Fifteen years have passed since the mortal races banded together and stood divided into factions against the might of World of Warcraft. Though Azeroth was still a babe, the tenuous balance between players and Blizzard has all but evaporated. The drums of a new expansion thunder once again.
Do you know that there was a moment in my life where my friends thought I had died? I just disappeared without a trace, no phone, no contact, no social media. I kid you not, they left flowers at my door. But I wasn't dead. I had jumped worlds. I had left reality behind and was living comfortably in the World of Warcraft. And for a while, I really did live there. I worked, I had friends, I had a job... all in there. And then, these two lives blended in together and my online friends became real friends.
Through the years, I have been in and out of WoW as if it's some sort of digital Narnia with better magical creatures. I've fought my way through every expansion Blizzard has dished at its player base. Like most experienced players, WoW's current take, Battle for Azeroth, didn't impress me much. It felt hollow and rushed. But I knew last year, that WoW: Classic was coming out. It was time for me to die again.
Since I am currently playing both versions of the game (and sleeping very little), I think it's time to put them side by side and see how they compare. I promise, no rose-tinted glasses are on, and I don't intend to get all historical about Classic: "Oh, for its time, it was revolutionary", no. Both games are being played today, so we're going to take a long, hard look at them as they are today.
Graphics
There is much to be said about Blizzard's state-of-the-art graphics in World of Warcraft. For fifteen years, the game has truly evolved, graphics-wise. Some of the clunky models in WoW: Classic haven't aged well. You can practically see the polygons on them:
Now, we have emotions on our characters' faces, hair that doesn't look like it's been cast in a mold, and gear that sways and ripples as you move. It might appear like a small thing but it's a great improvement.
While the game has always been nice and colorful, nowadays it really is a stunning visual display. You can just see how much time and effort has been put into making it a thing of beauty. And that is not new – Blizzard has been ramping up the Pretty-meter ever since The Burning Crusade, offering us views that get more and more spectacular with each expansion.
Naturally, this brings its own set of problems. An environment that is richer in detail is more difficult to render, therefore you have more lag. It also means that smaller details might be harder to see, and it will be easier to get stuck on a tiny nook in a fence as I do, and every time it elicits keyboard-snapping frustration. More importantly, raid environments get oversaturated with particle effects in addition to the details so you have a harder time differentiating between them. That's why Blizzard is recently opting for boss effects that are especially bright, like lightning or fire, or contrasting with their darkness, such as void zones.
And speaking of raids and bosses, let's talk a little about the "game" part of this game.
Gameplay
You have to understand that WoW: Classic and WoW: Battle for Azeroth are two entirely different beasts in terms of gameplay. Oh, sure, they look the same on the surface, but different things drive the player or players towards their end goal. Let's look at some practical examples:
WoW: Classic
You are in a 40-man raid. You are all geared to the teeth, and it has taken you months to get there. You need to manage several things: most importantly, aggro. Aggro is extremely important for all players, including healers. You need to make sure your DPS or healing is enough, but not too much to get the boss's attention. Tanks need to make sure they keep aggro and stay alive. Healers and casters need to manage their mana.
The boss has three or four mechanics but one hit, one wrong step means DEATH. Not just for you but for everyone in the raid. Dying means you've lost precious cash for repairs and consumables. You've also lost time. That's why raid leaders back in the day were prone to bouts of rage when someone did things wrong.
In this relic of the past, you can hear the raid leader literally lose their mind as the raid progresses. If you have sensitive ears, better skip it because he drops more than a few F-bombs there:
WoW: Battle for Azeroth
You are in a 25-man raid. Oops, which difficulty? If you're in Raid Finder, it's a walk in the park. Normal is... well, normal. Heroic is a more serious business. Mythic raiding will eat your face. Let's assume you're trying Mythic, the hardest one. You are all geared to the teeth, and so are your 50 alts. Aggro is no longer an issue. Repair costs are no longer an issue. Mana only runs out if you spam like crazy.
So what is left there to manage? The boss. The boss is infinitely more complicated than 15 years ago. It has not three but fifteen mechanics. It has two to four distinct phases where mechanics change. And one step may not mean necessarily death but if everyone in the raid is constantly getting hurt, the healers will get overwhelmed and the result will be the same.
You can see the epic battle Limit had to take on when they went for World-first N'zoth. Keep track of all the things the boss does:
In summary, to play your character well in WoW: Classic is difficult. But if you master that, boss tactics are easy. That's what the majority of Classic players currently report: raids seem easier because everyone already knows how to handle much harder bosses.
In WoW: Battle for Azeroth, playing your character well is easy. If you don't want any stress, you can just go to an easy raid mode and enjoy all the content. But at higher difficulty tiers, you need to be really careful with boss tactics, your positioning, and communication with your teammates.
And since I already mentioned money and epic gear, I'd like to talk about the most important part of WoW: loot.
The value of things
In WoW: Classic, you start off as a hobo. Your armor is taken from dead people and the garbage bins. Your first gold piece will fill your eyes with tears of joy. Getting your epic mount is a Herculean task and strutting at 100% increased ground speed made everyone else green with envy. Flying? Only with the Flight Master.
But as we know, value is something we attribute to things. A blue piece of gear will look like the most glorious drop if all you've ever had was greens. That's how Classic did things. Epic and Legendary-level gear were things people talked about in hushed whispers.
In WoW: Battle for Azeroth, gold and epic gear are raining from the skies. You can just get it from standard solo quests. Same with the Legendary cloak from Wrathion. The difference lies in the gear's item level. To get a higher level, you need to advance to higher raid difficulties or do Mythic Dungeons. The gearing is a lot more gradual and it's a lot easier to get started on that path.
