A Classic Player's Return to Retail WoW

Back in October I wrote a post about why I'm currently not playing that much Classic anymore, and I always meant for that to have a kind of part two, in which I talk a bit about why I am still playing retail and how I got back into it in the first place.

"How to get Classic players back into retail WoW" is a question to which I'm sure the Blizzard devs would love to have the ultimate answer... because while a subscription is a subscription regardless of which game mode you play, retail has extra monetisation opportunities that Classic lacks, which I'm sure makes it the much bigger earner of the two, regardless of what the actual player distribution might look like.

A few months ago I saw a YouTube video called "I Asked Over 400 Classic WoW Players Why They Don't Like Retail" and the most interesting thing about it to me was the conclusion, as the creator said that he'd originally intended to have a section about how to get Classic players interested into playing retail again, but gave up on the idea when the majority of the people he interviewed flat out said that nothing would bring them back to retail, ever.

I think this reveals that for many Classic players there's a strong emotional component to their dislike for retail, which also expresses itself in a sort of tribalism at times - I've found that in retail environments, nobody really cares if you also play Classic, but in pretty much all the Classic guilds I've been in, admitting that you also play retail is likely to result in persistent (if hopefully friendly) mockery.

I'm not being judgemental of that behaviour here either, because I was in the same boat only a few years ago. When I resubscribed for Classic, I had zero interest in ever playing retail again, and I shared several of the opinions expressed in the above video.

What changed? Well... the biggest and simplest draw to return to retail was curiosity. Having a single subscription for both was a pretty genius move by Blizzard in that regard, because I never would've re-subscribed to retail in specific, but since it was already part of my "subscription plan" so to speak, checking it out again cost me nothing other than giving up a bit of disk space after pressing the "install" button.

And I do suspect that this is something that has worked on other Classic players as well... the problem is that the initial experience you have upon returning is most likely pretty bad. Your natural reaction is probably to log back into the last character you played several years ago, which might have logged out in a location from multiple expansions ago, whose UI will be messed up, and which probably has a bunch of half-empty action bars. The game offers you a free teleport back to the capital nowadays, but I'm not sure how helpful that really is... I still dislike post-Cata Orgrimmar for example and always try to get out of there as soon as I can when playing Horde side.

Either way, even if you put up with the mess that greets you and try to make sense of it, the experience of trying to sort out what's what is likely to exhaust you and make you feel like the whole thing is just an awful chore. I remember that's exactly how I felt when I briefly logged into retail when I first renewed my subscription in the run-up to Classic's launch.

When I actually did start to play retail again, I did so by making an alt, a course of action which would also be my personal recommendation to you if you're a Classic player who's considering giving retail another try, even if you're not usually an alt person. It means that "chores" and elements of confusion come at you at a much more manageable pace, and you have a better chance of re-evaluating the game for what it actually is.

There are two basic strategies here from my point of view:

The first is what I'd call "the nostalgia route", in which you create a character of a race and class you like and start levelling them through familiar zones. While things are likely somewhat different from how you remember them from Classic, familiarity is going to outweigh strangeness, making it much easier to process the things that actually stick out to you as odd. I did this at first by creating a draenei shaman named Bluu and levelling her through the draenei starting zone, followed by having her go to Outland (this was before Burning Crusade Classic). I got a good shot of nostalgia out of the zones and quests, while pausing to be bewildered by things every now and then: Wait, they changed the intro cinematic for draenei, this makes no sense! Why does lightning bolt have no mana cost now? Why is the quest log weird like that now? What's up with the first aid trainer only teaching tailors now? Etc.

The risk with this approach is that you may run into one too many things that hurt your nostalgia after a while and sour your mood: elite quests that aren't elite anymore, barren landscapes where you remember bustling crowds, or confusion about where to go now that boats and portals don't work the way they used to. In addition, with the way scaling works nowadays, questing in old content means that you'll likely fall behind in terms of gearing and will eventually find combat increasingly awkward and drawn out.

Which takes us to the second approach, which is to still make an alt but almost with the opposite attitude: You know that trying to approach retail with nostalgia goggles creates problems, so you opt for a scenario where this won't be an issue, by creating a character of a race and/or class you've never played before, and jump into one of the more recent expansions that you know little to nothing about. This means that you'll be bombarded with more newness and strangeness than on the nostalgic path, but on the plus side, since you don't have expectations you shouldn't be disappointed by failing to have them met. Just read those quests and follow the markers and take in parts of the world you've never seen before. The slower trickle of information and features should still make the experience a lot more manageable than trying to get back to your old main instantly, and you'll get to explore a whole bunch of new content in the process. You can pick your old characters back up again later on if you want, when you're actually used to the UI again and have a better grip on how things work.

This is all under the assumption that you enjoy exploring and questing, which I would expect to be the case for a good chunk of Classic players at least. However, if you're looking to jump right back into group content and endgame, I'll admit that you'll have a tougher time and I personally wouldn't recommend it. Dragonflight and War Within have solo versions of all their dungeons at least, so you can check those out in a low-pressure way the first time around.

I will say that playing retail again hasn't suddenly "converted" me to thinking that it's the better version of WoW or anything. Here's a list of things I still prefer about Classic: 

• The way the whole world is relevant to some degree and how players interact with it by travelling a lot
• The slower-paced levelling and gearing and how it makes everything feel more meaningful, from your connection to your character and the ability to take in your environment to the excitement of getting a rare item drop
  
• The slower-paced combat with its simpler rotations and how it's more about being strategic about things like relative positioning to other mobs than about perfectly executing a complicated rotation
• The way being social is more integrated into general gameplay and the difficulty of just making progress in the world encourages you to co-operate with other players
  

Now, you might read that and go: Wait, what's even left for you to like about retail then? Well...

I think one major point is that I'm an explorer type, and while the Vanilla world is great, I've seen a lot of it by now (I know there are still some things I haven't personally experienced, but not a lot of them to be honest). In retail WoW, there are always new things to try out and new places to see, and since Dragonflight the devs have also made it a lot more rewarding to just cruise around the open world and explore. Nobody can tell me that the zone design isn't still top notch.

I also like how many casual activities they've added over time beyond just grinding dailies/world quests. I loved all the different recurring events they added during Dragonflight, from the communal soup cooking to the time rifts, and War Within has added more of these. They are little things that feel somewhat rewarding to do on pretty much every alt and are just plain fun. Classic has less of a variety of pre-made content: you either quest, do dungeons, raid or PvP.

Most importantly though, Classic is simply not getting any updates, the occasional experiment on a seasonal server not withstanding. Retail WoW is in a unique position in the MMO genre in that it's such a juggernaut with a huge budget, it's been pumping out new content like nobody's business for several years now. (It's fun to think back to when this game used to have "content draughts" of half a year or more. No longer an issue as it stands.) I love that there are always new things to do and new places to see, and even if not every single one of them is a banger, there's still a lot to love for players of all kinds of different persuasions.