Christopher Bratt's Online Newsletter: World of Warcraft, but not as I knew it

Hey patrons,

Inspired by our upcoming documentary following the WoWGG union as it bargains with Blizzard Entertainment for better working conditions, I've dipped my toes back into the comforting waters of World of Warcraft just a touch. Except, actually, this time around I've made everything feel a lot less comforting. I've upped the stakes.

Even if you don't play WoW yourself, you're probably aware that several years ago the game launched a set of 'Classic' servers to great fanfare, allowing players to relive the earliest days of the MMO prior to any of its many expansions being released. This was an opportunity to play a version of the game that had been largely lost over the years (outside of unofficial severs anyway), where reaching max level remained a feat of endurance, earning enough gold to buy your first mount was a major challenge and many of the game's more recent quality of life improvements hadn't been dreamed up yet.

If you didn't play WoW back in the early 2000s, this probably sounds terrible? But it's not. It's a wonderful thing, powered by that most potent of forces: nostalgia.

Anyway, in mid-2023, Blizzard added a further twist to this concept and it's this version that I've been dabbling with over the last couple of weeks. It's called Classic Hardcore and the premise is pretty simple.

If your character dies, its lost forever.

Okay, that's not entirely true. You are still given the option to transfer over to a non-Hardcore server at this point, but that's its own admission of defeat. If you want to keep playing Hardcore, you'll need to start over from scratch, potentially losing tens of hours of progress in the process.

This awful threat hangs over you as you play and completely changes the feeling of the game. I'm really taken with it.

 
There's the obvious stuff you might expect like having to be much more intentional with how you approach risk. Tackling higher level mobs or multiple enemies at once, for example, needs to be taken much more seriously and you also need to maintain some kind of plan for how you're going to exit a situation if things turn hairy.

But there's also a newfound respect for the game's many different overlapping systems, I've found. Anything you can to do to eek out a little more survivability for your character is going to be crucial in this setting. I've already had several moments in which I've escaped death with just a fraction of my HP remaining, meaning gear upgrades, potions, food buffs and other consumable items all feel so important to consider. This is the sort of stuff players usually only start to delve into at max level as they try to hone their character for endgame content. But here, in Hardcore, it matters all the way through.

Professions like Engineering are suddenly filled with possibilities too. You can craft explosives to cause extra damage, but also stun enemies for a second or two. You may have noticed my fetching goggles in the screenshot above? They provide a stat bonus early on, that's usually really difficult to match, as headgear tends to only appear later into the game. And I've recently unlocked the ability to construct and deploy Target Dummies too, an exceptionally useful item which temporarily draws the ire of any nearby enemies and gives you the chance to leg it somewhere safe.

These sorts of items were usually considered to be more of a novelty when leveling in normal WoW and you'd rarely see players invest much time, or gold, into building up substantial stockpiles of the stuff. Better to save those resources for when you hit max level. But here, in Hardcore, they can routinely be the difference that prevents you from losing your character forever.

Interactions with other players feel changed too. It's not uncommon for people to end conversations with "stay safe", which I find really touching and in most cases, there's a level of mutual respect for the fact that all of you have committed to this crazy journey together. You're all a part of the same masochistic club.

I've run a couple of dungeons so far and the experience of putting together a party comes with all this extra weight as well. You need to trust the entire group to perform their roles as expected, but also to manage the risks too. An overly eager tank who wants to pull large groups of enemies at a time could spell disaster for the rest of you, unless everyone is on the same page. A single player's hubris has the potential to wipe out hundreds of hours of collective playtime, so you'd better pick your party carefully and know when to back out if the vibes are off.

Again, this might sound terrible! But it's also some of the most meaningful, intentional playtime I've ever had with this game. World of Warcraft can be, at times, a somewhat mindless thing to play, as you listen to a podcast in the background (or perhaps watch your favourite PMG video on a second monitor??), but here there's no room for complacency. Every encounter could be your last, so you need to treat it as such.

Side note: I've needed to maintain a strict One Beer Rule when playing this game in the evenings out of fear that I'll lose my focus and do something stupid. Am I making this sound a lot like hard work? I promise I'm having a good time.

All in all, returning to World of Warcraft in this way has been such a powerful reminder of how special it was and is. Seeing its developers continue to find ways to reinvent a 20-year-old MMO even while simultaneously preserving its original state like this is really interesting. But also, watching the game's community reinvent itself too, that's been a blast. The players you meet in WoW Hardcore and the context in which you're meeting them, it all just feels so much more alive to me.

And hey, if you do check it out for yourself, may I offer a final word of warning? You need to be very, very careful when it comes to elevators. Those things are no joke.