I Decided to Try Turtle WoW Before It Shuts Down

Strictly speaking we don't know how soon it's going to happen (the server owners at least still seem to be in "we can totally do this" mode), but I did find myself thinking that if Turtle WoW does end up biting the dust in the near future... after everything that I've heard about it, I would like to at least have tried it myself, to see some of the things that people have been praising over the moon and form my own opinion.

So I downloaded a private server client for the first time in nearly a decade. (Don't give me the side eye, Blizz, my subscription is already paid up until next year.) On the plus side, with them offering the launcher right there on their own website, there was no faffing around with dodgy file sharing sites or editing realmlist.wtf files. However, it was also a reminder that a private server is still a private server with all the jank that entails, as I had to spend a fair amount of time dealing with errors and fiddling with settings until I had everything running smoothly. (In a similar vein, every single screenshot I took during my first play session was apparently lost as they wouldn't save properly unless I ran the client as administrator.)

One thing I was very impressed with though was the detailed list of server rules I had to agree to while signing up. I'm someone who likes clear rules, and I think that having some basic politeness standards for something that is supposed to be a relaxed, escapist space should not be controversial at all. Unfortunately we live in times where the argument of "free speech" is often abused to let pointless toxicity spread far and wide - when WoW players were asked to agree to a comparatively short and simple pop-up asking them to be nice a few years ago, there was a veritable uproar. So good on Turtle WoW for making it clear that good behaviour is not optional (and based on everything I've heard, they actually enforce these rules as well).

I created a blonde high elf because that seemed like a good way of diving straight into the custom content unique to the server. At first I was going to make her a paladin but then I saw that high elves get bonuses to their agility and bow skill, so I decided that I was clearly meant to create yet another hunter.

I was kind of impressed to find that the experience started with one of those fly-over introductions with a narrator explaining the race's background, even if the voice-over was done by a woman with a Russian accent. In a video about Turtle WoW from years ago, I'd seen newly created high elves simply get plopped down in Loch Modan with some starter quests around Farstrider Lodge. This was clearly outdated, as they now had their own starting zone called Thalssian Highlands, located north-west of the Plaguelands.

I will admit that after how much praise I'd seen heaped on the Turtle WoW devs for their custom content, I found it easy to immediately find things to nitpick. For example the first few quests I read were written in such incredibly purple prose, it actually made me laugh. (Though in fairness, later quests were not like that, so maybe the writers just thought that those particular characters should sound pompous and over the top.) More importantly though, the quest writers often seemed to forget that when you write quests for a game mode without quest tracking, you need to give some actual directions in the quest text. There were many occasions when this wasn't done and I was left slightly bewildered and confused after having been given instructions to kill some mobs without any idea of where to actually go.

It was difficult to find NPCs to repair my gear as most weapon and armour vendors didn't offer repairs like they would normally do in WoW. Guards seemed to be purely cosmetic and did absolutely no guarding. (My first death occurred when a higher-level mana wyrm attacked me on the road and a guard watched me die right next to him without offering any assistance.) Clickable quest items didn't despawn after I clicked them, so I often ended up clicking on them again without being able to loot anything, meaning I had to memorise which boxes or buckets I'd already interacted with.

The quest flow also seemed slightly off in general, as even though I picked up every quest I could find and killed plenty of mobs along the way, I was permanently slightly under-levelled for the next few quests I was given, and as a hunter without a pet... let's just say this was extremely painful and I died many times. (The issue was exacerbated by the all the mobs seemingly running too fast and having leashes that felt way too long for a starting zone - so any attempts to kite or simply run away from a fight were pretty much always unsuccessful as the mobs were impossible to outrun and would just chase me forever.)

Another thing that fascinated me about the quests in general was just how openly derivative many of them were, especially after the many comments I'd read about how Turtle WoW apparently understands better what defines Vanilla WoW than Blizzard does. "Come on," you might say, "it's kill-ten-rats kind of stuff, how much originality do you expect?" But I'm not talking about the tasks themselves - rather about the story and theming around them.

