What follows is a very long narrative of my history with WoW and an admittedly romanticized look at the new expansion. I am not discussing hardcore game mechanics. I’m not theorycrafting. I’m writing about the scope/themes of the game and what those things mean in a social/cultural context. If you make it to the end, I applaud your effort. If you put in that much work, I also hope you’ll leave a comment.
When I first caught the rumor that Blizzard would be announcing another World of Warcraft expansion at this year’s Blizzcon, I was completely apathetic. I haven’t played the game in nearly 6 months, and only then after some friends and I rallied from a similar hiatus for WotLK. The game had long since lost its former charm, which surprised even me. I was fairly hardcore for a while there. I wasn’t bleeding-edge by any means, but I led raids in a T6 guild before calling it quits on The Burning Crusade.
To understand why I quit I should probably begin with the reason I started. I joined WoW late in the game, late fall of 2006 in fact, because I was living in a small town with little to do. I had just graduated college, I was working my first serious job, and I wanted an enjoyable way to spend my wee hours. I also only had a Mac at the time, so WoW was one of few options for an MMO.
I got hooked fast; I almost made my way to 60 before TBC dropped, but not quite. From what I can only think to call “an academic perspective (meaning thinking about gaming/culture in a social context),” that was actually a good thing. I got to witness the first flight from Azeroth, and it was massive. I played on a med-high population server and I immediately noticed the lack of players in town. Trying to find groups for Sunken Temple could be a nightmare, where before the expansion there were plenty of people around. Now granted, this would have happened to a degree, even if the expansion wasn’t a new continent. A lot of the people I was playing with were playing alts, and they would have returned to their mains for new content either way. The problem, though, was that I was no longer a part of the same game.
People always say that the real game is the end game, so when the expansion dropped, everyone was rushing to 70. And then they were rushing to get geared for raids. And then they realized they didn’t need the gear and they would just raid for gear. But all of that was taking place on a different continent. It was a whole different game. Where I would once see 60s roaming the same zones I was leveling through, there was now nothing but people rushing to grind through the Dark Portal. That kind of excitement was great for the first couple weeks, but after that, Azeroth was a ghost town. There was the occasional blood elf and then people like me, desperately trying to be a part of something out of our reach.
I wondered then why Blizzard hadn’t just changed the original world they created. Part of what kept me interested in the game was that things felt dynamic. The first time I walked my toon into Orgrimmar and saw Onyxia’s head on a pike it was exhilarating. Sure I was a few years late to the party, but there were still people around, having fun with what was there. That’s the kind of stuff that made me want to be level 60. It wasn’t just gear, it was the parts of the game I wanted to see.
I got over that pretty fast. I made it to Outland without any Azerothian raids (barring Kara, of course, though much later), hit 70, and started raiding (alright, not that much later). I leveled another toon to 70 and raided with him. I made that second toon my main and kept on raiding, picking up all the flashy gear I had seen around town. And then my guild hit T5 and we had to make some changes. We had primarily been casual raiders but the regulars wanted to progress and we couldn’t do it with our casual members. Several horribly terribly awful guild mergers later we were moving into T6 and my interest just died.
There were a lot of factors involved with my first break. I had moved, changed jobs, formed some new relationships, and gotten a lot more involved with my local community (you know, the kind outside the game). There was still time for WoW, but it just didn’t make sense. All I did was farm and pray for good drops, trying to beat content that wasn’t really all that fun for loot that I had just stopped caring about.
I took a few months off, pretty much cold turkey. It was actually good to give it up for a while, though I did like to keep up to date on the WotLK news. Launch day came and went. I still wasn’t playing. A couple months later a few friends decided to re-sub and reroll, all on the same server. My little brother had just built a new PC so I decided to get him a subscription and give the game a final go.
Leveling again was fun! Fun enough, in fact, to send me back to my old server to say hello. Again, from an academic point of view this was a great experience. I got to avoid all the pain of trying to get raid ready with my old guild, and I was really enjoying leveling my new toon – something I vowed I would never do again – because I had people to level with.
Unfortunately I got caught up in my old level 70. I couldn’t just level through Azeroth like the rest of the game didn’t exist (or pretend I didn’t have access to the new content). Every time I stepped into Stormwind I saw 80s with all their shiny new gear. And their new mounts. And their new pets. And I wanted it all.
That’s when I realized the problem Blizzard had created. My first experience with the game was addictive because of the experience it provided. The world felt coherent, the story line (in enough places) led somewhere. Azeroth was interesting, dynamic, full of players at all levels. Blizzard had achieved a perfect balance of experience and reward. You have an experience, you get a reward. You have a new experience, you get a new reward. You have a shiny new experience, you get a shiny new reward.
The expansions changed that. They left Azeroth underpopulated and turned the new continents into homogenous sinkholes of lootlust. When the world was just Azeroth, you could level with the endgame in mind because the endgame was all around you. There were raids in lowbie zones, constantly reminding the leveling player that there were experiences to be had, and not just loot. By adding other continents, the only part of the new world players got to see was the loot, parading around town in all its shining glory. Sure, you need that. There has to be some reward for advancing. But when you only show the reward without reminding players that there’s an experience on the way you alter the focus of the game.
There’s also the obvious issue of repetition. New boss mechanics quickly become few and far between, and if you never change the experience/reward model, it gets old and it gets there fast. I see the expansions as the easy extension of a successful model. Like the first launch of the game, each expansion brought a new world with the same experience/reward model. Blizzard often talks about the intentional “reset button” nature of expansions; they say expansions give players another chance to rise to the top of the raiding scene, or the arena scene, or whatever they might want.
But I don’t think most players want that. I’d wager that the number of players who played casually for the years between expansions – players who didn’t have time to play on the bleeding edge – who suddenly become hardcore arena champions or top raid guilds are few and far between. The larger player base, even the raiding player base, is interested in the experience. They’re interested in the dynamic world. They’re interested in having some fun.
If you spend enough time in guild vent channels, you’ll eventually hear conversation turn to two things: penis jokes, and “remember when” stories. The former is just something every guild has to deal with. The latter, though, comes from shared enjoyable experience. Yes, guilds still have those moments. On the rare occasion that I stop by my old guild’s vent we can still laugh at inside jokes and stories long gone. How much more often could a player or a guild have those moments if they were still playing in the same places in game?
This is why WoW: Cataclysm is the expansion that always should have been. The old world, the world you spent your time leveling through, the world from which you have countless screenshots of your toon “growing up,” has changed. The Barrens isn’t so barren, because the druid you saved a billion times has finally made some f***ing progress. Shadowfang Keep has been overrun by genetically mutated versions of the pussies you used to stomp at level 18. Things have changed, but you’re in familiar territory, which gives you and the people with whom you played through all those zones a chance to say, “remember when?”
That’s what MMOs are really all about. They’re about creating enjoyable, memorable experiences with other players. By putting players back into the old places we used to haunt, outside instances where we used to gank, they’re putting those old memories at the front of our minds. It’s an affirmation of those shared experiences and the relationships that have formed as a result. When Blizzard finally shuts down the servers on WoW, your gear won’t matter. Your dps won’t matter. Your mp5 won’t matter (hell, it won’t even exist). The relationships you made can matter, though, and might even carry over into the next game, the new world, or god forbid, real life.
