I absolutely adore the apocrypha about Geoffrey Rush basically telling the rest of the production to stop being a bunch of tiny babies and just make the goddamned movie already.
Also I generally adore Geoffrey Rush so.
Just a heads up for anyone who still has an active WoW subcscription… Blizzard are currently conducting a stress test that is open to everyone who has an active sub. If you log into the battle.net launcher and select WoW, you should see a drop down that let’s you choose between classic and retail, and you can install the classic client. I’ve no idea if you could activate your account and then immediately play, but I suspect you could - it wasn’t like any kind of key was issued, it was just there in the client. (If it’s worth $15 to you to try out WoW Classic.)
The test started at 5:00 EST today and is supposed to be up for 48 hours, so there’s some time if you wanted to try it out. I believe the level cap for the test is limited to 15.
My spouse and I hopped on around 6:30 or so and the starting zone was an absolute zoo… it was everything I remembered from launch day in 2004. All the mobs dead, slow respawn rates, and heaven forbid you actually need drops for a quest, hehe. We played for about two hours and just barely got to level 4, mainly because it was near impossible to actually find things to kill and finish quests.
It’s made me rethink whether playing on day one is going to be the path we want to take. On the one hand, waiting for the initial rush to die down is good, but we also don’t want to be behind, since we’ll be playing on a PvP server, and being behind means getting ganked.
But so far, it’s true to form. Had to remind myself that when I bought an upgraded skill, I had to specifically drag it on to my action bar. THose were the days when you had the option to use lower level skills (which I seem to recall was necessary in some raids?) and the game never auto-equipped any skill you learned.
Also, I was tickled to see when I logged in that I had the “gift voucher” in my inventory. The one I got because we bought Collectors Editions of the original game, so I was able to choose between the Mini-Diablo, Zergling, or Panda Cub minipet. I totally wasn’t expecting that.
I will think about it. Hansey you have some real guts going in early.
After half an hour in the newbie zone I had collected two of the eight wolf meat I needed. It certainly didn’t take two hours to complete the first quest at launch.
A little over two months to go. I want in at the start. I want it crowded and a pain in the ass. I want to hear people bitching about stuff in zone chat. I want a real MMO launch again, minus a queue to get in, I hope.
I might even go real old school and take a day off work to play.
I dunno.
After 15 years, my Wife and I resubscribed to standard, and included my kids, 13 and 9. This was a many year promise that came true this summer vacation.
It seemed the places were about the same. We leveled up in Elwynn forest and Loch Modan. We took the griffin. Hogger was there. The pig in the Redridge Mountians was there. Ironforge was Ironforge and Stormwind was Stormwind, but bigger with some boats.
We had a really fantastic time, after a few days of leveling, even went to the Deadmines with the kiddos, which we both remembered as the “Van Cleef” dungeon. It was different, but great!
The graphics are better than I remember for added things. Skills, slightly different… but mostly the same. Warror gets cleave. Mage gets a water elemental pet. Paladin can heal…
What is the appeal of classic? Sincerely, everything different we have seen from 1-40 has been an improvement. A slight improvement. It’s the same damn game already!
Playing as a family by the way? Oh. my. god. Incredible.
edit: sorry, got lost in the story. Question: why is this a thing? If it was available a few weeks ago I would have subscribed to it, but kinda glad we didn’t…
This is going to be the kind of thing that almost everyone will sub to for a month, remember what a pain in the ass old-school WoW was and just as quickly unsub.
I wonder how many of those who clamored for Classic WoW and insisted that it be exactly as the original was have played the original WoW and are aware of all its “warts.”
LOL I will be right there with you. And I can command myself to take a day off…
I should probably mention that originally the stress test had 15 servers up. After a little while, they announced that “the servers weren’t stressed enough” so they closed some of them. In the end, only two servers were up, so everyone was crammed on to just those two. Presumably launch will actually have more servers.
The allure of classic for me, isn’t to solo your way through content you’ve probably done 20 times on alts, it’s that there will be people to actually group with, and they won’t be decked out in full heirloom gear and one shotting things. It will be difficult to do the dungeons, and require teamwork, CC, communication, all those things that make MMOs great, and not just glorified single player games (which to me, is what WoW became).
I’m looking forward to it for the social aspects of it. I’ve done the content so many times, if that was all the appeal was, it would be a hard pass. EQ is much the same way, the reason those progressive/start over servers are fun, is because there are actual people to adventure with.
Everyone is different, but for me, the only good thing about MMOs is the interaction, and friends you make. The gameplay is repetitive, boring, and takes way to long to get anywhere. Trying to do it solo always puts me to sleep. I look forward to wiping in monastery, because I’m pretty sure that will happen a lot. People are used to burning through old WoW content in extremely overpowered gear, it will at least be good for a chuckle watching the mayhem.
If only there was a thread where people had posted their thoughts on this, archived on the Internet for anyone to read at their leisure.
Anyway, stress tests are always the worst to participate in. And frankly given the already proven state of private servers, it seems obvious to me that the march of technology has made the question a lot more about “what player density can we support with our design” than “oh God how far can we push this thing before the silicon melts?”
Classic is included as part of your regular subscription. You don’t have to subscribe to it separately.
I have to hand it to blizzard…making money off a 15 year old game that most people quit playing 12 years ago…(well the cool kids did after TBC…the last great expansion…it went downhill fast after that)
For me, the ONLY reason to play it, is for the battlegrounds…those battlegrounds will be released in phases…as a matter of fact, there will be NONE on day one of classic…it’ll be 3 months before WSG gets ‘released’ and even more more months before all of them are available…its to keep you subbed as long as possible
well played blizzard
and yes, I too wonder how long till people realize the ‘issues’ with a 15 year old game gets to you where modern mmo’s have ‘fixed’ all those things…i give it 2 months before people go back to whatever modern mmo they play now
There are definitely some people who really love vanilla WoW and will play Classic for years.
But my guess is that most people who long wistfully for it are just remembering a time in their lives, 15 years ago, when they were younger, weren’t tied down with families, and had the time to dedicate to the game. These are the people who will be most disillusioned by what they get with Classic.
DING! Totally agree and I fall into this category. I had a similar experience when I was fondly remembering Everquest. Holy cow is that game non forgiving of my rose colored glasses…
Classic dungeons being difficult is a common misconception. They were difficult at the time as we didn’t have 15 years of WoW experience but it’s been quite illuminating seeing how easy they are in streams. In fact, some of the classic player base were wondering if the mob hp values were set too low early in the classic beta and Blizzard clarified they are correct. Modern M+ BfA dungeons, especially at 10+ and beyond are way more difficult and require much more coordination.
What is definitely harder in classic is leveling up. In modern WoW, pulling many enemies on each pull, and when I’ve leveled as tank spec sometimes pulling 5-9 at a time – being more limited by mob rubberbanding than character durability. While in classic pulling more than one enemy is very risky. Pulling three accidentally usually means you had better start running and praying.
Lack of tools was a lot of it.
Pull 4 guys? Better hope you can CC 2-3 of them.
Original WoW in a nutshell. Guess I got my answer.