Taking a Peek at the Forever Beta

Only a few days ago I responded to a commenter that I didn't care about the beta, but I did preorder and have access to it. So naturally, after spending the last few days hoovering up every possible tidbit of information about Forever that I could find, I was very tempted to at least take a look at it myself. Not to play "properly" mind you, I'll still leave the actual testing up to others... but just to have a bit of a look around, you know? Check out those graphics updates and new UI options, to see what those look like.

The first thing I heard was that there were queues, up to 40,000 people strong from what I've read, though the highest I saw myself was 20k. A few days ago I saw a conversation about Forever's launch on reddit where someone claimed that "modern WoW doesn't have launch queues anymore", which made me chuckle at the time. Maybe "modern" WoW doesn't, but that person has clearly never been part of a Classic launch. And this wasn't even the real launch, just a beta test!

There were some issues with lag and disconnects, which were worse for EU players and which eventually led to me learning that WoW betas always take place in the US region. This surprised me only because of how strict they have been about needing to maintain the regional divide everywhere else, which made me think that there were some legal or technical issues that were simply insurmountable. So you're saying all I needed to do to potentially play with American friends is play a beta? Weird.

Anyway, needless to say, things were busy in the starter zones. Night elf, human and tauren were all bustling. I decided to take my tauren up for a run first to see the lay of the land and was delighted to see the new Plainsrunning racial in action. Unlike the original plan for Plainsrunning that was then dropped for Vanilla, this is not meant to replace a mount but instead lets you slowly build up to 30% movement speed increase as long as you keep running, which I imagine will be great for lower-level characters without a mount wanting/needing to traverse the world.

I also came across this new functionality, which they explained was added to help out hardcore players in particular, because it sucks to die when everything around you resets unexpectedly and you're suddenly surrounded due to no fault of your own.

You could argue that it's a bit immersion-breaking, but I think this is an important enough feature that it's worth it, and I'm actually hoping they'll add this to retail as well. I've had so many rage-inducing moments in retail when I was working on some kind of event that needs build-up, or fighting a tough rare or something, and then just as you're about to finish, with the last mob at 10%, everything around you just disappears because you've been phased into a different version of the world. Always hate that.

Anyway, to get back to Forever, the view towards the north of Mulgore was genuinely stunning because you could see all the way up to Mount Hyjal. I imagine the world will feel kind of different with Nordrassil always looming in the distance wherever you go.

That said, in places the updated graphics looked a bit... weird to me, in a way that I found hard to describe. I ran around Elwynn Forest and Stormwind as well to take some shots there, and then took pictures of the exact same scenes in Classic era to compare them. Take this shot of northern Elwynn Forest, just out of Northshire:

Forever

Classic Era

The shadows in Forever are obviously so much more sophisticated, but it also makes everything look so much darker. And I don't know, is Elwynn Forest of all places meant to be this dark? I'm sure there'll be people who'll answer "yes, it was always a little bit ominous" or something like that, but I always remember it as pretty bright and sunlit, so this change just seems a bit strange to me.

Or take this shot of Stormwind Keep:

Classic Era

Forever

I put Classic era first for this one to show that the top of the keep always looked like ass in Vanilla, it just wasn't that big a deal because with the shorter view distances it was always meant to just kind of be this vague silhouette that blends into the background. 

In Forever, the updated lighting somehow manages to give everything more definition, which looks great in the foreground, but it also has the same effect on the towers in the back, basically putting a big highlight on just how terrible they look. Which is awkward! I wonder if they'll do any extra work on updating stuff like that. Either way, it'll take some time to get used to.

I've had similar struggles with the models. I did play around with the SD/HD toggle a bit and it honestly made me feel a bit confused. I love all the old models, but with so much of the environment managing to look more high res somehow (even if it's technically the same old assets), they look a bit out of place at times. But when I toggle HD on, I'm reminded of how much I dislike the new models for some races (hello there, tauren). It's almost like I'd need the toggle to be per character instead of account-wide, so I can see the world in SD when I need a specific character to be that way, and HD when I'm happy to see the newer models. I'm guessing that'd be too complicated to do though. It's just something that'll take a bit of getting used to I guess.

Turtling On

I've honestly become quite enthralled with Turtle WoW. I wasn't exaggerating when I compared the experience to 2019 Classic, including the urge to log in whenever I can, even if it's only to take care of one small task at a time.

