Vanilla WoW Is 20 Years Old. Why Do We Still Play It?
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- čas přidán 10. 09. 2024
- Why do we still play Vanilla World of Warcraft?
by @vulgrin9573 • Why Do We Still Play V...
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To me, vanilla WoW has always felt like a real fantasy world. It's large, slow paced, and sometimes inconvenient. The modern game is more gameified, its about what's immediate and stimulating, now, now, now! Which has its own appeal, and I did enjoy dragonflight a lot until, but vanilla has this almost mystical appeal for me
Vanilla is simple a MMO RPG, while retail have nothing MMO neither RPG.
MMO mean that its massively multiplayer, but Retail doesn't even let you play with other player, you never meet anybody in the wild and the games mechanic make that everyone tend to treat each other as NPC.
In classic you always meet new people doing their quest, exploring, etc.
Its simple, i don't even remember last time i made a friend on retail. On classic, i bonded with 6 people over two weeks.
@@madeizo not just that but also the enemy faction in a PvP server
You never know if they are going to attack you or not
Which adds to the RPG
is not the game, is that person playing the game at that time. :)
What I liked in WoW is that you where pretty much *'a completely mundane commoner'.*
No great lineage from which you hail, no great quest or reason why you start adventuring. Just an average dude who starts from rags and hopefully ends up in riches.
At least this is what the Human story was pretty much like. Your background is a blank slate, you are nothing special and you are given very mediocre tasks for your station.
And slowly but surely you up this curve and take on dangerous landscapes and quests. Mirroring the recognition you slowly build up by your faction. It is very brilliantly made. 👍
As bellular said, retail is "Bing Bing wahoo"
Classic WoW is a gem, it actually feels like you're in this world going on a long badass journey with your friends all the way up to level 60, this game has always felt so alive and still to this day unlike most games nowadays.
With real friends it really does feel good 😊
Yes! And one example that striked me is the light/colors of the Elwynn Forest at day for example. The trees were different and so colorful. I can't explain it, but different vibes.
I feel that, minus the friends 😭
I still have fun though
"Because it's so long and hard, it feels better to beat it"
-Asmon 2023
If everyone can beat it its not an acomplishment.
"The texture of something being rougher makes it more enjoyable"
One underrated change that fundamentally altered the game was the addition of flying. That alone was a big part in shrinking the world, trivializing navigation and traversal, and modifying the way players view and interact with the world. The most important thing for classic plus content to retain the classic character is to keep travel as an important element of the game. There is a lot that could be said on this topic alone.
Yes, the "World" of Warcraft felt like more of an actual world, large and imposing if you really wanted to go from one side to the other.
No, the Looking for Group dungeon tool that teleported everyone to the dungeon ruined it. If we didn't have that, at least we'd be out flying - but we're not, we're all sitting in the capital cities waiting for any queue to pop
@@dkaarvand9913 I agree with that as well.
have to agree now that i played classic and now hc, flying is not a thing i miss one bit. I remember back in tbc when i started playing, that flying would be awesome and so cool, well it was for a little while until that initial excitement wore off. After that, it was just mindless flying, wouldn't need to worry, wouldn't need to think. Just pick a direction and auto-fly.
But you said the core thing that plagues wow's development, trivializing game aspects such as talent trees and even class specific equipment usage. Rogue poisons and hunter ammunition comes into mind. Neither are casters or mages, so lore wise it seems weird for them to pull throwables and arrows out of thin air, not to mention poisons that seemingly never wear off. There is sure something that is lost when those things are trivialized, maybe some could call it the soul of the game. At least rpg element is gone, if nothing else. And gameplay becomes just another mindless grind, not having to play a rogue, making sure you have your poisons and blinding powder.
@@hosannayeshua4446 "But you said the core thing that plagues wow's development, trivializing game aspects such as talent trees and even class specific equipment usage."
No I didn't :D
BRD is literally a city. I almost don't even look at it as a dungeon. There's so much to do there it's insane from the amount of quests to just different paths you could go, hell it even leads into molten core if you wanted lol the zone is genius.
This is what made things so great in Vanilla. Profession trainers werent posted up right next to they trade goods vendor, and some trainers were on other continents or hidden in a cave. Wanna smelt Dark Iron, better get a group together. Flasks? You guessed it. People had to work together, you had to make connections.
I agree. It's something that they have failed to re create in even there new mega dungeons. Mechagon or whatever it was called in bfa was alright, but it didn't have the feel that BRD has. I genuinely don't think they could make anything like that again in retail.
People had a lot of time back then.
@@silviuvisan505
Possibly but I saw the contrary. Back when it first came out all the people I knew really only played toward the evening/nighttime. They still had school, work, social lifes, etc. Today it's common for gamers to not really have much of a social life. It is much more lacking and video games and the addictions that come with them or the endless amounts of people who don't want to work and stream to 10 viewers instead is significant.
I can garuntee people have more time/waste more time now on this crap than they did back then simply because it's far more common now.
You even went in there for 20 fire resist enchant. It was like you were never done with that place.
“Because it’s so long and hard it feels better to beat it.” - Asmongold
Translation: It was horribly designed and esoteric for no good reason, but I still manged to beat it.
Ayo
@@corneliussmiff2773 Hardly. Vanilla WoW was simple, but you still got filtered.
A perfect "That's what she said"
@@Anonymous-mp2ln Simple.. but not exactly.
Vanilla wow is kinda wierd in that regard.
It’s always absolutely astonishing to me that even after knowing Classic since 2006 I always find new things that I didn’t knew about before!
