ALL The Addons!

A few weeks ago, Wowhead drew my attention to a YouTube video called "What happens if you install EVERY ADDON for WoW Classic?" by Baltoboulbobbi. I clicked because the title intrigued me, but by god, I was not ready for what it showed me. It's not a very long video, only about seven minutes, but that's still a pretty long time to keep laughing, so my husband eventually grew concerned about what had me quite so amused.

At the time, the video had about 80k views, and I noticed that the pinned comment by the creator was "If this gets 20k views I'll do a 1-60 all addons challenge on a hardcore server". Someone asked whether he was seriously planning to do that, and he replied that he'd already started.

Needless to say, I immediately proceeded to his stream archive and started watching that too. At the time of writing this, I've watched about four hours of him streaming like that, and while it's been both funny and fascinating, I'm not sure I'll be able to take much more of it.

If you've ever watched someone else play a game awkwardly and found yourself fighting the urge to give them advice and tell them to do things differently, watching this stream is similar but ten times worse. The whole experience is just so painful to watch, Balto must have extraordinary patience to deal with it as calmly as he does, and it's rare that you notice any kind of annoyance sneak into his voice at all.

It's really quite astounding just how awkward the game is to play with all those unknown addons stacked on top of each other. Aside from the fact that all the extra windows mostly obscure his view of the actual game, they also break all kinds of other game functionality in unexpected ways.

For example he has no mini map, and the map addon that asserted itself always opens the map with a single view of the full continent, so that he then has to scroll about twenty times to get to the right corner of the actual zone he is in. With his visibility so limited and navigational tools largely out of action, he managed to get lost more than once even just trying to navigate the dwarven starter zone. He states early on that he's never actually played a dwarf before, which manages to make everything even worse as he doesn't even have the "legacy knowledge" of where the quests are and what they require.

Inventory turned out to be another tricky matter, as all the different bag addons created a situation in which he couldn't actually view or interact with anything in his inventory. He eventually figured out that he could get it to open any time he interacted with a vendor, but that was kind of it. At one point he also managed to somehow accidentally unequip his weapon, which started to sink in only slowly once he noticed that his little dwarf paladin was now punching things to death with his fists. Just locating his weapon again and getting it back into his hands was almost a mini adventure in itself.

It's not all doom and gloom, mind you. The addon that announces "You may now drink" in a weirdly snooty tone every time his character gets out of combat never gets old, and another one plays the sound of a metal bar clanging on certain occasions, though I don't think anyone's figured out yet what triggers it. Another one starts playing a repeating "sproing" sound at intervals that goes on for some time and then stops again, sometimes getting faster for a while... but again, it's open to interpretation what it all means. It just gives the notion of "coming up with new ways of playing the game" a whole new meaning.