After I initially completed the high elf starter zone, the thought of going back to the same old content that I've done many times before seemed a bit underwhelming. There doesn't currently seem to be a unique new quest hub or zone for Alliance characters in the low teens, presumably because so many people go to Westfall during that time anyway. However, based on the Turtle WoW Wiki, new custom content seemed within reach if I could only knock out another ten levels or so, which I figured shouldn't be that hard this early in the levelling process.

So I travelled around several of the classic 10-20 zones, doing a few select quests in each one, and being fascinated by where random new quests showed up mixed in with the old ones. In Elwynn I befriended a sheep called Lulu for example, which then became my pet. And if you ever thought it was odd that Marshal Dughan asked you to explore the Jasperlode Mine just to then not follow up on what you find in there - well, on Turtle WoW he actually asks you to go back there and kill those giant spiders.

I also found new stand-alone quests in places where they felt like very natural additions, such as the dwarven fisherman down by Loch Modan asking you to kill some threshadons, or the first night elf house you come across when going down to Ashenvale now having a night elven couple in it that ask you to check in on a furbolg and hunt some wolves. Again, I could nitpick about things like odd word choices and typos in the quest text, but I loved that it just felt right that there was something to find in those places now.

There were other random changes to the world to notice. For example Stormwind has the harbour that was added in Wrath, and the boat from Auberdine to Menethil was rerouted from the latter to go to Stormwind instead - which means no more Wetlands death runs for night elves, but also makes Darnassus as a capital way more connected so it doesn't feel too bad to go there now. You can even do your auction business there without it being too annoying because the devs added a mailbox next to the auction house building, meaning it's no longer necessary to run all the way back to the bank all the time.

Fishing has been another interesting exercise. Fishing has always had the reputation of being a decent moneymaker, but my experience in WoW Classic has always been that on the Classic megaservers, there's too much competition for pools and it's hard to claim any for yourself. Turtle WoW must have increased the spawn rates for fishing pools massively, because even though the server is incredibly busy and I do see people fishing all over the place, there are always more pools to grab. This doesn't seem to have hurt demand either: I had about one gold to my name when I decided to stop at the Auberdine docks to fish from some pools that I noticed there - a few hours later I was up to ten gold and could buy myself a 16-slot bag (which was only a fraction of the price you'd be charged on official Classic servers).

They clearly made other changes as well - for example I keep finding Sagefish along the coast, which is purely a freshwater fish in regular Classic. Also, the lowest rank Rumsey Rum which you can find in certain pools is usually vendor trash, but for some reason I could sell it for ten silver a pop on Turtle. 

Not everything's great, as there are also bugs with fishing - I was unable to fish in Crystal Lake for some reason, and at other times I would catch something but would be unable to loot it and the fish would end up lost. Still, overall fishing has been fun and a great boon.

Chucking things on the auction house has also felt better than it has in a while, again thanks to small changes I noticed compared to "pure" Vanilla. The maximum listing time has been increased from 24 to 72 hours, and while I haven't done the maths, listing fees seem drastically reduced compared to regular Vanilla, with many low-level items not having any at all, which actually makes it viable to throw up low-level crafting mats for a few copper without making a loss. I've been kind of impressed with how materials are simultaneously abundant and affordable, but still sufficiently in demand that you can actually make a small profit off everything you sell (which is once again a contrast to official Classic, where I remember the leather market for example sometimes being so flooded that you were better off just vendoring it all).

At level 18 I could set out to the Darkmoon Faire to get the low-level turtle mount, which matches the server's name. It doesn't actually speed you up a lot, but around level 20 when you start having to travel around a lot more, it still feels good to be able to go even a little bit faster. (Plus it actually swims if you walk it into a lake or river!) I thought that was quite an elegant solution to making travel just a little bit easier without devaluing the level 40 mount.

I also really liked the quest text for this one by the way, as I thought it was very clever and fit well into the existing lore. I never really thought about the fact that Torta and Tooga in Tanaris are talking tortoises and how odd that is even in Azeroth, yet nobody ever remarks on it. It seemed appropriate that Silas Darkmoon would be fascinated by magical talking turtles!

I thought I'd also queue for a quick Deadmines, because I always love me some Deadmines. I actually got a group instantly, but the experience was not at all what I expected. Four of us arrived at the dungeon before the tank, so I thought we could at least start pulling some mobs in the tunnel, right? As a hunter with a pet I was generally able to take a same-level elite as long as I took a bit of care. Not here, though! The very first mob murdered my pet in only a few hits and then got me too.