A few years ago whenever classic came out in 2019 I thought that I liked tbc the most, then wrath, then vanilla out of all the WoW expansions from what I remembered. But after replaying all of them I gotta agree with Asmon: Vanilla WoW was the best Version of WoW period.
Sure…there are many flaws and things that are pretty annoying like for example not having as many flight routes as in tbc, needing one bagspace for each mount, mobs hitting you through z-axis etc. But those lose immense relevance whenever you weight them against the amount of love the developers put into building this massive world, into the class design, the music, the artstyle, into the many many different little stories that happen all over the different zones in Azeroth. It just feels alive and breathing! And as Asmon himself said, that’s something magical.
I believe that Vanilla WoW was a once in a lifetime video game and I’m more than happy to still get to play it to this day.
As a new classic player , I agree . Seeing 60s just chilling in westfall or goldshire is crazy. It feels like a real world with all the people
It's the thing people don't understand about issues with modern retail. The QoL changes to leveling, questing, finding groups, and traveling have basically de-socialized, de-populated, and devalued the open world experience within the game all to funnel the players into prescribed time gated chores and repetitive instance loops as early as possible.
@@arcc4 It's hard to condense into a single sentence, but yes, whatever activision did to the game basically removed or inverted every single feature of classic that made the game function on a social/MMO scale in the name of creating "accessibility" and Lobby-like features from Lobby based multiplayer games.
Now, I actually like lobby based games and d2 is one of my favs. I actually *like* the idea of having dungeon finders, faster leveling, better raid design, but something about what they did fundamentally broke the "massive world" feeling vanilla had.
They tried to cater to the CoD crowd, or people who only want to play 20-30 minutes a day, to ensure people can get some worthwhile experience in just 20 minute bursts. They want it to be like CS or CoD and you can just "press a button" and be in some type of game, whether it be a dungeon, BG, or whatever. This arcade style deisgn is fundamentally at odds with a massively multiplayer game.
The other issue is the blizzard team became increasingly focused on short term player retention rather than expanding character progression horizontally. I would have preferred a more runescape style game where the level cap remains the same but a more complex and deep profession/stat system... rather than continuing to build a robust and massive world, they simply decided that dangling a carrot was the best way... new raids, new gear... no fundamental expansion of RPG elements, just button pressing and more grinds.
I sometimes wonder what a PoE x Runescape type MMO could look like, sandbox style with open ended character progression. That would be fun...
@@arcc4this isn’t even true, take a look at old school RuneScape. It’s one of the greatest examples that eventually people will always find ways to min-max activities in games, regardless if it’s made easier or not.
Exactly! One feeling that I will not forget is that when I was starting vanilla and I was on the Human race, I saw a Warlock Undead inside the Abbey of Northshire making firerain. I was like, "Duuuuude, what-IS-this!" 😮 I'm a bit out of topic, I know, but wanted to share it. 😊
I'll never forget that era and I'll always be eternally grateful for having gotten to experience it. Nobody today will ever quite grasp what we felt back in the day, because the internet has changed everything and MMO's are no longer a fresh idea that nobody is newly discovering. Back then, you'd never know all the content the game had to offer, you'd never imagine the scope or know what was coming. You joined blindly, explored and discovered everything on your own because you couldn't simply watch videos online about it. There was magic to be found, true magic that will likely never again be found by us or anyone ever again...
You could just stop watching videos bro??? Litteraly nobody forced you to start watching guides etc
spoken like a true person who wasn't there back then. The point is that nobody knew, nobody had the option of doing that. It changed the atmosphere of the game, how people played and interacted.@@niklaslarsen1992
@@niklaslarsen1992well this guy didn't get it
@@niklaslarsen1992Lol you completely missed the point didnt you
@@johnlappa5447 He's right, the experience isn't gone, people just rob themselves of it with google.
It's almost scary how well made Vanilla WoW is. At least for me, it is perfection
what lmao@@oatraa
@@oatraa Are you on the spectrum or something?
@oatraa you been watching too many skibidy toilet memes bro your mind has melted
@@oatraa
You quit over one classes walking animation?
Not really lol its buggy no qol and yeah for people with no lifevits perfect
I started playing WoW for the first time when WotLK classic pre-patch came out. Sitting on the dock with hundreds of other people waiting for the boat to Northrend was one of the best gaming experiences in my life.
You're too cute. But welcome to it!
Same, WotLK was my first real wow experience, and that Zeppelin ride to Northrend was an insane experience. That being said, that is where that experience should stay, I wouldn't get anything like that from doing that ride again, instead ill get annoyed at the lag of the game not being able to load players, and the error that will kick me out of the game failing to load me into northrend. The magic died way back then, people who play the classic servers now are trying to relive something that passed long ago. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and it is reinforced by other nostalgic players repumping each other's nostalgia.
I legit cannot understand what people like about classic now, it is slow, annoying, most of your time is spent running back and forth, and you are paying a sub for.... nothing? like legit, people are paying a sub for a game that isn't even a live service game... Classic is a ripoff farming people's nostalgia, and good on blizzard for making money off those people
@@framinthor Better than the absolute garbage that is Retail and has been retail since the end of legion shit mid legion
@@framinthorbro most of wotlk classic players didn’t even play original wotlk KEKW. you’re argument cannot even exist.
I was playing WOTLK classic forawhile, I really enjoyed WOTLK back in the day. I didn't even play BC, just vanilla, and then got an itch and played some WOTLK when that came out. So when they did classic WOTLK, I thought it'd be fun to join up again. But then one day I login, and bam, there's this +50% xp buff? Nah. Fuck that.
