The War Within: WoW’s latest expansion

I play World of Warcraft for 19 years now. Ok, I missed a few expansions, meaning that I have not played them thoroughly and I am considered now a casual player.

Early Days

Back in the day, I did the whole nine yards; I was level 60, full epic, raiding three (3) times a week and fully enjoying the online sensation, as cartman mentioned in the dedicated episode of Southpark.

I made lots of friends in the way, most of them vanished after the hype ended, but there are the sacred few.

Burning Crusade came, along with the Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. I played all of them, and really enjoyed them.

But with each expansion, the original game was losing something, the essence that made it unique.

Deterioration

First, it was the flying mounts, but they worked only on Outlands. Then the spells and their usages changed. Now, you had to stun less, decurse/cleanse less. Healing were becoming easier. 40-man/20-man raids became 25-man/10-man etc.

Instances became linear with 2–3 bosses. You could get epics from everywhere. The last thing that changed and really broke my experience was group finder. You could go even to “light” versions of raids with just a few clicks. And you were teleported there, ah yes, to the instances also.

Atunements and all quest lines to get into instances were diminished. The Deadmines had some mini games that you had to jump over flames like Super Mario Bros to name a few.

The War Within

But I have to admit, even with all those mishaps. I am loyal to this game and Blizzard. I have all the games, everything and played almost all of them, from the lost vikings to Diablo IV. So, in the last Blizzcon, I was really glad that Chris Metzen returned and said “You are home”.

Indeed, we are. World of Warcraft with this latest expansion puts some things in perspective and began to be interesting again. But, there is something missing.

Homage

The War Within is the first expansion that tries to respect its legacy. It is a beautiful homage to 20 years of history. In the past expansions, the old content (from Cataclysm and beyond) somehow “existed”, but now I feel it begins to be respected again.

No, all the vast world of Azeroth, does not play any real role to the expansion, even now. You can go into Northrend and see enemies waiting for players to fight again, with no luck. But, now more than ever you can go and do your vanity chores, get some mount, several tiers of armor in order to look good, some achievements.

And if you want to play, you can enjoy the storyline of the new expansion. Playing for me is a bittersweet experience. I loved all the hard-core RPG features, in a game that now resembles more and more, modern RPGs.

Classic

But there is also, World of Warcraft classic with the season of discovery varation. A nice move to keep everyone in the loop. Even today, I was doing the “westfall stew” quest, for 9th time. After all these years. And I have the same feeling, “Ah, this vulture should drop that stingy vulture meat, this is the last kill”.

Until the next expansion

I will never abandon WoW Classic. It has a special place in my (very long) gaming history that began with that Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K and a cassete player.

But, I have to say, since “Cataclysm” this is the first expansion that seems to have more sense. Lets see what the next patches will bring to the table.