It reminded me of how when WoW Classic came out, it turned out that Vanilla private servers were way overtuned in terms of difficulty compared to the real thing, just because everyone remembered things being way harder than they had objectively been at the time. Apparently the Turtle WoW devs never revised that tuning for dungeons, whether intentionally or by mistake, which meant that our progress was very slow as the tank took an absolute beating on every pull, making the healer go almost oom. I don't really know how I feel about that. I don't like people rushing through dungeons, so making them harder in order to force people to slow down should be right up my alley, but it's the freaking Deadmines, your very first dungeon as Alliance - it just felt way over the top.

I also came to learn that the Turtle WoW devs had added two new rooms with new bosses to this dungeon. The first one was a Defias alchemist guy, and I didn't get to see the second one at first as the group wiped, people got separated, and then we disbanded. Not what I expected of the Deadmines! (I did later do another run that actually managed to complete the dungeon, but it also included a wipe and once again felt quite slow and tedious, even with everyone being quite high level compared to the mobs in the instance.)

Also, another small note on community: I once again got confirmation that there are a number of guilds and groups that are just super dedicated to Vanilla and will always go where it's currently at its liveliest. I spotted someone in Stormwind who had "Group Therapy" as his guild tag and went "Wait, like the guild I was in during early Classic six years ago?" I actually whispered them to ask and they said they didn't know for sure whether it was the same guild since they were new, but they directed me to another, more senior member who seemed to at least confirm that it was likely the same guild. Small world!

There may be no consensus about what an ideal "Vanilla Plus" should look like, but I can see why many players feel like they've found it on Turtle WoW, and it certainly seems to scratch that itch for me as well.

WoW Memories #2: October 21st, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'm adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.

The following was originally posted on October 21th, 2006 under the title "More WoW Fun":

Ah, the bizarreness of the human condition.

Yesterday I logged on one more time to see how many Germans would be online in the middle of the night.¹ Unsurprisingly the place was pretty dead. Except that I ended up running right into the middle of a commotion.

As it turned out Goldhain², the village next to the starting grounds, was suffering a two-(or-three)-man invasion by an Orc huntress and her pet lion and some other Horde guy I couldn't identify.³ He had a staff and made himself invisible a lot.⁴ Now, they couldn't actually attack any players without being attacked first, so they started slaughtering NPCs instead, which caused a lot of "OMG, the village is under attack" messages to pop up in the chat.

A few brave souls actually ventured forward and tried to take them on, but they were killed almost instantly. It was really sad. After that everyone else made sure to not attack the Horde players anymore, but they kept following them around, jumping up and down and yelling for help. I thought it was quite sad and funny at the same time.

I guess that was the revenge for everyone making fun of the Orc corpse that lay on the town square all day long.⁵

¹ As a reminder, I was still living in Austria back then, bought the game in German, and rolled my first character on a German server.

² Goldhain is the German name for Goldshire. I was using the German client and while I was writing about the game in English, I didn't immediately realise that some places had different names in German and English.

³ I think it's interesting that even though I rolled on a PvE server and had no interest in PvP at the time, literally the second post I wrote about the game was about an instance of world PvP. In the starting zone. People are not exaggerating when they say that it was happening everywhere back then.

⁴ The only class that would fit that description would be druid, but then I'm thinking that if it had been that, I would have made note of the giant bloody minotaur instead of "a Horde guy with a staff"? I think it's more likely that it was something like an undead mage or warlock whom I simply struggled to keep track of.

⁵ That last sentence is fascinating to me simply because the notion that a dead orc in town would keep general chat talking all day is kind of incomprehensible to me nowadays, but I guess those were different times and it took a lot less to get everyone excited and chatting.

Some More Experiences with Hardcore

I didn't immediately forget about my mage on the Stitches server after launch day; I did in fact go back to play her some more and see what else was happening on the server, plus I figured I might as well play until I died, which was surely going to happen soon.

I picked up mining and herbalism in Stormwind to supplement my income, figuring I'd avoid any crafting profession since levelling that would've just felt like wasted effort once I died. I also vendored most of the herbs I picked - when I talk about using gathering skills to make money, I'm not talking about the auction house, since it was so utterly flooded that absolutely everything was going for coppers. If you actually do want to level a crafting profession though, it's probably not a bad time to do so. I've seen plenty of crafters advertising their wares for cheap at all times of day, and I myself used the services of a tailor to get some bags made and bought a cheap wand from an enchanter.