Every WoW starting zone has quests to kill some local wildlife, but the context varies. As a whole, each starting zone paints a picture of the culture your character belongs to, what its values are and what problems it faces. The blood elf starting zone is very different from the human starting zone, which is very different from the undead starting zone. What stood out to me about the high elf starting zone in Turtle WoW was that it seemed to lack a clear theme and felt more like some weird amalgamation of Elwynn Forest and Eversong Woods quests viewed through a fun house mirror: Here's the quest where some guy asks you to pick flowers for a girl he likes, here's the quest where an elf wants to throw a party and needs you to fetch supplies. Here's the quest with the vineyard where grapes have been abandoned in buckets and you need to fetch them. (Though oddly, no grapevines in sight - the implication seemed to be that they grow on the giant trees?)

All that just hit a nerve with me because I hate the idea that people might think that the gold standard for Classic+ should be to just retell the exact same stories over and over again. It's like those people who don't like anything Star Wars if it doesn't have a lost Skywalker finding the Force in it.

Anyway... that was a bit of tangent. Let's talk professions! I initially wanted to learn skinning and leatherworking, but the skinning trainer in town didn't seem to exist. I saw a jewelcrafting trainer nearby and went "Ooh, they have that here?", so I trained that and mining instead. In an interesting twist, it's not the same as Burning Crusade jewelcrafting. From what I've seen so far, the basic rings are present but have had their recipes changed, and there are a lot of new and different recipes as well.

Unfortunately, secondary professions seem to have gotten the short end of the stick in comparison, at least based on my experience in this zone. While there was a fishing trainer, the fishing skill requirement was way too high for a starter zone and fish were always getting away from me even with a lure applied. There were no fishing pools along the coast either. Cooking and first aid were likewise trainable in the vicinity, but none of the animals actually dropped meat that could be cooked, and apart from a handful of ghost mobs in the north-western corner of the map, nothing seemed to drop linen for first aid either.

I could go on and on... but despite these nitpicks and annoyances - I had fun. There was definitely something very refreshing and exciting about being in a vaguely Vanilla-like starting zone without having any idea of what awaited me. I loved not knowing what I'd see next whenever I crested a hill, or finding an unexpected quest giver inside a building. I quickly lost track of time while playing, and when I got up the next morning, I kept thinking about my little elf, eager to go back and play some more in a way I probably hadn't done since 2019's Classic launch.

For all the small details I noticed being off, there was still a lot to be impressed by, such as the fact that the whole zone of Thalassian Highlands is an original creation (even if it clearly recycles a lot of assets from Eversong), including the composition of original zone music. And there are other loving touches, such as that they updated the Vanilla loading screens for Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms to include high elves and goblins. The Turtle WoW creators clearly have a lot of love for Vanilla; there are just gaps in the details.

At one point when I got tired of dying constantly due to my low level, I ran towards what looked like the local docks on the map, and jumped onto the first boat that arrived to take me somewhere else, anywhere else. I ended up in Auberdine, and found that someone had pitched a tent outside the inn. I had heard about these, so I stood under it, and within the course of five minutes or so, I saw my rested XP shoot up by about half a level. While I soon hearthed back home, that restedness helped me to finally catch up a bit in levels, so thanks, anonymous tent-builder.

This seems like a good point to mention community. Again, this is something that I'd heard a lot of praise for before, so I was admittedly a bit confused when for my first few levels I couldn't get anyone to talk to me. By that I mean that people would group up for a quest and cooperate, but I would literally get zero reply to anything I said. I was starting to wonder whether there was some hidden chat restriction for low-level characters or something. I think I was around level 9 when a friendly mage finally talked to me while we briefly grouped up for a quest to kill murlocs. They even offered to continue questing together, but unfortunately I had to log off just after that. The only other verbal interaction I've had since then was some random whispering me to compliment me on my "thicc elf booty". All in all, I would rate that as similar to playing on a Blizzard PvE server before they merged everything into the mega servers - neither notably better nor worse. But then, you can't really have a non-megaserver experience in most of the official Classic versions anymore, so...

After I'd completed all the quests in Thalassian Highlands (as far as I could tell), I tried to do some research on what else might be interesting to check out, whether there was another custom zone I could go to at my level. As it turns out, there aren't actually as many of them as one might have expected after all the hype, and Thalassian Highlands is supposed to be one of the better ones. There do however seem to be a lot of smaller changes all over the place, and I have already encountered a few new quests sprinkled in here and there among the original ones from the existing zones.

I don't know how much time I will invest in this exploration (never mind how much I will have before the server potentially goes bye-bye) but there'll be at least one more post on the subject, about me trying to do my first dungeon and it being a very weird experience.