【Girls in the Night Traffic】

World of Warcraft Classicis delivering on Girls in the Night Trafficits promise to bring back the original World of Warcraftexperience, for better or worse.

I had a chance to play the World of Warcraft Classicdemo at BlizzCon, rolling a level 15 Tauren shaman to try to recapture the experience of my youth. Kicking around in the arid Barrens zone that I remember from the good old days, I was struck by how foreign the game felt.

SEE ALSO: How 'World of Warcraft' became a life-consuming addiction for me

Since WoWfirst launched in 2004, a ton of changes have been made to the game. Of course there have been some visual upgrades and aesthetic changes, and then the expansion World of Warcraft: Cataclysmchanged the actual landscape of many of the games' zones and storylines.

Those are the sort of changes I expected to see reverted in World of WarcraftClassic. What I didn't remember was how much changed in the game at the system level. Things like item drop rates. Things like mana management. Things like combat speed and quests.

Playing World of Warcraft Classicfeels like Blizzard took modern WoWand hit it in the knees with a lead pipe.

In the Crossroads of the Barrens, I grabbed a couple of quests that had me hunting raptors, killing plainstriders, and locating Mankrik's wife — a classic lineup of quests.

Right off the bat, I looked at my minimap to see where I would find these plainstriders. But there was no golden arrow or blue circle to lead me toward the plainstriders whose beaks I needed to collect.

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I had to read the quest text to find out that they were located to the east. I had to read directions. I haven't done that in years thanks to the built-in quest helper that Blizzard added to WoW.

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Once I found the plainstriders, I started killing them, very slowly, one at a time, and found that less than 50% of them had beaks when I looted them. They were also pretty spread out around the desert landscape, so it took me around 15 minutes to finish the single quest — a process that is usually done within a couple minutes these days.

They are a bunch of little changes, but wow do they add up

It was kind of agonizing, but it brought back some good memories of lazy days working my way up to level 34 on my Tauren shaman in vanilla WoWover the course of several months. The game was slow, but that is part of what made it such a wonderful experience.

If you wanted to do anything in vanilla WoW, you had to dedicate a lot of time to it. If you wanted to do a dungeon, there was no helpful group finder that automatically paired you with other players so you would have to spend a long time gathering a group of players on your realm before diving in.

Gold was pretty hard to come by too, raid groups were hard to get together, high-end gear was reserved for the best and most dedicated players, and there were no super fast flying mounts. You couldn't even get your first mount until you were level 40, and even when you hit level you probably had to grind a bit to get the gold required to buy it.

During a panel about World of Warcraft Classic at BlizzCon, game director Ion Hazzikostas mentioned some other differences between WoW Classicand modern WoW, many that I had forgotten about over the years. They are a bunch of little changes, but wow do they add up.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

One thing that stuck out was that the mail system was going back to a delay when players send a piece of mail. Right now, mail delivery between players is pretty much instant, whereas back then it would take an hour to get to the recipient. Hazzikostas pointed out that, if you wanted to get something crafted, it might be easier to go and meet them somewhere rather than spend a couple of hours waiting for some back-and-forth mail business.

This paired with needing to find players for dungeons and other things meant you were probably more likely to make deeper connections with players.

It's something I felt in the demo as me and a group of people tried to get a group together to dive in to the Wailing Caverns dungeon. It wasn't easy, and to be honest we didn't even make it to the entrance of the dungeon (although it wasn't for lack of trying), but it felt like through that struggle we connected in a way that I haven't connected with fellow dungeoneers in a long, long time.

WoW Classicwas slow. A lot slower than I remembered. But it felt good to be back.

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Topics Blizzard Entertainment Gaming