As far as my gathering was concerned, it was hard to tap ore nodes and pick flowers before anyone else did due to how busy it was. While visiting the Elwynn farms, I found myself wishing that I'd taken up skinning instead, as I watched a constant stream of skinnable, hyper-spawning boars fall to adventurers keen to feed Billy MacLure.

I also joined a guild, not out of any particular desire to be social, but simply because someone threw me a random invite and I was curious to see what life was like in a hardcore guild. The first message I saw was someone talking about farting into their hand, which honestly made me want to immediately leave again, but then there was so much text scrolling across the screen, I did want to at least see some more first. The guild message of the day declared that the guild was "international", which manifested itself in people speaking a variety of languages in guild chat that most members probably didn't understand.

Death announcements were scrolling by pretty frequently and elicited a chorus of Fs in chat pretty much without fail. The average level of people's demise seemed to be around 8, with frequent causes of death including kobolds, murlocs and wendigos. Aside from that there were constant "so-and-so has joined the guild" announcements as the guild master appeared to be spam-inviting absolutely everyone for reasons unknown.

One guy that stood out to me among all the crazy chatter was someone who claimed to be a Catholic priest and who, unlike most people, talked in full paragraphs that were only slightly preachy but sounded very sincere. I couldn't help but wonder whether he was for real or some sort of elaborate troll or chat bot. I never found out, because he died to a kobold at level five and I don't know what he did after that.

I quested my way through the entirety of Elwynn and was level eleven by the time I hit the border to Westfall. And honestly, despite the constant death announcements, it was less scary than I expected? I just made sure to always run away if I wasn't 100% sure of the outcome of a battle. The only thing I had that was somewhat close to a near-death experience was when I went into the Fargodeep Mine (yes, I've heard all about the dangers of caves but I wasn't not gonna hunt down Goldtooth) and found myself running very deep inside because there were people everywhere and no mobs - until I suddenly saw a kobold in front of me, turned around, saw a kobold behind me, and everywhere else I looked I was suddenly surrounded by kobolds with no other player in sight. I basically just started running and didn't stop until I was out of the mine and the four or five kobolds I had in tow had reset. Frost Armor probably saved my hide there by slowing them after their first hit and allowing me to get away. When I made my way back into the cave a second time, I advanced more carefully and managed to find and kill Goldtooth with no problems.

Oh, and while hunting gnolls, Hogger spawned right on top of me not once, but twice. He hits pretty hard for his level and took about a third of my health off in a single hit both times, but again being a mage was helpful with getting away.

All that said, I didn't really want to start questing in Westfall and deal with Defias at level eleven, so I returned to town and logged off in order to accumulate some restedness. When I logged back in a week later, the guild had shrunk from over 500 members to less than a hundred, with a lot of the still active ones now being in their thirties or forties. I guess on hardcore a guild can die in a more literal way.

I decided that I was going to get a couple of levels in Loch Modan. I know that troggs can be dangerous too, but I seemed to remember the ones in the open hills being a bit more predictable and less janky than the Defias in Westfall. And indeed, being rested, I gained two levels doing just three or four quests in the area to kill troggs and wildlife. There were quite a few bodies at the entrance to Stonesplinter Valley though, and I witnessed a death "live" for the first time, as a female human warrior or paladin (I didn't quite catch it) was fighting near me one moment, and then I looked over just in time to see her expire to a trogg. It felt oddly traumatising to know that character was truly gone now.

Back in town, I heard a strange sound that sounded like a crowd of people shouting and which I couldn't place, but I soon learned through a guildie that this announced a character on the server having hit level 60. 

Lossy the mage remains alive at the time of me writing this, once again chilling in Stormwind after having hit level 13. Apparently that already makes her better than average, as the official Warcraft Twitter has enjoyed sharing some statistics about official hardcore life (and death).

I like how in the heat map included in that first link, you can see the trail of death from people attempting the Wetlands run at low level... and to think Pallais thought people weren't gonna do that! A lot of the causes of death listed in the second post also align with my own experiences based on the death announcements I saw, though I'm surprised to see fall damage and PvP ranked that high. I can't even think of that many places in Vanilla where you can fall to your death unexpectedly, unless the Undercity elevator still does that thing it used to do...

Anyway, I guess I'll casually keep going for a little longer until I either die or get bored.

