Over the last few weeks, I tried going back to WoW after around 15 years. Incredibly, even though Blizzard continues to this day to add expansions to WoW (known as the Retail edition), it also offers a Classic version of the game as it was around in 2006! Since summer 2023, they also offer a Hardcore version where your character is forever lost if you die (which happens a lot).
I tried it and had quite a bit of fun, and it made me wonder why. Why do lots of players think it's better to play a game of almost 20 years instead of the new and improved version? And why would anyone play the Hardcore version where weeks or months of progress can be lost if you make a single mistake?
What makes WoW Classic hard... even bad
First, let's look at what makes WoW Classic such a difficult and unfriendly game by today's standards.
- Enemies are tough: Enemies are strong, forcing you to deal with them one at a time. You'll spend quite some time running away after having pulled a few too many at the wrong time. Become too optimistic and you'll perish.
- Progression is slow: Going to the maximum level of 60 will take months if you have a job and other obligations. Reaching the end game content is a legitimate achievement in itself. This slow pace is a consequence of enemies being tough to beat and each level requiring significant and increasing amounts of experience. And it is made even worse by:
- Most of your time is spent traveling: The map is large and made even larger by your slow pace through the environment. You'll need to wait until late in the game (level 40) to get a mount. Before that, you'll be walking everywhere. There isn't any fast travel either. The best the game gives you are griffin rides available at each zone's main town but there are some caveats: You need to have discovered the town before it can become a destination, you need to pay for your rides, and you need to actually wait for your griffin to go through the map. This means that going somewhere can take you half an hour.
Here's what a typical "fast" travel looks like:
- No group finder for dungeons: If you're searching for a group to explore a dungeon, modern MMOs will offer tools to pair you up with others also interested. WoW Classic offers no such thing and you'll instead have to go to one of the main cities and ask around if anyone wants to join you. And once you have a team, everyone will need to come meet up at the instance which can take a while as well. Spending one hour looking for a group before starting the dungeon is absolutely normal.
- The map shows barely any information: Most games will now use your map to show you points of interest, where to pick up quests, etc. WoW Classic doesn't do any of this. The map is beautiful and matches what you could expect your character to actually draw as he discovers the world (the map only reveals itself as you travel through the world) but there's nothing else. This is challenging as you need to explore to understand where quests can be picked up, and then read the description to figure out where you should go for the objective.
Almost everything enjoyable with the game comes from its challenges
It's interesting to realize that the lack of convenience is what makes players enjoy their time in the game. Progression is slow and hard, but just as you remember having run a marathon because it was tough, you remember having fully leveled your character because of the arduous journey.
Traveling being slow is what makes players feel immersed in the environment. You learn the zones, their styles, and their geography. This is helped by the great style of World of Warcraft that holds up really well after all these years. Because traveling in the world is so slow, you feel slow compared to the world around you, giving an immense feeling of immersion.
Having to talk to people, search for groups, or join a guild to access dungeons forces connections to happen between players. You really go on an adventure together and if it's successful, you gladly add each other to the friends list. Any automation would have made the experience transactional.
The tyranny of Quality of Life Improvements
Game updates often list their Quality of Life Improvements. Those are always great and fix real pain points for users. But as we just saw, improving the experience in the short term can actually diminish long-term satisfaction. Just as in real life, it's only what challenges us that creates strong memories: Struggle hard during a marathon, and you'll remember it for your entire life.
Players are partially to blame here, and as Soren Johnson famously said: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." In WoW Classic, this translates to huge online resources to speed up leveling. It is even possible to add add-ons that will fill out the map with information or add a GPS pointer to the screen to speed up navigation... no need to read the quests anymore!
Why games aren't like they used to be
So why aren't game designers following this blueprint to make better games now? The problem is competition in entertainment and our addiction to quick releases of dopamine. Twenty years ago, most people had few entertainment options. If a game was hard, you had to fight your way through it because the alternative might have been to not play anything. Today, game designers need to contend with the fact that anyone can install hundreds of free-to-play games on their devices, watch Netflix, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
There's intense competition for your attention, and the game design that's best suited to create long-term memories and deep satisfaction in the game isn't suited for today's competition. This is why some players go back to WoW Classic.
There's always going to be a subset of players that are looking for a challenge; look at the success of the Dark Souls franchise. In WoW, this gave birth to the Hardcore mode where your character is lost if you ever die (which happens a lot in WoW Classic). But most players do not fit this category, and most new mass-market games need to target a more casual audience.
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