I played vanilla at age 16, obsessed. Quit Wrath during college, because… college. When I returned after a 7yr. break, not only was my Time-Lost Proto Drake missing (clearly over it), but a guildie gifted me BfA. As *soon* as Classic launched, I quit retail and began raiding MC. Guild drama, WoW friends, farming rare pets-can’t wait to get a computer to start HC.
classic is magic, I couldn't imagine the process to make such a good game.
read the book: the wow diaries
fascinating book about the creation of vanilla
tl;dr play classic everquest, take notes, and casualize it
My guess is that much of the things in classic happened because a developer thought: "would be nice/cool to add this" and they added it.
Instead of: "will this increase engagement metrics?" Then make it worse.
@@atraxian5881this
It’s not magic. Classic wow is just made by people who actually play the game.
@@Giggles4692 er, no it wasn't, WoW didn't exist before, y'know, classic WoW was made
dungeons in vanilla were absolutely the best. i dont care if they are big and take a long time to do. the fact is i know every vanilla dungeon propably better than my own home and i can guide every quest and every boss and even brd is done in an hour when people listen and i love it.
Same 😊
I remember when I first started playing Vanilla back in '05 I had just made it to the barrens and there was a couple alliance attacking Crossroads npcs and griefing in Ashenvale. 15 minutes later no less than 20 level 50-60's dropped off at the Flight path and steamrolled them and just hung around for a half hour. Seeing all those high level chars was awesome as a lvl 15.
Vanilla is much more focused on fundamentals of the game. Things like aggro/leash range, or deciding how to get from one place to another.
Retail improved combat flow at the expense of everything else, it seems. The rpg elements are gone, the adventure is gone, and the immersion is gone. It feels hollow and bland now.
@BasedChadman i would argue that combat feels better in classic expansions, Vanilla through Wrath. Personally, I prefer Wrath combat more than retail.
shadow bolt shadow bolt shadow bolt shadow bolt shadow bolt god DAMN this combat is nuts@@paradoxical247
@@BasedChadmanthat's the most accurate description I've seen so far!
@@paradoxical247 I'm aware it's subjective, but I think the gameplay feels much more polished now than it did then. Kits are more cohesive with less downtime and a general build / spend playstyle. The smooth rotations feel more satisfying to me on a mechanical level.
That being said, mob encounters are still a lot more fun in classic because they require some thought, cc, and managing your pulls. You can't pull 10 things and get out alive the way you can on a fury warrior in retail.
A big part of what made classic wow for me was the fact that you were out in the world and you were on foot, flying Mounts destroyed a lot of the random interactions with community out in the world including world PVP.
There was nothing better than pulling a bunch of mobs on accident and some guy you grouped up with three nights ago comes and saves your ass, or rolling through winterspring going to farm up some mats and you see that bastard that tried to gank you the night before and you chase his ass across two zones before you finally catch him.
@jordanhurley7307what if they allowed the use of flying only available for a certain amount of time every day?
So you can use the flight paths and all preferably, but have your mount if you need it for some occasion and when the mount is exhausted and needs to rest, then: too bad. (Maybe with the allowance, that it won't just throw you off, but you can fly as long as you want - but after dismounting then that's it for the day).
I think you and that viewer hit the nail on the head for me. I was raiding in 10.1 after returning to the game from several years away, and ended up playing WOTLK classic now, even though I was able to get my AOTC and such, I just prefer the more laid back chill style of classic. I work oil rigs in Canada, I have a wife and 2 kids at home full time and a 3rd who lives with his mom and spends weekends here, 2 dogs, and elderly family members with dementia/Alzheimer's living with us as well. I play when I sit down at the end of my day to smoke a bit and catch some CZcams videos for myself before I go to bed. I dont want to have to be balls to the walls on 47 different mechanics I need to master as well as the size of my spell bars are ridiculous. I play Ret pally and Resto Druid on Retail and Prot Pally and Resto Druid on WOTLK and much prefer the classic chill vibe. Retails a great game if you wanna be a greaser for sure. Just as a lot of us age we don't have time for that. We don't create content for a living. We don't have time to sweat it out. Another big problem I found I encountered was if something came up irl and I needed 5 minutes, I wouldn't get it in retail but I get it in classic. Much chiller community.
your last point about the needing 5 minutes is so true. if you’re in a group setting in classic and politely ask for a few minutes because something popped up your group will just be okay with it! but in retail if you have something come up they’ll just kick and replace you with somebody else
World of Warcraft was more then just a game. And it's a phenomen that will always stand for itself. Although today it may be different.
It really was revolutionary. Nothing came close to competing with it besides maybe Counter Strike and the two weren't mutually exclusive so weren't really in competition. No other mmo has a leveling experience that is actually a fun journey. They all feel like a waste of effort time sink that you just want over with as soon as possible with the pointless quests and cookie cutter quest rewards.
@@wickian9571 sounds like you've never played Lineage 2 (which came out 1 year earlier than vanilla WoW) - which is actually the better MMORPG overall from the two - precisely cause of the very same things that everyone praises vanilla WoW for --- L2 did it better and had better systems, a true open world MMORPG with active worldmap/guilds and politics.
vanilla WoW was always a theme park MMORPG which had some sandbox/open world elements, those are the reason why it's good and still played today.
@@6kembe4orba i played lineage 2, asherons call, everquest, etc. None compared to WoW. There is a reason WoW is still relevant and those games dont even have servers up anymore? The closest MMO back then to WoW was EverQuest (in terms of popularity).
classic wow was my by literal legends and maybe with some divine intervention idk :D
@@6kembe4orba oh please, we all played lineage 2... the game was an RNG Fiesta-garbage, similar to 2016 archage.