Official Hardcore Launch Night on Stitches - EU

So as I've said many times by now, I'm not really interested in playing hardcore personally, but I'm interested in the new hardcore servers as a concept and community event, because in an MMO where you're no longer getting new content, the ebb and flow of the community is what shapes the game's narrative.

With that in mind, I was looking forward to checking out the hardcore server launch last night. I thought that the go-live time was midnight in my time zone, but I was apparently off by an hour... which meant that I arrived to the party an hour late. This probably wasn't entirely a bad thing as it meant that I only faced a queue of six minutes when I tried to get into the Stitches server around midnight my time. Both it and Nek'rosh were showing as full.

On character creation, I found it a bit annoying that you have to agree to a pop-up that explains what hardcore is (and most importantly, that there are no appeals if you die) - or rather, that this pop-up appears before the server has confirmed that your chosen name is actually available. So I had to hit "agree" half a dozen times just to be presented with a "name not available" error each time. However, eventually I found something that was available and off I went.

I created a human mage and unsurprisingly, Northshire was absolutely packed. There were so many new characters spawning in at the same time that the name over my head disappeared in a giant purple blob. Even an hour in, the area was heaving, to the point that I found it impossible to kill anything. Someone commented in general chat that at least this way, they were in no danger of dying, though I found a human corpse in the hills anyway - pretty impressive to die in an area with nothing but neutral mobs.

I ran around for five minutes, having a look around and trying to tag a kobold or wolf here and there, but I simply stood no chance. In the precious seconds my mage needed to wind up a fireball, one or more melee characters would've already tagged anything I tried to attack.

I decided to log off and have a look at how things were going Horde side. I opted for the undead starting zone there, and made a warrior in order to have a better shot at tagging mobs. Things were still very busy there as well, though slightly less so I think, and being a melee character definitely helped a lot with getting the first hit in. Often "my" mob would be hit by someone else's spell a mere second after and I thought, "yep, been there, done that". I made it about halfway through the first quest before I started to question my life choices (why was I fighting people for mobs like this on a server I had no plans to stay on anyway) and decided to log off again.

 

For a change of pace I logged into my low-level hunter on Hydraxian Waterlords, the RP server that had previously been designated as the unofficial hardcore server. My census addon only saw a total of 30 characters online on Alliance side, though that's still more than there used to be before this whole hardcore thing took off. We'll see whether anyone decides to stay or whether the place will go back to being completely abandoned in short order, now that the hardcore players have an official home. As for me personally, I enjoyed the peace and actually did a quest on my character there before calling it a night.

The next morning I decided to have another look at the situation on Stitches. I got in without a queue and was pleasantly surprised that the human starter zone was actually playable. It was still very busy of course, but no longer in a "ten players for every mob spawn point" kind of way. When I got to the quests to kill the Defias in the vineyards, it definitely felt different knowing that an accidental overpull could kill my character for good. I thought it was very noticeable that everyone around me moved much more carefully and deliberately - none of the reckless "just barrelling through to get to my quest objective" that you sometimes see on regular servers.

General chat also continued to be relatively entertaining, with conversations such as how people thought that finding a certain colour of bag first was a sign of good or bad luck. One level one chimed in to say that their last character hadn't even made it to level ten before dying to murlocs. My own mage made it to Goldshire before I decided to log off again.

When I checked back once more later in the afternoon, there was a 40-minute queue. When I checked again in the evening, queue times had increased to two hours. Needless to say, my curiosity wasn't strong enough to warrant waiting in line for that long. We'll see what the new mode's staying power is like. On the unofficial servers people seemed to be happy to re-roll endlessly for months so I expect sustained interest here as well, but I'll be very surprised if we still have queues in a week or two.

Other people writing about the launch:

• The Last Chapter Gaming Blog
• The Ancient Gaming Noob

Adventures on Gehennas

I mentioned in my last post that I made a little paladin on Gehennas just to have a look around, and I'm finding myself strangely enamoured with her. There's just something about human paladins... even if the first character I ever levelled properly was a night elf priest, the first character I ever made was a human paladin, and even though I rerolled to play with friends after only a few days, those first few days of playing the game as a human by myself clearly had a major impact on me.

I've got a lot of nostalgia for the early night elf starter zones as well, but for some reason I never imprinted on the Horde zones in quite the same way. Mulgore probably comes the closest in terms of filling me with warm, fuzzy feelings, but even so it's not really a contest when compared to human lands.

