It’s a strange thing to disassemble a fifteen-year-old game about which so much has been said and talked about that you can build a new Tower of Babel out of reviews, manuals, disputes and memoirs. But it's even weirder to return to a world that tries to pretend to be a fly in amber. After all, evolution is not accidental: what does not develop dies out, and even a virtual river cannot be entered twice.
But we'll still try. And go back in time and tell us what we think of World of Warcraft Classic.
Almost one in the morning, decent people have long turned off the lights in their apartments. Only my colleague (Dmitry Kinsky from Kanobu) and I are discussing on which server to start our epic with WoW Classic. As a result, the choice falls on the newly discovered Zmeytalak: there are fewer people, which means that you can play more calmly.
Alas, we were convinced that we were wrong, barely watching the familiar introductory video of people; the square in front of Northshire Abbey was filled with players. There are dozens of them, hundreds of them, and they keep appearing out of thin air in front of the starting quest giver. Then they scatter through the surrounding forests, but they do not become smaller. And this is just one of the “layers”: if there really were all the players on the screen, the PC would probably explode.
It is clear that a quiet game is out of the question. The surroundings are generously strewn with the corpses of unfortunate wolves and kobolds, new monsters do not have time to load, as a hail of blows falls on them. The same, or even worse, happens on other servers and starting locations. In short, the veterans of the classic World of Warcraft got a great opportunity to remember how many bottlenecks there were in the original game. All the first days, crowds gathered in front of the quest bosses - sometimes they politely lined up in a real queue.
Queues in general became a sign of the first days of the "classics". Queues for servers, queues for quest bosses, again for servers. " Who's the last one on the captain? "-" Hunt occupied me, but flew out. - " Ah, well, he's in another queue for now."
But there were more difficult cases. One of the first quests for the undead is to search six chests scattered around the location. In the classic version, only one player gets their contents - the one who first got to the treasure. This means that when two dozen people try to do the same quest, it is useless to run a race, there are too many who want it: you have to choose a strategic point in the old fashioned way and wait for a box to appear in it. It takes exactly four minutes. Six boxes, four minutes to wait, plus time for a slow search - almost half an hour of life is spent on one completely useless quest.
Blizzard is fighting the problem by opening more and more new worlds and increasing their capacity at the same time. Surely hundreds of players, tired of the insane population density, have already fled to where it is “greener”. However, the community tends to huddle in large flocks, so the color of the Flamegor will not soon cease to be red.
The overpopulation of the game aside, technically, the launch of vanilla servers turned out to be almost flawless. Yes, all owners of not the most powerful computers observed lags and freezes, but there were no critical errors; restarting the servers took a very long time.
Otherwise, the authenticity of the classic version is cool and appropriately diluted with fresh WoW developments. Quite modern orcs, dwarves, elves and trolls run across Azeroth, not a bit like their ancient low-poly prototypes. The territories were leveled and sown with fresh grass, the houses were overhauled, and the interface was updated to the latest version.
Although some locations have been preserved in almost original form. For example, the fortress of Stormwind. Nowadays, this is one of the most pretentious and luxurious places in the capital of the Alliance: with fountains, wide stairs and carpet paths. And in WoW Classic, you can see how uncomfortable the royal abode looked from the beginning. No throne, no other furniture.
"Vanilla" is a great place for anyone who is tormented by nostalgia. This world has not yet been touched by the Cataclysm, in which the Wastes are not split by a rift, and the Thousand Needles is not flooded with water. Despite its size, it feels compact and homey. After all Pandaria has not yet emerged from the fog, and there is no one to open the portal to Draenor. The Broken Isles not only did not surface - no one rushed to look for them. So everything important and significant is happening here and now, on our way to the 60th level without wow mythic boost.
However, who are we kidding: the usual routine is going on around. Before Blizzard starts telling exciting stories, a lot of water must flow. The boy-king Anduin, the risen from the dead Sylvanas, Bolvar Fordragon, Thrall and other great and small leaders of both sides are so far nothing more than cardboard figures, devoid of the character and burden of past years.
And our heroes are ordinary pawns who will not be entrusted with saving the world. We are entrusted only with the most everyday tasks, which there is no one else to foist. Hey you recruit, run and kill the Scourge! And along the way, pluck strider feathers, cut meat from boars, take rings from the Scarlet Crusade, pick weed and deal with murlocs!
The conquerors of Mechagon, the pioneers of Kul Tiras and Nazjatar, the "children of the Legion" and other neophytes all have to do it in harsh conditions. There is no acquired capital in the form of a clogged stable, chests with "heirs", bursting with bank resources and a network of laid flight paths. You have to dress in rags knocked out of murlocs, shake over every copper coin, run from end to end of the location on your own two feet and try to cope with the reduced combat capabilities. And for all this, they won’t even give out an “achievement”!
But that's the beauty of it: in Classic, everyone starts on an equal footing. It is possible to distinguish a beginner from a veteran only by the fact that the first asks where Mankrik's wife is, and the second answers: "After the bridge near the tent." Yes, yes, he answers. In the early days of "vanilla" you cannot be afraid to ask any questions, ask for help and gypsy silver "for skills". The gaming community is extremely friendly, and even the notorious “barrens chat” is only warming up so far.