The game had 0 skill involved, all u were doing is auto attack ( 1) and soulshot (2).
It was fun for it's time, but when wow came, we all ditched it and never looked back.
Lineage 2 has NOTHING over wow...
You are probably just 35-40 years old ,with tons of fun memories of lineage 2 and you are just full copium if you think Lineage 2 is actually superior to WoW.
The no guides argument is a really important factor.
When the last megadungeon launched in retail like a month or so ago I went in completely blind with 4 mates who also went blind. We had to see the fights ourselves, read the journal and think how to solve everything.
It took us about 6hrs (3hrs each evening, two evenings).
It was by far the best experience I've had in wow in MANY years.
We still play classic vanilla because the game is overall fun. You can lose yourself inside the game where you are an unknown adventure in a wide open world. Its simplicity makes it great.
for me, I enjoyed the ceiling. The moment you hit 60, full BIS, you know that you've accomplished a lot on your character. Now it can be repeated multiple times at different classes.
With Retail, i can barely hit the ceiling. Then next year comes; and a new expansion is out. I'm choking. theres no time to digest and enjoy the zero to hero progression. because it wont matter; the next expasion is already out before i could even start doing high end raids
Ground mounts were a thing too. It was awesome riding my sabretooth, and seeing someone riding in and out of stormwind. Nowadays everyones teleporting, flying, in town queuing up in front of auction. Town is a lot more populated, but zones for questings arent so much.
The problem is a portion of the player base of retail is so toxic, I dread the idea of having to talk to someone. I miss being social like back in Wrath, but now it's hard to find patient, helpful people in wow. I shit you not, I saw on the forums the other day saying they think new players should not be allowed to start out as tanks or healers. With a shortage of both, how tf do you think people will ever learn and fill those spots? 🤦♀️
Retail isn't doing itself any favors by killing off all the best Heroes. I still remember how Marshall Windsor was the GOAT walking through Stormwind to call-out Onyxia.
But he died
no one said it better than Kevin Jordan, in classic "You the player are the content" and the community keeps everything together.
I used to always tell people that I missed actually making the journey to the dungeon with my group and meeting up there to ready ourselves for it. It kind of hyped up the experience to me. I was always met with people saying they don't miss that and how much of a waste of time it was. Turned out they did miss it. Because now they play Classic.
Always had that one party member that would be on the opposite content and then scream "Summons?", forgetting that Vanilla doesn't have a summoning stone and the warlock is only lvl 17.
Really try out HC, on an unknown alt mate.
As a 2004 player, this whole HC stuff (witch is nothing like me, as a PvPer) feels like the opening of 2019 should have been.
It's such an blast man.
It really does. Every zone feels full and brimming with life. The economy isnt destroyed yet because people keep getting reset. Everyone helps each other out (for the most part) because you dont want them to let you die either.
@@bluemyst42 ikr?!!
Stay safe mate!
It’s a complete waste of time
@@OkayyyIGetIt so is, playing 90min of soccer mate.
Still fun AF.
Classic WoW is like golf, knowledge of how and when to use the right tools matters a lot, but it’s leisurely played. Retail is like hockey
Id say it's like Basketball lol, gotta go fast fast and the quality of the goal isnt as important as the quantity
Hockey is pretty technical.
I play WoW for 16 and a half years now, it still is and always will be, my top 1 favorite game, i just fell in love with it so much.
@@Atrocitylol69you’re *
Played it for 20 years. I miss it.
One of my favorite memories was I worked at a Gamestop when TBC launched. I had my copy at 830pm EST, installed by 9:30pm EST.
It was 11:50pm when all the people sitting outside the Dark Portal got to watch me walk into the portal and not through it. I stood alone at the top of the other side of the portal and looked down upon the Horde and Alliance NPCs battling the Legion forces assaulting them. I looked left and right and then it all hit me:
I was the first person on my server to step foot into the newest content the game had seen at that time. I'll never forget it.
And then there's also the hours of stories I have from vanilla...
I just started playing WoW, completely new player, and I can tell you right now, that Retail does not feel like an MMORPG in any way whatsoever. Top two complaints for me (and why im playing Classic HC RIGHT NOW): Social aspect, and the Leveling Experience.
Leveling is like a whole other game from the level 60 experience.
My first Dungeon in retail, I was literally pulling teeth to get people to talk to me; Classic HC, we were having full conversations in the beginning middle and end of the dungeon (albeit most of it was about questing and the dungeon itself, but we were still talking)
To those who say that nostalgia is to blame, I played the Classiс in 2019 for the first time because I was bored playing Battle for Azerothi and stayed there, never returning to retail, and there were many such people with me in the guild.
Chess is older and still loved and played. Yes, it's different, but shows how age have nothing to do if the game is good.
I started WoW about 6 months after launch on EU Stormrage PVE. I've still got screenshots from summer '05 as a level 33 Nelf Warrior at Crossroads doing world PVE - I remember people commenting about it in SW and that people needed to get to Crossroads on Friday night. Man, it blew me away.
Was on Stormage PVE EU and had a Nelf warrior also, great times!
@@Infecti0us1 I soon moved to Haumarush PVP when that opened not long after 👌
Me too! :) I played on Stormrage PVE with Genesis.
I haven’t watched much content about classic wow but I hope asmon goes back to it at some point. It seems to make him happy and it’d be nice to see that happiness
Wow, what an awesome comment and compliment to Mr Asmon.
@@Atrocitylol69 how is wanting people to be happy parasocial? Bit of a reach lol.
