For many of us, World of Warcraft wasn’t just a game; it was a rite of passage. It was certainly the first subscription I ever convinced my parents to fund, a monumental step up from my days in Runescape. When a band class friend in 2006 described WoW as ‘Runescape but better,’ it sounded like the pinnacle of gaming. While adult-me might quibble with that exact comparison, child-me was sold. After a month of persistent negotiations and chore commitments, Azeroth became my digital home from its vanilla days through the Lich King’s fall, a journey that wound down around my senior year in 2012-13. Subsequent attempts to rekindle that magic in modern WoW felt hollow; the world I knew was gone. Then came World of Warcraft Classic.
For years, I sided with Blizzard’s infamous stance on legacy servers: ‘You think you want it, but you don’t.’ It resonated with my own experience; I hadn’t perceived the game as declining, but rather that the game and I grew apart: I began to play narrative-heavy games as WoW continued to streamline. Recently, a lot of streamers started playing Classic Hardcore, where if your character dies, it gets transferred to a non-hardcore server, so the only people playing on the hardcore servers are those that haven’t died. I don’t really watch a lot of them, but I started hearing about it a lot on Twitter and such. The more I saw people talk about it, the more nostalgic I got. The stories of peril and triumph, even from afar, stirred a potent nostalgia. So, when a gaming group I’m part of suggested a foray into Classic – just to level 20, we naively thought – the old call of Azeroth was too strong to ignore. I quickly remembered, however, that ‘just level 20’ in Classic is a significant undertaking.
We all sort of played independently, with a little meet up at the end. All of my impressions are from the perspective of someone playing classic solo, with some groupings with randoms here and there. In retail WoW, you can probably get through the starting zone (around level 10) within an hour. In Classic, I would estimate it took me about 5 hours, with many more deaths and roadblocks. Classic WoW’s questing is a testament to simpler design philosophies: the objectives primarily revolve around monster slaying, item gathering, or a combination thereof. While later expansions introduced more complex, sometimes gimmicky, quest mechanics like minigames, I found myself appreciating Classic’s straightforwardness. The novelty of elaborate retail quests often wore thin, whereas Classic allowed me to focus on the core joys of combat and exploration. I remembered how simple quests used to be, but I didn’t remember how dangerous questing used to be.
Emerging from a single combat encounter with even half your health felt like a minor victory. Depending on your class/level, fighting two enemies at once is usually a straight up no-go. This difficulty is compounded by how much slower your health and mana regenerate outside of combat, usually forcing you to sit down to eat and drink after every other encounter. To contrast, in retail WoW, you can usually aggro 4-6 enemies at once and be back at full health within seconds after the combat. This greatly slows down the process of questing, especially when you consider most Classic quests require more kills compared to retail. Whether this is a good thing will differ based on what you want out of the game. I feel like the questing and leveling is the best part of MMOs, and don’t care as much about end game raiding and gear grinding. I appreciated the slower pace of the game as it let me stop and smell the in-game roses. There is a lot of detail in the world of Azeroth, and the break-neck pace of retail can make you forget that fact.
World-building is further developed through class trainers. In retail WoW, you get abilities as soon as you level up, as you may expect. However, in Classic, you are required to go to class trainers to purchase abilities after you reach their level requirement. These class trainers are found in capital cities and some settlements around the world as well. Having to go back to town every few levels may sound like a chore, which is probably why it was removed. I found this system very endearing, as it broke up the monotony of questing by forcing a “break” to return to the city, get my abilities, and kind of just chill there for a little. This recurring pilgrimage to civilization did more than just gate abilities; it fostered a sense of place. Capital cities weren’t just hubs; they were lively social spaces. The often-chaotic trade chat, the sight of diverse adventurers displaying their hard-won gear, or simply observing the player-driven world felt integral to the experience, preventing the tunnel-vision grind that modern WoW can sometimes induce. I found it far too easy to zone out in the grind of retail WoW, hopping from quest-to-quest as fast as possible. This forces you to slow down and see more than one aspect of the game.
Despite all the praise, I don’t think I’m currently in a position to continue playing. WoW Classic demands a commitment of time and patience that, regrettably, I can no longer offer. The slower, more deliberate pace undoubtedly recaptures a magic that has been diluted in its modern counterpart, forcing you to engage with the world and its inhabitants on a deeper level. For those with the hours to invest, who crave a journey where every level gained is an achievement and every encounter a potential threat, Classic WoW offers a profoundly rewarding, if demanding, experience. It truly is a journey back to a different era of gaming, one that I cherish having revisited, even if only for a while.
"Good game in 2025, great game in 2004"
"And I'm NOT biased"
"Exploring the world would feel much better if it wasn't gated by pressing my number keys in order a thousand times per zone - Chill game though"