One of the fantastic things about the challenging COVID era was how all these grand convention-style events moved online. While I can’t remember every event that temporarily moved to this model, I watched a few, and it was great that more people could participate.
It’s a pity that big events like D23 or Blizzcon stepped back from that all-online model. I don’t fully understand why they did that, since I’m pretty sure it wouldn't dent their live attendance at all, but such is life. I watched the elements of BlizzCon that became available on YouTube this year, and it brought up a thought I haven’t had in a while.
Is digital exploration valid?
A blizzard for Blizzard
I didn’t think I’d ever get into a Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO). Everything about them I labelled as toxic to my personality. The level grind. The raiding culture. Punishing death penalties despite it being inevitable. Enforced PvP or grouping.
World of Warcraft promised to be different, and while other games had started to focus on a different approach to MMO’s before Warcraft, they got the headlines and made the marketing work. I was also a longtime Blizzard fan from the heyday of console games like The Lost Vikings (1992) and Rock’n’Roll Racing (1993) on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Then other people came from games like Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, which was a lead-in to the game's background.
There was also a confluence of extended friends, some into MMO games historically, and others drawn to Blizzard’s incarnation of the genre just like me. World of Warcraft was just a whole time, place and people confluence that is almost impossible to repeat. I’d also just come back from a failed migration to Australia, so there probably was a deep-seated need for another form of connection even if it wasn’t physical or face-to-face.
So, slightly later than everyone else by a few days, I walked to the store in a veritable blizzard to buy Blizzard's World of Warcraft at retail a few days after launch.
I had no idea what I was getting into.
Warcraft was a lifestyle
Okay, I’m half joking; I didn’t descend to the levels of The Guild web show, which is great, by the way, but it did become a core part of my life: the question is why?
How hard I went into Warcraft is relative. It didn’t take over my life, but it did take over all the time I spent gaming on my computer. I stopped playing anything else, and I just played World of Warcraft. It was addictive for two reasons: exploration and connection.
If you expected me to say loot or that it was engineered to be sugar for the human brain, you’d be incorrect. This was 2004. A simpler time. To riff on Obi-Wan, World of Warcraft in 2004 was an elegant design for a more civilised age. It was built on polish, adventure, and respect for the player, long before modern gaming traded genuine craft for weaponised FOMO and psychological hooks.
Connection cadence
A large part of what made Warcraft fun was the connection.
You connected with random people to do various activities, often in dungeons, and those serendipitous connections were often fascinating. People of all ages and from different parts of the world. You know you’ve entered a surreal world when you have to stop your dungeon run because one of the group members has been called to by his Mam to have a bath, or because your raid tank has fallen off his chair and finished the raid with a potentially broken arm.
We had a guild called The Dungeoneers; only God know how that name wasn’t taken, right? It was great doing end-game dungeons and the smaller raids until we merged with another guild of ex-FPS players. I have no idea what we were thinking. We even met with them in the real-world and culturally? It was obviously it was fracked.
The truth was that the various Warcraft chats, with varying degrees of openness, were a way to maintain a more constant, frequent cadence of conversation with the fabric of gaming friends who joined the game at launch. I’d say the level of discourse between various people was at its highest during playing Warcraft, for me at least.
Exploring a fantasy world
A big part of the game was exploring the world, even though it wasn’t a real place. Traversing the land and seeing its wonders. Encountering the fantastical creatures that lived there. Seeing new cities and locations. Entering various dungeons with their own stories, inhabitants and antagonists.
I know it sounds strange, as it’s not a realm, but the wonder of it was amazing.
You end up with distinct memories. When you cross into another zone and are instantly killed by a bear way above your level. When you’re a lower-level Horde and a bunch of humans ride past, decked out and on their horses, galloping to Scarlet Monastery to do the dungeon. The first time you get on an airship to a distant location.
I have these memories despite having a machine at the time that meant it took me an hour to get into and out of cities because of the lag.
The end of an era
My journey with World of Warcraft finally came to an end after a few attempts to restart around 2007 to 2008, as I played large parts of The Burning Crusade but none of The Wrath of the Lich King.
It ended for a number of reasons.
The Dungeoneers sort of fell apart a bit, and I think a few real-life friends fell out because of it for a period. It was usually the raiding dramas that came with 40-man raids at the time.
This is because raiding becomes like a job. Set raids. Set times. Do you work to make sure you’ve created enough potions so you don’t weaken the team. Rules over loot. Frustration when 40 people don’t orchestrate perfectly. The end-game experience was so different from the cornucopia of exploration and connection that was the levelling process. If the levelling game conjures small muscle memories of travel, the endgame starts to feel like a corporate job.
Is it then surprising that people have been trying to connect with those halcyon days of 2004 again?
Will Warcraft be forever?
I mean, people still play it, but Blizzard hopes so through World of Warcraft: Forever.
There is a whole article, or even series of articles, on how the game, known as World of Warcraft retail, has changed over the years to not be the experience it was for some people, but that’s not the focus of this article. What matters for this article is that World of Warcraft: Forever is designed to recreate that 2004 experience and never move away from it.
I am looking at the idea, and I think I’ll be drawn in again.
It’s partly nostalgia, but not entirely. I find myself coming back to the game's muscle memory for exploration, even though it sits in a digital world. I want to level up and experience the world again with the tweaked graphics, which make it look like you remember it rather than how it actually was.
I may spend as much time finding a spot to take in the view and snap a screenshot as I do trying to level. I’d be in no rush to get there. I’d want to soak it up, take it slow and be open to serendipitous connections. It’s not exactly like I’m going to spend hours and hours on it.
I guess I’d want to experience it the way I try to experience life.
You see, the other game I like is Diablo, and one thing I always felt about my original World of Warcraft experience was that it felt like a bigger, more open, and more immersive Diablo.
Somewhere a guild forms
As I was writing this, I got a message from my nephew linking to shorts he is creating and saying I should start playing World of Warcraft again. I was like, funny enough, I’ve been leaning into this since watching BlizzCon. They’re forming a small guild to level and eventually do 10-man stuff. A sort of friends-of-friends thing where most people know each other at most one step removed.
That nailed it.
The potential for exploration was always there, and this now provides an avenue for connectedness. Even though I will inevitably level slowly and sort of level and explore in their slipstream, it will give a fabric of conversation that will be great, especially since two of these people are my relatives (my nephew and my brother).
It’ll also be sort of interesting and intriguing being a Warcraft character in Jack’s videos.
Azeroth Awaits, Again
Come November 4th, it’s likely I’ll be creating my own blue elf and taking up the adventure in Azeroth again. Possibly. Maybe the call to a sense of vestigial exploration in a digital fantasy realm will fade, but I am not sure it will. If it does, it will be through experiencing it.
The potential for that guild experience probably seals the deal.
It will come down to how it feels. The vistas to see. The experience to have, and whether they try to rejuvenate and recreate it, and whether it fails or succeeds. I’ll guess I will find out.