True. But he's gonna get carried to perfection then get bored...then TBC...then WRATH.. 😊
Modern MMOs feel like a task list to me. Vanilla is indeed an adventure. What we need now is content generated on teh fly by AIs, so that every quest, NPC etc... happens once only. That would restore the magic and immersion.
One of my instrument teacher told me a story in 2008 about how did WoW completely destroyed her relationship with her boyfriend (she was ~27 years old). She said that her boyfriend was skipping showering on raid days (XD) but it was much more complicated.
You can just Imagine what a gamer was her boyfriend, and i can relate with him as a 25 years old myself.
Wow is such a complex game, even if we get every 3 years a complex AAA game which actually playable, it's nothing like having an actual complex multiplayer, where players are playing with passion.
I've never really played this game but for some reason i am so very invested in its journey through time and its inevitable death... I dont know why :)
Start playing classic WoW
play clasic hardcore
Classic wow won't die!
Your invested in asmongold and his opinion on it parse the difference
Play classic wow you won’t regret it
To me, TBC will always be the expansion that felt like an actual expansion of the previous version. It was truly Vanilla+.
No it wasn't. It still deleted Azeroth. Level 60 endgame content in Vanilla still used the base game. In TBC, once you left the dark portal you never truly came back.
@@Junesong_777sure I agree but I still had fun in TBC with my guild doing dungeons and raids, overall I can play vanilla, tbc and wotlk and enjoy them all.
Sure. Cutting 15 people from your raids felt so vanilla. TBC wasn't bad but it was the beginning of the downfall. It just wasn't that much palpable then.
@@Junesong_777Hut getting there was still a long and meaningful experience. (And Kara made you come back for endgame anyway). Compared to modern wow where levelling is blink and you missed it.
Having fun from TBC doesnt take away from the fact that it ruined the game. Level cap should have never been expanded, and loot should have never been made easier to get.
"people want to play a game that rewards knowledge and preparation thats chill and doesnt require twitch reflexes"
thats a bingo!
Exactly, I don't know when reaction time became the only thing praised as skillfull but it's such a shitty community take. Preperation and patience, calculated risks and decisions can be skillfull too in their own way.
There many 20 year old games I still play. And the lord of the rings trilogy is still a masterpiece
1999-2009 was peak art for music, film and video games.
So many good games from 2004-2006
@18 WotLK is when they started introducing automated grouping systems - Dungeon Finder.
It was also when heirlooms became a thing.
WotLK is when Blizzard started designing the game around "pre-end game is a waste of time".
It was no longer an adventure through a world, it was an adventure through the end-game expansion.
Sure they had some pretty big problems starting to occur, leveling through vanilla zones, outlands, and now northern. Then they already knew there was going to be more zones, Cataclysm, Panda patch, etc.
And yea, when a new player is introduced to the game via friends they want to play with their friends. That makes sense.
But still, the game was supposed to be an adventure and at the time, both the devs and community didn't want the vast majority of that adventure. They considered the vast majority of it to be a waste of time.
I spent hours having fun in both casual end game content and pre-end game content, from very late BC to mid panda patch.
I also ended up learning the layout of most of the pre-end game dungeons, even Wailing Caverns. If I recall correctly, they had simplified that dungeon at some point but I remember learning the full dungeon and understanding it simply because I had ran it so many times.
I stopped in Panda patch because you know what pre-end game had. Zones void of players, heirloom-decked out people in dungeons. Tanks were just glorified DPS because a lot of DPS could tank. Heirlooms, blues, and dev tweaks made people over-powered while leveling.
That doesn't mean heirlooms weren't fun. I still remember the time I was killing skull level monsters as a hunter with a ton of heirlooms. I was bored and I entertained myself by doing something that I shouldn't be able to do. I believe the zone was Silithus.
Heirlooms was fun to play with for a while but they weren't meant to be fun. They were meant to save time.
Imagine this, someone plays WoW for the first time. They end up speccing for tank. They get into a dungeon.
Everyone else is decked in heirlooms, the DPS and healer just start running things down and the tank can't even begin to out-aggro the DPS and it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because the DPS and healers are doing fine without a tank.
I know that situation. It happened in Razerfen Down. I was not a new player but I wanted to try playing without heirlooms again and that situation happened. Granted 1 of the DPS was an arms warrior.
No it was not a fun time. I wanted to tank but I was the inconvenience in the group because I wanted to tank and play without heirlooms.
Good things don't last forever but they shouldn't be treated like previous expansion content in WoW was treated.
Vanilla WoW, and to a certain extent TBC, is the most fun Ive ever had in a video game. But its a combination of the times, the game and the community and this combination will never repeat itself.
i actually played WoW back when it first came out. i had a little gnome stun lock spec rogue (full mace tree spec, with as much attack speed as i could squeeze out), and i had so much fun confusing people by off tanking mobs and just holding them in place stunned in dungeons. it might take a while but my stun lock rogue could win a fight with almost any enemy where the level would actually display in game. unfortunately around level 40 most of the dungeon bosses became immune to stun, so my entire build became useless during most boss fights.
when i was around level 20 to 30, there were a few times some level 60 horde character would come into the low level zone and just murder people en mass, but i would watch and wait. get used to their attack patterns. then i would move in and pop them with a cheap shot, throw down a couple other moves to build my combo up, and when the cheap shot stun wore off, hit them with a kidney punch to knock them out again. in between successive kidney punches, my random mace stun procs would go off too. i was only hitting for like 1 hp of damage per hit, but i was holding them there so the rest of the angry mob could also get their hits in for 1 hp of damage, and i would laugh as the level 60 predator became helpless prey during a feeding frenzy.
i loved the stories that could come out of vanilla WoW more than anything.
