This month, I had the amazing opportunity to join all of you in the WoW: Forever beta and see all the new and exciting features Blizzard introduced into the Vanilla experience to make it fresh and intriguing for everyone, not just the old heads who were around in 2004. I absolutely loved what I saw, even though some archaic Vanilla mechanics remain in place.
The Skyborne race was my faction of choice, aligned with the Alliance of course. I was a Rogue, like most of my characters in WoW, except in post-WOTLK expansions where I would pick anything, level it to 55, and then go and make a blood Death Knight.
This new race’s starting zone was refreshing. It had a plethora of different areas clearly drawing inspiration from other locations in Vanilla WoW, and moving from one place to another gave you a sense of progression through its environmental storytelling alone. It boasted a lot of cool ancient temples, alongside dark forests shrouded in mist and mystery and strange cities attuned to the very world and the powers of the wind.
The leveling in general was fine. The quests mostly followed the usual MMORPG formula of go there, kill that many creatures, and by chance loot them to bring me their unique items. That’s the overall gist, but some of the quests did have narrative grounding, and the writing in the quests themselves was actually better than I had expected of modern WoW. However, the structure of the zone meant a lot of players skipped most of its content and never saw the ultimate showdown, i.e., the zone’s narrative conclusion.
This is both good and bad. The game does not force you to stay in this zone for much longer than you want to, and as soon as you’re fed up and done, you can go to one of the ships and reach Dalaran, Stormwind, or any other faction capital you want to visit. Once there, you get quests that take you across the world and allow you to pick up leveling from areas in regular Vanilla WoW, but staying in the starting Skyborne zone is an option.
Read what’s behind the latest news in gaming (with a bit of snark) by subscribing to the Destructoid Checkpoint newsletter!
It starts to drag after level 10 or so, though, so leaving for Stormwind was actually what I did around level 13 and started my journey across the Eastern Kingdoms using boats and trains and walking on foot.
It was an adventure of sorts—I hadn’t played World of Warcraft for a long time now, and had not set foot in Vanilla for literally 15 years. This solemn odyssey across the world, to Teldrassil and the Ironforge and into Westfall and through Stormwind, was a trip down memory lane into a time that longer exists, a childhood I was born into, of which remain unseen fragments that only the mind’s eye can glimpse.
The overall experience, significantly boosted by the unprecedented amount of other players achieved both through nostalgia and the new no-realm system, was one that slingshot me back to the good old days, and I’m glad I got to play it.
I recommend checking WoW: Forever out if you liked old WoW but wanted something new added to the mix. The Vanilla is intact if you want to ignore all the novelties, but you always keep the option to try them out.