Revisiting all the quests in Elwynn Forest once again, I've got to say that the whole zone is just damn well done though; it's not just nostalgia. You can really tell that Blizzard built this starter zone first and had more time to reiterate on it than on any others. The quests flow together and across zone lines in a way that they rarely do anywhere else in the early game. There are lots of little details like NPC conversations taking place and neutral critters ambling about everywhere. And all the unique mob pathing! I remember Bhagpuss wrote a whole post about being fascinated by it when he played WoW Classic. Of course mobs wander around in all zones, but it seems to me that there's distinctly more complexity to it in the lower-level zones... I'm sure all the wandering Murlocs in Elwynn did their share to contribute to the whole species earning its reputation as a multi-pull menace.

I've only seen a couple of other players during my journeys so far, and I've been surprisingly unfazed by this lack of company. It may sound strange - deranged, even - but I kind of feel like I've transcended the need for other players in WoW. I still enjoy having them around, and I'm happy to see era's growing popularity, but I'm actually okay with playing by myself as well, and I realised that this makes me a rare minority.

Every day someone comes on the era Discord to ask how many players there are on this or that server, because they're scared of investing time into levelling a character somewhere where they can't do instances or shop at the auction house. I don't think I was ever that bad, but when I first started playing on era and it was still very quiet, I do remember having the occasional moment when I noticed that I was the only person in a given zone and it felt a bit like staring into the void. However, I persisted and found contentment in playing by myself when I needed to, and I feel like that's made me more resilient in a sense.

People install the hardcore addon to lock themselves out of the auction house to challenge themselves, but I'm simply playing on a server where there is no active auction house - though this hasn't prevented me from putting up a couple of auctions for useful lowbie items just in case someone does come by. I sold a pair of green mail trousers, so I know it can happen! Also, I just kinda enjoy seeing my name up there, being the only person to have items listed on the auction house. As far as anyone randomly checking in is concerned, I pretty much own this place!

Inventory management and making money have been the biggest challenges so far. I'm considering looking into buying some small bags from a vendor to fill my remaining currently empty bag slots, because I just don't have room for anything. I also always loathe to vendor things that could be useful to another player, but Gehennas just isn't in a place where anyone's looking for things like trade goods right now, so I've got to learn to bite the bullet if I want to be able to afford new skills at some point. I still don't expect to take this little levelling challenge very far, but for the time being it's a nice little distraction.

My Experience on a US Server

I mentioned as a side note in a post from January that I had somehow managed to create a free trial account for the US servers by accident. Despite the fact that I never even logged into it, my Battle.net launcher annoyingly keeps defaulting to that account whenever I want to play retail, which is a bit of a nuisance.

The other day I had a bit of a discussion in Redbeard's comments about Chromie Time and how it works, and it made me want to test some things out for myself, specifically in regards to the new player experience. Of course, you can't very well simulate being a new player on an account that's been active for over a decade... which was when I suddenly remembered my empty US trial account. At last, a purpose for it!

I don't really have all the answers to my questions yet, so I won't  talk about Chromie Time or related matters in this post, but just the experience of rolling up new characters on a US retail server was interesting enough that I wanted to write about it.

I started by creating a night elf druid called Shintar on Ysera - I can't believe that nobody else tried to grab that name over there in over a decade, but it was certainly convenient for me! As expected, I didn't have a choice of starting zone but was put into Exile's Reach by default. Classes that have their own starting zones and start at a slightly higher level, such as death knight and demon hunter, were greyed out with a note that they required level ten to unlock.

When my druid loaded onto the Alliance ship where the Exile's Reach experience starts off, I was confused to find another druid standing there, already up to level six, and spamming a single spell over and over. I was initially a bit mystified as to what spell they were even casting... after all, there were no enemies there! Only after a few minutes did I realise that it was Moonfire and hitting the ship's target dummies... which are killable and award XP. The character was just tab-targeting and hitting Moonfire so fast and consistently that I can only guess that it must have been botted. People do the strangest things.

Anyway, aside from that, the whole thing wasn't very remarkable. As I said in my original post about Exile's Reach, it's a zone that's perfectly serviceable but extremely generic. The only thing that stood out to me was that as a druid, the brief class quest you get about halfway through the zone taught me travel form at level six... but I guess due to homogenisation no class is allowed to go faster than another at that level, so using it actually made me go no faster than night elf or cat form. I could see that being somewhat confusing to genuinely new players...