"Why are we still here? Just to suffer?"
@6:25 This likely came from classic EverQuest. Classic EverQuest was the all-time grand champion of doing this. Almost every non-dungeon zone, if not every zone, had reasons for a max level player, group, or raid to be there. Level 20 rare spawn/drop that is BIS or has a unique utility? It's there. Level 60 epic weapon quest that involves killing this roaming lvl 55 boss that killed you when you were level 8 grinding in that same zone months earlier? It's there. Rare spawn quest NPC that you need to turn in a material to for the next part of an endgame quest in a lvl 15 zone? It's there.
@21:35 Also, EQ. EQ was completely a group game. Soloing couldn't get you very far (well, some classes could, but solo is still less efficient than grouping). The only way to "fast travel" is via a teleport, and the only teleports in the game were via players. Wizards could teleport, but only to wizard spires, and druids to druid circles, and both spires and circles were located in different zones from each other, giving each others' classes variance in utility and convenience. Also 100% agree, MMOs need to give people reasons to interact with each other, and give them benefits that aren't superficial to do so.
Dunno if it was mentioned, but Item Identity is super important. You see that warrior and Ashkandi, you know where he went to, to get it. Same for armor. Once you play enough, epsecially in PVP, you can judge how a matchup with another player will go purely based on the gear they wear and you can see that almost at a glance.
A few things that make this game better for me:
- huge world and zone "bosses" (like Mor'Ladim in the video), the world is dangerous at the same time due to limited skills at your disposal and often times you are feeling powerless
- capital cities where people of all levels are bunched together
- classes are not balanced -> impactful class identity, not everybody can do and play your role, you feel more immersed and you don't have everybody sprinting or stealthing, you know they're druids or rogues
- walking to dungeons/raids and having to fight your way through with sapper charges (see BRM raids on Sunday in EU region lol)
- using a relatively simple toolkit to develop complex gameplay in order to have an edge above others
- each upgrade feels really rewarding
- also the dungeons mentioned in the video...once you step in BRM it's magic, like all dungeons in that zone are amazing and kinda connected
- you have a damn sword that WHISPERS to you (Corrupted Ashbringer)
- I know I started with "huge world" but did I add zone design, it kinda caters to all tastes - tirisfal/silverpine/elwynn/redrige/duskwood/stonetalon/stranglethorn/tanaris/un'goro/feralas/burning steppes/winterspring - so many different themes for the zones, I can't think of an ugly zone - maybe Desolace out of how many...
There are others, but these come to my mind and I feel add to the magic of Vanilla WoW
man this guy hit the nail on the head with why older mmo design is preffered by various people. As for not having as many resources back then, I think that also contributed to the fun. I mean when I played Elden Ring there was next to zero information online and I loved it.
🤦
the real beginning of the end was in TBC when they changed the Daily Quest cap from 10 a day to 25 a day. I remember celebrating because it meant i didn't have to pick and choose which dailies to do - i could grind it all.
fast forward to current retail where you have a billion different things you HAVE to grind or you're behind
One of the reasons i've realised recently is that I love that there's so much downtime / running that its a great game to play while watching youtube or streams. Like if i'm going to do those anyways, why not play classic?
I've been grinding every single MMO that came out since Vanilla. Played D4 HC to 100 completing all objectives in Season 1. Me and a group of friends (all aged around 40) went back to try Classic Era WOW and i can easily tell you why i'm going to keep playing this game for a while again now: 1. Item system. Getting a green drop actually matters. No more seeping through hundreds (or thousands) of items to minmax or build the item you need (looking at you New World and D4) - you get a drop and it's either what you need or it isn't. 2. Convenience: I LOVE that it takes time to travel and that the game isn't designed to get you to keep playing. At times it feels like it wants you to quit. It takes effor to complete quests and some you just can't do alone. I hate the "handholding" of modern MMOs. Make me work for it! Make it hard to achieve your gold! 3. Solid mechanics. It's not overly complicated but it takes time to master any class. I don't know wtf happened to D4 and their 100 different stat parameters - it's unnecesary and overly complicated. KISS.
I hope that Ashes of Creation look to classic wow more than modern MMOs. It just still works.
I remember when I played WoW the only time I added people to my friends list was people I roleplayed with. Otherwise there was absolutely no incentive/reason to friend people. I had a lot more reason to add people on classic compared to retail because of how it encourages you to interact with other people.
In Vanilla, you get to be part of something. A group, a raid, the world, which is difficult to navigate, you get mobbed up and you'll die alone. It forces you to be social.
All the woke pc bs nowadays. Why ppl try to instill their political agendas into gaming is beyond me. I just want to play a fun and well developed game without all the bullshit.
At level 30 in classic as human, there is a quest in SW where you have to go back to Northshire abbey and it feels so cool to come back there for the first time after lvl 5
With Classic + you said don't give it updated graphics but I just don't think that is possible. I think that they can definitely increase the fidelity but go back to a classic Style. I think they should restart. Send us back to the beginning but let's take the story in a different direction. Keep the other ones for nostalgia/ testing. Stop retail where it is and don't continue story just make it a sandbox for testing indefinitely. Classic needs to be sectioned off, having it go through the xpacs again makes no sense. However having servers just meant for each expansion then that would make sense. Classic+ should be something new with something old and make the perfect game.
One of my most memorable moments in Classic all those years ago was in Redridge, after doing a quest for some orcs, I saw a path, the terrain got darker and I saw this large, busted open gate. "Damn, this place looks scary, I wanna check it out!" I didn't get far before I saw some skull level imps. I shouldn't mess with those, but they're also just imps I thought, so I pushed my luck and tried to explore further. Obviously I didn't get far. Being able to return much later, now armed with levels, gear and experience, I had my revenge. I felt like I was at the top of the world, until I got my teeth kicked in by Volchan. I had a new goal.
