So, after years of insistent demands from irreducible fans, Blizzard took the plunge, deciding – finally! – to give us the long-awaited Classic server !
A news that, after the closure of the unofficial Nostalrius servers , certainly caused a huge sensation making even a tear of pure emotion to the veterans and surprising those who, as neophyte, will finally have the opportunity to discover all that this masterpiece has represented its early days.
The essence of the World of Warcraft that we have all learned to know (or loosened by all the layers accumulated afterwards), has seen the light only after 5 years of development. The graphics originally exploits elements of the engine ofWarcraft 3and, released in the distant 2004, reaches the peak of success in October 2010, with a peak of monthly subscribers of 12 million users , obtaining the record as the most popular mmorpg of the time.
Furthermore, in January 2014 it was estimated that more than 100 million accounts were created and more than 500 million characters were played by players from 244 different countries , a veritable record not only never equaled, but also burnt in the book of Guinness World Record.
The unstoppable evolution of a myth
How has the game structure evolved from its very first version? Which races originally traveled the lands of Azeroth? Among the ranks of the Alliance we could only find: Humans , Dwarves , Night Elves and Gnomes . Among those of the Horde , however, there were Orcs , Undead , Tauren and Troll . In addition to the known class limitations on the breed race that we still find today, at the time we had the Shaman (reserved to the Horde) and the Paladin , exclusive class of the Alliance.
Even the combat system presented different peculiarities and, in some respects, was more affected by the RNG (random number generator, or an algorithm that guarantees “causality”).
For example, enemies could resist or dodge your attacks and spells. Furthermore, to effectively challenge a weapon, it was required to raise the skill to the maximum so that the possibility of missing it was reduced to almost zero. Secondly, Talents presented themselves quite differently than we know them today.
There were the three usual specializations (such as Fire , Arcanum and Frost for the Magician) but you had 51 points to place in the skill treededicated, instead of the current 7 in the various branches.
These talents were the centerpiece of each class and their placement could really make a difference to determine if the character would be used to progress through the various levels, in PvP or perhaps employed in raids. Today, this gap has narrowed, allowing the player greater flexibility. You can use a certain talent in fact, for each of these situations without penalizing us too much.
You also had to choose very carefully where to spend the points, because in case of “mistake” you could only fix the cost 5 gold coins that could increase up to a maximum of 50 (for the era 50 gold coins were really a nice sum). Finally, the skills were much more than today and, for the players,
Comfort and spirit of adaptation
Many of the “comforts” that we take for granted today were precious resources that every player had to manage carefully. Just to give some examples, the Sorcerers had to worry about preparing their Soul Splinters before each mission, in order to use their spells.
The Hunters , on the other hand, always had to keep their quiver full of precious arrows if they did not want to run the risk of running away in an honorable way even in front of a Murloc. The Thieves , finally world of warcraft raids, had to put the same attention of the “colleagues” just mentioned, filling the pockets of useful poisons that had to be applied periodically on the weapons.
In short, at the beginning, managing your avatar was a job that needed attention to detail, lots of love and dedication. Even greater, however, was the attention that the players had to store during the Expeditions . Today, these are reduced in many situations to a simple ” tank and spank ” (that is: the tank of the group is concerned only to keep the attention of the enemy on himself, while the DPS do all the damage possible) without necessarily studying the peculiarities of the dungeon or of the enemies that you face.
This method, once, was hardly applicable and it was enough a single moment of distraction by the tank (or even the group’s DPS) to end the shipment in a sad wipe. Also essential in shipments or raids was to perform Crowd Control to not see our mana swept away like a candle flame in the wind. This feature was then greatly reduced over the years, not to exclude classes with few or no DC power.
Only with Mist of Pandaria have we seen this mechanic resurface thanks to the Expeditions in Challenge mode in world of warcraft classic announcement (set for the maximum level and with much more powerful enemies, in a race against time).
World of warcraft classic release
Blizzard announced World of Warcraft Classic during its BlizzCon 2017 keynote, which is a “classic” server option for WoW.
Classic, which is currently in development at Blizzard, is an attempt to replicate the feeling of playing the original World of Warcraft — though not necessarily how it played right at launch.
