alt Hacker News> Vanilla WoW really did have a different design ethos than the later expansions did, and some people prefer that experience.
Right, and that's my point. When you take away the nostalgia for the content, you reveal what players are asking for, which is a reversion to what is effectively a previous game as modern WoW lost all of what made it a good game, to those players, in the first place.
So yeah, there was definitely a group of players that literally did want Classic WoW, original content and all, but I also feel like Blizzard would have saw success continuing that Classic formula with new content. Blizzard sucked the soul and charm out of WoW. For all intents and purposes, modern WoW is a completely different game.
Yes. I've watched some videos on wow by Kevin Jordan, who was on the original team. He said the original game was built on 3 pillars:
1. Advancement over time.
2. Player interaction. Hard content should be hard in order to push players into working together to overcome challenges.
3. The world is a character in the game. Even when you eventually got mounts later in the game, they made it so mobs can knock you off & daze you. The world is big and full of wonder. Especially at earlier levels, just getting from point A to point B can be a journey in itself. Wanna play with your friends who started in a different zone? Fine, but just getting there will be an epic journey.
They abandoned those principles later on. Eg, by adding "sidekick" characters you can summon when you're playing on you own, to overcome hard content. The point of that content was to push you into making friends with other players. Flying mounts made the world small and safe. Just point in the vague direction you wanna go and go AFK for a few minutes. They also added more and more teleports, so you don't have to schlep overland yourself. And the LFG system.
It was a really different game back then. I didn't get that much out of classic wow. But I'd enjoy playing a new MMO built around those same principles.