I haven't had a similar experience in WoW outside of Classic, except maybe Fel Reaver in TBC to some extent.
Man Asmon be speaking FACTS when talking about Wow. 💯💯
40 yo here, I loved WoW vanilla and I loved Burning Crusade even more. I had to drop the game a little bit after WoLK came out because I just didn't have the time to play it properly, life catches up to you at some point and you need to make choices. While I still play stuff almost daily, I rarely can put more than 1 or 2 hours in it and I'll never enjoy a mmorpg if I can't sink at least 6 hours/day into it. But I still have fond memories of long evenings in NC, ZG, BWL, Karazhan Tempest Keep, Black Temple, Sunwell Plateau... Not to mention fighting in Alterac Valley and farming on many wonderful and unique regions. I understand why people who have time are still playing it it's a good effing game and gives you more memorable experiences than any other game.
That's my big issue. When I played WoW it was a time in my life I could sit and play 12 hours a day if I wanted. I have a wife and kids and work overtime now. Even if I could shave off the time to play I wouldn't want to. I have too many hobbies already fighting for my attention.
Flying anywhere and everywhere is one of the points that killed the game for me... While running you would actually run into other players, interact, buff, do an emote, maybe its an enemy from the other faction and you have some action...
11:20 to put it simply, old world dungeons are designed with the world and lore in mind. Whereas currently the world is designed with dungeons inmind
I am 3rd generation WOW out of 5. My Mom(R.I.P.) and Granny(R.I.P.) played and my son and grandson now play. It is now a part of our heritage!
Nostalgia goes a long way. It's also a solid game given the primitives. Original WoW broke boundaries and took chances being the easiest MMORPG for its time and still ended up having decent depth and well paced progression.
Love hearing you talk about your mum bro
ive been playing ascension on vanilla xp and mob difficulty, and having a blast making my Elunite Warpriest :D My fav thing to do in vanilla is to level chill while keeping up with my gear/professions and money. There is no better feeling than hitting a level bracket and already having crafted a set gear for that level bracket.
It’s because retail took out everything that made classic, classic.
Retail is instant gratification, quick kills, quick travel, quick professions. It made it easy.
Classic was slow. The world felt huge because you had to actually travel it. You had to watch pulling multiple mobs, you needed professions, you needed to farm up gold just to unlock skills and hope to have some left for better gear.
You had to plan your specs or else it costs money to fix the mistake, leveling felt good because it took time. New gear felt good because of the same.
Wow today is an arcade game compared classic.
“Because it’s so long and hard, it feels better to beat it”. Words to live by my man
Came here to say this
Haha same. Someone needs to make a clip of this
Childhood, nostalgia. Wanting to go back to a simpler, better time. Life had more colour and more magic. A beloved old game, book or series is the closest thing to a time machine.
The simple joy of vanilla Alterac Valley can never be properly replicated or renewed and if you missed out on that you will never understand peak early 2K gaming.
I remember one single game of AV lasting like 36 hours on our server. Lok'holar is my homie.
His example about his mom not making any new friends after Wrath, same, until Classic hit, I didnt add anyone to my friends lists.
Because there's no other mmos.
That blizzcon 2018 classic announcment was so awesome. I didn't put together the ice cream reference until he said vanilla and I couldn't believe it was happening.
because unfortunately no MMO in the last 15 years is actually significantly better even with how relatively worse wow is
"I wanna smoke while i play".... yep pretty much sums it up. See gandalf smoking the pipe in the shire in the beginning of lotr. Thats what i feel when i m leveling my mage through vanilla. Chilling.
Frankly half the reason is nostalgia. People can't let go of the past and playing games over and over from 20 years ago. Current stuff is too different and the past things were better.
Same as your grandpa who pines for the older better days. Thats you now. New stuff is too hard, too complicated, older is better, etc etc. The game just isnt as good nowadays and people dont wanna accept that.
That can't be the only reason at the end of the day gameplay is all that matters. If there were actually good mmos out there then I'm sure many would play them...
@@ykonratev thats what people like to say. What is gameplay? Just the reactiveness of buttons? If so elden ring and dark souls are trash as many weapons have noticable huge swing delays between you hitting a button and an animation and damage completing. Gameplay is everything as a whole, and wows gameplay is extremely simple and basic. Every facet of gameplay in wow is criticized by people like asmon, telegraphing is bad, snapshotting is bad, aoes not matching the size of the attack on the ground is bad, affixes are bad, color layering red on red on red is bad, visibility is bad.
The only good part about wows combat is its responsiveness in feedback to clicks and dodging. Too bad everything else is mid at best.
Will never forget when I saw a level 45 shadow priest in shadow form, when I was a fresh toon in Dun Morogh. I think it’s part of the reason I eventually switched mains to spriest many years later
I've played WoW from release to DF, and my brother played it till Wrath before he quit. Whenever we share stories from our history with this game 90% of our stories are from original vanilla.
Even after many years, Classic wow is the only game where I can instantly recognize specific in-game items just by looking at a player character, and I can even recall the names of these items aint that crazy?
'Adventure' in modern MMOs...
