(#UXdistortions1) Shadowlands, Classic and the essence
Lately a strange payment pop up in my phone: Blizzard….oh! I subscribed to that! I had already forgotten. My relation with the MMORPG World of Warcraft has always been like this: on and off. This time I had wanted to experience it like a teenager again, because there was this last expansion, Shadowlands. I paid for a 6-moth subscription…and after a month I just disengaged.
I have a renewed 6 month subscription for WOW I didn’t want. Since it was there, I checked a couple of articles. Curiosity came to me when I came across the term “Classic”. Basically, now you are able to play the game as it was 2004: no expansions content, all the old mechanics of the game. Ok, let’s try it. The first time I played to WOW it was in 2008, just after the launch of The Burning Crusade expansion. Now, when I first launched the “classic” version, it was like going back in time! Not only because of the graphics, but because of the feelings I got while playing. Those feelings were not there when I paid for trying Shadowlands. Now I was excited, I was feeling accomplishment, I was engaged.
It also was strange to read that the Classic version was a long time desire and petition from the WOW community. First days after the launching servers were severely crowded, as it was 2004 all over again. A lot of old users returning to the game.
Somebody from UX team in Blizzard sure has taken note and investigated in this direction, and the result is that they are going to be relaunching all the expansions of the game every 2 years, so you can live the experience of the evolution of the game all over again, going back to 2007, 2011,…and, most incredibly, every time there will be an expansion, there will be a parallel respawn of the classic version. This way, in the future you will have servers for Classic, servers with only the Burning Crusade, servers until The Lich King.
After all this gamer jivi-java, I was left with two huge questions: WHY all this for oldies, and overall…Does this tells us something about the newer version of World of Warcraft?
It is possible that all of that is because of nostalgy? Is it possible that the people in their 30s has taken over the world?
Yes, this is one possible answer. But my feelings when I tried the classic game, what if there was another answer not related to that?
I wanted to check what difference were between the two WOWs, and where was this feeling coming from. Of course, I have not conducted any major study on this: my only purpose is just to raise a doubt that sometimes annoys me.
So far, classic WOW has no guided stuff. You don’t have markers on the map to know where to collect quests, were the quest has to be done. Very few flying points, so you have to walk yourself, a lot, to get to places. Levelling is much harder, so hard it is barely impossible to fight to enemies at once and survive. You have to earn money for everything. You have to visit the class masters and pay for habilities.
In the current WOW, everything is on the map, the levelling is a bit easier, you can do it everywhere in the game’s world (wich is now huge). You have the double the races. You can go wherever you want easy because of the multiple flying points and ships and zeppelins. In definitive, everything is much easier so you can level up fast and then, be in the fun things (getting more things than the rest, battle in PVP, special events…).
In other words: with time, the game has focused in offering more variety to the user, easiness to receive rewards and grow fast. More objects, collections, appereances, pets, professions, dungeons, battlefields, lands…and still, launching classic is a success.
Is it the current WOW based in the same points as it was before? I have the feeling that the best of the classic game was the reward you were obtaining when feeling you were working for it. You were growing yourself. You had to read the quests so you knew what to do, where to go, and by that you also were entering the narrative. To substitute that, now you have cinematics in the main quests, because otherwise, people DON’T read. They can skip it, anyway, and since everything is marked in the map, where to go and what to do, you don’t even need the narrative.
Back in my real life roleplaying times, I remember there were two types of players: the people that were playing for the experience of it, and the people that wanted experience POINTS and have a better character. Usually, the last were ending the fun because the greediness, the lack of roleplaying (ironic when roleplaying), and the feeling that the essence of the game was gone.
After all this, I am going with my wild guess. Does classic version success tells us something about the newer version of World of Warcraft?
I think designers have given the users of WOW what they wanted with every expansion, improvements and content here and there. Time, and generation of players, have changed, and in the today’s world people doesn’t read, people want things now and easy. They want success (it is not that they did not want it before, it is that now we are more used to this immediate rewarding).
And somewhere along the line, the original essence dissappeared.
Ei, it is not a bad thing. Now you have a different experience, one adjusted to the nowadays user. Users have brought us here.
Are users always right? Do users really know what they like and why? Always? Is it possible they were longing for something out of expectations but by getting it slowly the original essence was fading? Don’t worry, we ask the user again and…oh, a revival! a classic experience! Were they right now? or they were compensating the nostalgics?
The paradox here is that the evolution of WOW the last years have left some users out, to the point they ceased to be users, and winning other users in the meantime. User persona changes because… maybe you did not draw a line in the sand? Can you draw a line in the sand in UX? or since you are not your user you have to blindly listen to them? Would you have lost the “original users” if you had drawn it?
Since the tendency is, easier, easier, easier…is it possible that we are killing things? Or we aren’t?