I also noticed that I was automatically put into a channel specific to new players where people called "guides" would answer questions. I vaguely recall hearing about that system before but I'd honestly forgotten it existed and still don't really know anything about it beyond what I saw. People mostly seemed to use the channel to ask (to me) uninteresting questions like "Which class should I play?" or "How do I link an item in chat?".

As soon as I hit level ten, I logged out and went back to the character creator. All classes were unlocked now, and I was able to choose any starting zone, so I rolled up a human paladin and started her off in Elwynn Forest for comparison purposes.

I'd forgotten what a weird number Cataclysm did on Elwynn, as it actually kept a lot of the vanilla quests more or less intact, but what changes Blizzard did make feel very jarring for old-timers, such as Princess being right next to the quest giver who wants her killed and Goldtooth chilling in a camp outside the Fargodeep Mine instead of inside of it. The changes to Northshire also feel pretty rubbish, what with the oh so threatening "invasion" by lots of neutral mobs. I did note though that Blizzard appeared to have removed the basic "use your abilities on the target dummy" quest I remember appearing after Cata - probably because truly new players for whom this sort of guidance would make some sense all get funnelled into Exile's Reach anyway.

Anyway, I ran about hunting kobolds, murlocs and what not, and it was very noticeable how much less streamlined and efficient this was than the Exile's Reach experience. It's kind of funny to me that I found myself in a world where the Cataclysm content is the one that feels outdated, considering I still always think of the Cataclysm revamp of the old world as the "new" content (compared to how things were in Vanilla).

However, what surprised me was how... comforting it all felt. Redbeard made a post yesterday about briefly logging into retail and going to Goldshire, where he was immediately put off by the crazy mounts. The timing on that was funny to me because my feeling about visiting Goldshire in retail was almost the opposite in this instance. Were there crazy mounts? Probably; I didn't really notice. What I did notice was that there were people out in the town square, chatting, showing off and goofing around, which felt heart-warmingly familiar. There was also a random corpse on the ground, something that represents "typical old-school Goldshire" to me like nothing else.

While I was out questing in Elwynn, local defense went off about the Horde attacking the inn and I had flashbacks to my very first night playing WoW back in 2006, where that exact same thing happened as well.

Another fun moment was when I tore through the murloc village north of the Eastvale Logging Camp - in terms of button presses, retail is of course much more engaging than Vanilla/Classic and characters get more powerful early on, so I was tearing through those murlocs like nobody's business, AoEing and healing myself, which is very unlike the old days... but at one point it did almost seem like I had bitten off more than I could chew, so I was very grateful when a hunter and mage decided to add some damage of their own and probably saved my butt.

I logged into my BC Classic server on EU for comparison and rode down to Goldshire there. All I saw was two levellers passing through, one of whom instantly logged out the moment he entered the inn. People in BC Classic don't "hang out" in Goldshire anymore in my experience. You log on to do the content you want to do and then you log off again. Anecdotal for sure, but food for thought nonetheless.

Old-school Experiences in Elwynn

When I first logged into the Kronos server with my newly (re-)created human paladin, I was pleased to immediately see other people around me in the starting zone. It wasn't exactly heaving the way it was when I first started playing World of Warcraft back in 2006, but it was reasonably busy. The lowbie world certainly felt more alive than it did on the live servers during my brief visit during Mists of Pandaria. A system announcement sent out a global message every time a battleground popped, and the level 60 PvP seemed to be reasonably active. Later I also started using the /who command to gauge the population, and while it only displays up to 50 individual characters, it did also show the total number of characters online, which seemed to hover between 300 and 500 most times. I'm not sure that's enough to support all forms of group content, but it was obviously enough to make the world feel alive (during the early levels at least).

For all my appreciation of Vanilla WoW, I realised instantly that I, too, had been spoiled by the incessant streamlining that WoW and other MMOs have performed over the years. I immediately looked at my mini-map to look for quest icons, but of course this being Vanilla WoW, there weren't any. I actually had to walk around Northshire Abbey and look all the NPCs in the face to see if they had an exclamation mark over their head or not. Once I had picked up my first couple of quests, I habitually opened up my map to look for the quest markers telling me where to go. Nope! Vanilla WoW expects you to read the quest text and to actually look at the world around you. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I also got confused briefly because some items that I was supposed to pick up from the ground weren't indicated by giant sparkles... Fortunately it didn't take long for me to adjust and to pull my eyes back towards what was going on in the world around me instead of being entirely focused on UI overlays.

 

Cue heroic music...