That's a cool mount where do I get that? Oh it's on the cash shop you can get it right now
How do I get this cool armor you have? Oh it's on the cash shop you can get it right now
What do I need to get to this cool zone over there? Oh just buy a boost and you can go right now
30:54 am I the only one that got CHILLs when He said "Vanilla" ?
no xd
It's a form of morphic resonance. We subconsciously detect the passion and mental frameworks underlying the development of something
Classic wow was so great from the start. You mean I can walk into the buildings I played with during Warcraft 3. You mean I can see all these people I interacted. I remember going to see Thrall for the first time. All the characters any more don't matter.
Why dual spec? Spending 50g every time you want to change your spec with a normal 60% mount costing 100g, sounds fair.
Only thing I like that came out after Classic was Transmog and RBGs
In Vanilla every little thing matters and you have to earn every little thing. Level 1 mobs can destroy you. In Vanilla, the warlock learning to summon the Voidwalker is a big big deal. You have to do a quest for it where you can die, there is a back story behind the notion of summoning demons, you even have to fight it to subdue it and earn the right to summon it. In retail, it just shows up in your action bar when you hit a certain level. WoW classic is the real World of Warcraft. It has the vibe of Warcraft 1 Orcs and Humans and Warcraft 2
Quest itself is not really complicated but it has it's own Warlock theme and there is something magical in you walking through this Sacrificial Lamb tavern, going through curtains, walking down the hall and seeing all these powerful warlocks hidden behind. Then you go even lower to the tombs and see graves, acolyte, summoning circle
i play a large variety of games over the year, one of the genres i always play along side whatever main genre i have going is MMOS, if im in my counter-strike period, i wanna play counter-strike, but when ive played that for a few hours, i wanna winge down, and thats when i launch my MMO, and i always play MMOs where i can just kick my feet up on the table and relax, level my character, kill a boss, group up with people and do a cheeky dungeon, OSRS and WoW Classic is perfect for this.
Crazy to think I’ve been in ToC’s almost as long as Asmom’s Dire Maul…
The Classic player base really is something else.
(It also takes over an hour to fill groups on a mega server??? Not sure why)
Played back in 2005-2010. Been playing a month and a half and have 17 days played . This game is crack
I liked knowing I could reach a certain level and go back to a zone and one shot stuff instead of have the mobs lol up as well
I only played retail wow in 2022 (Dragonflight for 1 month) and then wow vanilla. It's not about nostalgia, bc i never played the game before, but the vanilla wow, except for the long leveling time, is really the best version.
If you have ever gotten slowfall and journeyed off the map to crazy unfinished zones, or high atop the cliffs of the badlands, or jumped on top of stormwind gate, or climbed inside of zul gurub from the hidden tree in duskwood, this was a true adventure. The exploration of wow classic was never created again in any of their games, and neither was the freedom or user experience.
I kited teremus the devourer from the blasted lands, a 17 minute kite, all the way to stormwind and watched as he killed player after player ...the things you could do in this game, were just amazing.
Blizzard built a giant world, and let people roam free, and that's what adventure is all about.
Now people just read an online guide and copy, or netdeck in card games, and the internet has accidentally ruined the freedom and adventure that existed long ago.
Be very careful in life, because sometimes when you get more convenience, you lose a bit of your spirit and soul in the process, and that's what the world is becoming...a controlled and optimized simulation, where people become robots, and in this sense, technological innovation has destroyed gaming, and much of the human spirit.
2005-2006 were some of the best memories... just going to school and every single one of my friends played WoW, we would all talk and plan our adventures during lunch break, look at pixelated maps of leaked ZG on the shitty school computers and then all run home and play until midnight every single day. It was so fun levelling up and having little competitions of who achieved higher level, it was about a level a day back then. Sadly 99% of them quit as soon as aq40 came out... after that it was just a full time job of raiding every day and people lost interest. I went all the way to naxx but I dont have very fun memories of the raiding... its the levelling and fun with friends, early dungeons etc that I miss the most!
It's because you can play vanilla wow without a single addon. You can see what's happening on the screen. It's easy to learn your class and that makes the game fun. Retail would be much better if blizzard would listen to Asmondgold instead of saying that he is bad at the game.
I never got to 60 when I was a kid. I didn’t have fast enough internet to play at home, so I would play at friends for LAN parties and at the computers at school. It’s still my favorite game of all time. Playing classic was a blast, and when I finally hit 60 in classic it as such a joy!
Classic dungeons are by far the best. I love kicking back with some wine and playing classic
A good game is like a good story. You open the book and find a new world, you exploring in it having fun, the story lead you to deeper and the conflict arising, at certain points it get to the climax, it's such a epic experience and then it ends in glory and you close the book. Blizzard doesn't want to close the book, and the book is getting worse.
And just like a good story, you don't mind if it has sequel or is part of the saga. As long as it has destination, never forgets what it was initially and just adds on good or best parts of it. It can be three books (LotR), can be five, eight (Witcher, HP, though it starts to get tedious and ending has to be very satisfying). WoW on other hand... it partially was and was not continuation of it's own story and definitely was not more of the best. It was experimenting and adapting to trends which changed it to something else.
Vanila was successful as the game was a social community that interactes and evolved together. The game was built for lvl 1 to 60 with end game content. All the expansions where just end game content were the leveling process was a just a barrier to skip through as fast as possible.
I feel this best describes why classic is a better game "if ever plank on a ship was replaced every time it rots, is it still the same ship"? - people fell in love with the original for so many reasons, 20 years of adding and re-inventing the wheel brings the question is Dragonflight the same WoW we fell in love with
I have thought about it recently and I think WoW Vanilla has more flavor overall. It feels like when the game was developed, the developers were loving their projects and put love and a part of themselves into it. I don’t know if the game was designed to make money in the first place, but it feels very immersive.
Back then games were designed to be fun and people were sold an experience.
Nowadays games are designed to make money.