release subsequent patches at roughly the same speed as they were released the first time around. Here are some of the ways that WoW Classic exceeded expectations, but also some of the unexpected things that happened in Classic along the way.
WoW Classic’s popularity exceeded expectations, even among huge Warcraft fans. Classic servers were swamped at launch, with many filling up completely as players raced back to Azeroth to relive their first experiences with WoW.
This caused a lot of server problems early on. Not only were many Classic servers overpopulated, but this led to difficulties with the phasing mechanics that Blizzard had implemented to try and manage this in the game. For many players the world was either completely packed full, or, because they’d been phased to a different version to avoid overpopulation, strangely empty, especially at higher levels.
Blizzard prioritized placing players in the same phases based on factors like whether or not they were in the same WoW guild, meaning that for a lot of players the Vanilla experience of bumping into the same random players over and over again and forming organic relationships while leveling on the server was somewhat undermined.
Nevertheless, compared to WoW’s current cross-server PUG dungeon and raiding systems, Classic saw the development of far tighter server communities than the current version of the game, especially as Blizzard worked to iron out the phasing system as the game progressed. It also saw the size of the World of Warcraft subscriber base double by February 2020. The original subscriber count peaked at the start of WoW: Cataclysm with around 12 million players, but has steadily declined since then, with Classic as the only major uptick excluding expansion launches in the otherwise downward trend.
Vanilla dungeons and raids were known for their difficulty. While in the current retail version of World of Warcraft a player can use the Raid Finder tool to teleport to a 10 or 25-man raid with a random cross-server group, Vanilla raids often included organizing up to 40 players, journeying to the location of the raid itself, and wiping time and again in hopes of success. Guilds would search for players with specific race/class combos in WoW just to counteract certain boss effects, a tactic which would become less relevant in the first expansion when racial abilities were significantly nerfed.
WoW Classic could not have predicted how incredibly efficient at organizing people online had become since WoW released back in 2004. Far from posing insurmountable challenges, WoW Classic‘s raids were beaten surprisingly quickly, and soon once intimidating encounters became the subject of speed-runs by guilds used to organizing for far more mechanically complicated fights. The guild Dreamstate was able to clear Molten Core, an infamously hard Vanilla raid, in under 23 minutes flat in WoW Classic.
Onyxia’s Lair was one of the hardest raids during WoW’s original launch, and was considered almost impossible to beat without a dwarf priest and their Fear Ward buff in the party. Nonetheless, the black dragon was no match for modern raiding strategies and communication, and one guild even managed to defeat Onyxia while naked.
The difference in raiding will likely have struck many players as a surprise. Vanilla raiding was considered some of the hardest in gaming, and it was seen as common knowledge that WoW‘s raids had got easier and easier over the subsequent expansions, especially in WotLK. While this is still likely the case, WoW Classic also helped vindicate Blizzard to some degree, showing that the developer was in a tough spot as players themselves got wiser to the sorts of strategies they could use to defeat some of the hardest bosses in the game.
The fact that resources and raid tactics were also available to players from day one is likely another big factor in the different reception of end-game content. A huge part of the original World of Warcraft community included the steady development of websites like Wowwiki, which began as an independent project back in 2004, among other sites which began to build up knowledge of the hundreds of quests, raids and dungeons in the game. Having that information on-hand at launch almost certainly played a factor in how quickly the raids were defeated the second time around.
Nonetheless, WoW Classic still threw players into an immense world where combat was far harder and communities had to form to take on even low-level quests as infamous elite mobs like Hogger once again reigned supreme in Elwynn Forest, even if WoW Classic players had to wait in line for them to spawn. With no flying mounts and riding training hard to attain, the World of Warcraft once again became an intimidating landscape where hostile NPCs and players alike could be waiting around any corner. For many fans, Azeroth felt like a living breathing world again, not just a setting.
WoW Classic still has a lot of content ahead of it, including the giant Necropolis raid Naxxramas, yet to be released. Whether Blizzard decides to open servers for the next expansion, The Burning Crusade, remains to be seen, but if it does, many players could find themselves going on the full WoW journey once again.
Whether or not Blizzard decides to go down that route likely depends upon the success of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, the upcoming expansion to the main game. However, considering the fact that WoW has never been able to return to the subscription numbers it had during the game’s first few expansions, that could be likelier than many fans think.
World of Warcraft Classic is available now on PC. World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth is available now on PC.
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