From a gameplay perspective, my first couple of levels were hilariously bad, though this was at least in part due to the fact that I chose to roll a paladin; on a different class it wouldn't have been quite so pronounced. For those who don't know/remember: in Vanilla, paladins started out with a buff and a heal... so when it comes to fighting, you can literally do nothing but auto-attack for the first few levels. My pet tank looked over my shoulder with a frown (as he only started playing during Wrath of the Lich King himself) and I broke out into hysterical giggles as I assured him that Vanilla WoW and just auto-attacking everything was totally awesome.

8 damage! This is going to take a while...

In all honesty though: no, I don't think that particular design decision was very well thought-out, however I do think that it made sense back then to start things off slowly for the benefit of complete newbies to the genre. I distinctly remember being confused by simple things such as orientating myself or figuring out what my two buttons actually did when I was true WoW noob myself.

Fortunately it didn't take long until I got an attack move (judgement, on a ten second cooldown), even if that would remain my only offensive ability for quite a while. However, already at level four things got interesting in a different way. I was sent across the river to the vineyard full of Defias, and those guys were deadly. Their aggro range was considerable, they hurt, there were multiple patrols and several locations where mobs were grouped up in packs of two or three, not to mention that they were all pretty densely packed to begin with. My ability bar may have been nothing to write home about, but I was extremely focused on my surroundings, trying hard to dodge patrols and making sure to run away or at least back off far enough to cause any adds to evade if I overpulled by accident. Instead of being all about the second-to-second gameplay of hitting your buttons, the Vanilla WoW levelling experience is all about tactical movement. I really enjoyed going back to this style of play and feel confident in saying that this was not an inherently worse levelling experience than WoW has today, but simply one with a very different focus.

Once I had made it to Goldshire, I wanted to learn how to mine. Nope! Why would miners hang out in the middle of a forest? Go to Stormwind and talk to the dwarves there, they are all about mining. In other words, this was my reminder that Vanilla WoW still put "a world that made sense" ahead of gameplay convenience in many respects. Another reminder came when I failed at mining my first copper node and had to try again. Why of course, you don't always succeed when you try something new for the first time, makes perfect sense! Ore was hard to come by in general because I had forgotten just how sparse mining nodes used to be in the old world before the Cataclysm revamp. I'm not going to pretend that all those little things didn't also result in minor annoyances, but minor was all they were - and at the same time they created all kinds of challenges and goals you could work on aside from questing. When was the last time that taking a break from questing to leg it all the way to your trainer was a genuine thing that you planned around? There was gameplay in overcoming these minor obstacles that is missing from today's World of Warcraft.

Fail. :(

Finally, the social side: I think I had more chats with random strangers during my hours in Elwynn than I had in my last three months of playing WoW on live servers. I grouped up to kill Goldtooth and Hogger. A friendly gnome mage offered me some bags, an offer which I gratefully declined since I had been extremely lucky and had found four six-slot bags (!!!) relatively early on during my questing. A random person from general chat exchanged some whispers with me on the subject of experience gains in a party. And I got invited to a levelling guild, though I respectfully declined that as well as it wouldn't feel right to me to join a guild when I'm not sure how invested I'm going to be in this project. But it was nice to receive a personal, genuine guild invite from someone, compared to the constant, addon-based auto-invite spam that was running rampant on the live servers last time I played.

Just meeting other players out in the world was generally a positive experience, even when we didn't talk or group up. Occasionally there was competition for mobs, but since they were so densely packed in most areas, there was no real shortage of things to kill and it was just a relief to have someone else cut a path through the area and reduce the number of threats. Meeting people on the road also meant "drive-by buffs" - I was quite happy every time I met a priest or a mage in particular. With how tough I found the mobs to fight, every little stat increase was appreciated. My own five-minute paladin blessings didn't feel like a great gift to return, what with their short duration.

When you're knee-deep in kobolds and all you have is a shovel, any company is welcome.

So how has this whole "emulating Vanilla WoW" experience been holding up from a technical point, considering Dodgy Kebab's video review in which he repeatedly called Kronos "flawless"? Well, it wasn't completely flawless: I ran into a couple of kobolds that were stuck in a wall and a few copper nodes in a cave that came up as "invalid target" every time I tried to mine them. I can't say that I perceived this as a huge negative though, considering that those things are the kind of bug that occasionally showed up on the original Vanilla WoW servers as well. So far, it's certainly been a good recreation of the Vanilla experience - including the fun.

 Oh, and this.