So, to what does BfA attribute value? I'll tell you where: mounts and unlocks. Players now have the option to unlock new races via grinding reputation and obtain unique mounts by doing raids, something unheard of in Classic. The value is purely cosmetic but many mounts become unavailable with time, so having the Rusted Proto-Drake is considered a real achievement.
And since we've covered the more technical aspects of the game, let's get down to...
Storyline
As we have already mentioned, Warcraft lore is a tangled mess with more branches and snags than the Teldrassil (RIP). However, when the MMO first launched, things were relatively simple. You had the Horde and Alliance, doing their endless war thing. You had Onyxia's plot, the Old God corruption, and some other tidbits, but it didn't exactly follow a straight line. WoW: Classic is essentially an open-world game and it doesn't even have anything remotely called a "storyline". Advancements to the "story" came with the patches, revealing new in-game content, but that was it.
And aside from the opening cinematic, there are no other cinematics in Classic. Only after the release of the next expansion, The Burning Crusade, could we say "oh, all of these things happened and THEN, the Dark Portal opened."
Every expansion afterward has been going farther and farther down the linearity route. Even in Legion and Battle for Azeroth, where you could choose your questing zones, the story followed the same pattern. And it wasn't a bad story, but honestly, Blizzard, what happened? What are you doing with this? Where are you going? It appears that the writers responsible for World of Warcraft have written themselves into a corner. They are stuck repeating the same motif:
- We have a hero, here are 50 reasons they are a hero/badass.
- The hero becomes corrupted by an outside force, usually Old Gods.
- The hero turns evil, becomes the villain.
- The hero is the next big boss to down.
- The Old God responsible needs to go down.
We have already seen so many variations of the same story that it no longer makes sense. Even Sylvanas Windrunner, who has never been Emperor Palpatine-level evil, did a huge 180 at the beginning of WoW: Battle for Azeroth.
At this point, it just seems like lazy writing.
Not to mention that thanks to previous expansions, we are left with glaring plot holes. For example, why did we suddenly forget about time travel? We've used it for two expansions already (stealing the Dragon Soul in Cataclysm and Garrosh escaping in Warlords of Draenor), but now no one says a peep about going back in time and stopping ol' Sylvie from burning Teldrassil.
Why did Azshara lift the waters from her nigh-impregnable underwater domain so that we could waltz in and kill her troops? She claims it's for her own entertainment but it makes no sense? She was toying with us without getting us to Nazjatar. And when we finally defeated her, why did N'Zoth yoink her away when she was about to expire?
These are answers we may never have. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of having a storyline. I think Blizzard was right in implementing one. But for the love of Elune, get an editor! Get twenty editors and streamline this thing!
But I digress. After all, an online game is nothing without its players. We have arrived at the final chapter...
Community
World of Warcraft is an MMORPG. The second "M" of that acronym stands for "multiplayer". This means that the game requires you to collaborate with other players in order to succeed at it. However, a community is not based on collaboration alone. A game's community needs a soul, something that brings people together. The very same something that kept me up at night with all my friends, talking on voice chat until the sun came up. Currently, things are as follows:
When I play WoW: Battle for Azeroth, I often do dungeons. I queue in Group Finder, it finds the right composition of a healer, 3 DPS and a tank, and we're automatically transported to the instance. I say "hi" to everyone. No one says a word. The tank rushes in, pulls things. Not a word. The DPS is in trouble or AFK... not a word. The whole ordeal takes about 20 minutes and we're out, never to see each other again. It's like playing with bots. But no one bothers me and I can go merrily on my way. Global chat is silent except for Rare spawn announcements.
WoW: Classic forces you to talk to people. There is no group finder, so you have to shout yourself hoarse until you find a group. Multiply that by 40 for raiding. And for some reason, it has an effect on the players. People ask you where you're from. They crack jokes. They ask you to join their guild. We pick the best character names in the group. We give each other compliments. And we add each other to the Friends list if it all went well. The whole ordeal takes TWO BLOODY HOURS from start to finish, including getting to the damn place. Finding a tank was like finding the Holy Grail. Meanwhile, someone is singing disjointedly in General Chat:
Where have all the healers gone and
Where are all the mobs?
Where's the rogue with Slice and Dice
To fight the rising ones?
Isn't there a Paladin upon a holy steed?
Late at night, I toss and I turn
And I dream of what I need...
I NEED A HEALER
I'M HOLDING OUT FOR A HEALER TILL THE END OF THE NIIGHT~~~
I even saw people roleplaying, proper roleplaying outside of Goldshire.
You can't have that in BfA. There is just so much to do. You have so many grinds and world quests and profession skills that it feels like you are missing out if you're just chatting with people. And as I was thinking that, the epiphany hit me.
The epiphany
WoW: Classic and WoW: Battle for Azeroth represent two parts of our lives. Classic is our childhood: it needs to be taken in large doses and over large periods of time. The server is all of your friends who have come to play with you. It lets you walk around and get lost or get really good at something and impress the whole server. It has silly memes and Barrens chat and your model looks like something you drew yourself. You can play a Hunter and not use your pet because you felt sad that it got hurt all the time (real story).
Battle for Azeroth is a game for adults. It does everything in bite-sized chunks because adult life has little time to sit down and play. You are surrounded by other adults, people who are often as pressed for time as you, with little to say. But the disjointed walking now has a purpose. The coarse lines and polygons are now smooth. There is beauty and attention to detail in everything. And as an adult, the choice lies with you: play casually, or hardcore. You have all the cool achievements and you are on your way to unlocking all the allied races so you're ready for the next expansion.
Maybe that's why I play both. I am eternally stuck between the two.
