wisepowder: WoW Classic reminds us of all we've lost

wisepowder

WoW Classic reminds us of all we've lost | Opinion


It sounds at first like an April Fool's gag: "game studio announces that you'll soon be able to relive the nostalgia of playing their most popular title in its original form, back before they patched it to be less frustrating and look better." Yet that's for all intents and purposes what Blizzard is offering World of Warcraft players with its WoW Classic service -- the stripped down, unforgiving game that originally launched 15 years ago, rendered in all its chunky-looking glory -- and at least for the moment, it seems to be making pretty serious waves in the gaming community.To get more news about buy WoW gold Classic, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

It's hard to say how much effort was actually required on Blizzard's part to get WoW Classic up and running, but I suspect it was a bit more than the "just dig the old code off a backup drive somewhere" procedure many consumers will be imagining. Nonetheless, for the amount of buzz it's created around World of Warcraft, it's undoubtedly been time and effort well spent.

"How much of the industry's cultural history is being washed away every single month by the proliferation of live service games?"
Now, I'll confess that the buzz is a little lost on me personally. It's not that I didn't dump countless months of my life into WoW like all the rest of you -- to this day I think part of my reticence to invest in a gaming PC is my recollection of how easily I slipped into a pretty hardcore WoW habit. Rather, it's that WoW didn't really come into its own for me until sometime around Wrath of the Lich King, so the outpouring of affection for earlier iterations of the game goes right over my head. I guess I've always been a Filthy Casual at heart.

Nonetheless, it's fascinating the see how much attention and demand Blizzard has generated for WoW Classic. This is something genuinely new for the industry. We've become accustomed to the enthusiasm that greets updates and re-releases of retro titles, most notably in the form of miniature retro consoles loaded with classic games, but WoW Classic is something quite different. A stripped-down retro re-release of a game that actually still has a very popular live service right now. WoW isn't a retro game -- it's a current, regularly updated and widely played game -- yet it's clear that a substantial number of consumers see an earlier iteration of that live service as being something different enough to qualify as an exciting retro re-release.

Aside from what this says about the accelerating cycles of "retro" gaming (WoW itself only launched back in 2004), the success of WoW Classic, whether it be long-term or merely flash-in-the-pan nostalgia, stands as strong evidence of something else as well -- namely how much of the industry's cultural history is being washed away every single month by the proliferation of live service games, and the lack of a clearly defined or well-implemented strategy or rulebook for archiving them.
The most obvious concerns in this regard are about games that simply disappear; online or mobile games that are discontinued by their creators, with their servers and licensing systems going offline and the games becoming entirely unplayable. In the worst-case scenario required code may be lost entirely, and the game -- however significant or minor it may have seemed, no matter how far-reaching or inconsequential its influence may have been -- is likely lost forever to would be archivists or students of this medium.

WoW Classic, however, highlights another major aspect of this problem. World of Warcraft is a hugely influential part of gaming history and culture, but nobody is worried about it going away entirely, at least not for now. It's an active, popular game that still makes plenty of money, after all. However, the fact that an earlier version of that game is so radically different that it's possible to launch it as a separate, "retro" service is a clear acknowledgement that WoW has evolved so much since launch that what you can play right now is effectively a whole different game.