It’s still a little hard to believe that World of Warcraft has been around long enough for people to be nostalgic about “the good old days.” At this point, WoW has been around for longer than what's sure to be a sizable chunk of its player base has been alive. We're talking 11 years of clicking tiny icons on bars, watching spells cool down, and saving up enough gold to buy a shiny new mount that's totally better than your other, functionally identical mount.
The newest expansion, Legion, is definitely an attempt to feed on that nostalgia. Familiar faces and locations return from throughout the game's tenure as the premier MMO on the block. That seems perfectly targeted at players like me. It's been nine years since I last played World of Warcraft, back in my halcyon high school days of 2007 when I had plenty of time to sink into the game's first expansion, The Burning Crusade.
So, as I set out to review the nostalgia-tinted Legion (how does one review something on this scale?), I felt I should see what two-presidential-terms’-worth of updates and expansions had already done to the game I knew and loved. What changed? What stayed the same? What did “Hearthstone” mean before it was a collectible card game? This is my tale of Rip van Winkle culture shock experienced in revisiting a virtual place I haven’t lived for years.
A to B to C, and back to A again
Back when I was 17, I recall being mesmerized by the sheer scale of Azeroth, the world on which the war is crafted. I imagine it was the same for a lot of players back then, faced with an almost seamless planet's worth of land, sea, and air to explore. The downside to this sense of scale was that it took forever to get from point A to B. In the early stages of the game, especially, completing the simplest of fetch quests is an effort of endurance.
Pandaria, by contrast, runs like an Italian train station. The starting area of WoW’s panda-centric third expansion, which I missed when it came out in 2012, has just enough slow moments to build anticipation for what comes next. And what does come next is usually a lot more interesting—if only visually—than anything I remember from 2007.
As I conversed with a giant turtle carrying the landmass on its back, a la Discworld, I suddenly found two very different fantasy worlds from my teenage years becoming welded together. I soon helped blow a hole in its side and watched rivers of blood pour into the ocean. That was considerably less majestic.
Playing another character, a monk named Bigknucks (I tell myself his parents knew that one day he'd be way into punching things), I got to revisit the Dranei starting area I had romped in during The Burning Crusade. Bigknuck's starting zone, and a lot of the surrounding content, did not fare well with nearly a decades-worth of distance. Now, the Dranei starting area seemed as slow as someone speared with a mage's Ice Lance.
Just for funsies, I also scoped out the goblin and "Worgen" (a.k.a. copyrightable werewolves) starting areas as well. These were included with Cataclysm, the expansion preceding Pandaria, but they were still new to me.
The story was much the same: lots of bombastic, varied activities, interspersed with voice acting that’s now comprised of more than the two to three syllables I enjoyed years ago. These "new" opening areas feel violently propulsive in a way the older parts of the game simply weren’t.
Most of the layers in World of Warcraft’s concentric tree rings of content showed obvious progress, but there was one major exception. Honestly, it was hard for me to see much change in the Cataclysm expansion that came out a full three years after I left the game. Largely, that’s because now I’m playing as an Alliance Dranei, rather than a Horde Tauren. Thus, the cataclysmic Alliance locales I’m seeing for the very first time are likely to be the only versions of those areas I ever see.
Still saving the world
Perhaps because of this, the heaviest salvo of nostalgia World of Warcraft has hit me with came elsewhere in Legion's pre-launch content. Across both main continents of Azeroth the Burning Legion—a troupe of green cenobites from outer space mostly comprised of demons—is launching its invasion. It's a teaser of things to come in the expansion proper, and it's an outstanding way to grind XP and loot, assuming you have the patience.
One such invaded area is a Horde-controlled burg by the name of Hillsbrad. I could have sworn this area was ruled by damn, dirty humans back in 2007, and the game reminded me of this when the town's leader shouted to rally all nearby players to Hillsbrad's defense, bellowing something along the lines of "Whether you love Hillsbrad now, or knew it in the past, you must fight to protect it!"
This was exactly the sort of callback I expected from Legion content, given how Blizzard has been positioning the expansion so far. Ironically, since I played Horde back then and Alliance now, I'm pretty much the prime example of someone who shouldn't give a damn about that town. Ah, well. It was a cute moment nonetheless.
Faces you'd rather not see
World of Warcraft seems awfully light on those cute moments these days. Everything leading into the Legion expansion is framed as an incredibly dire disaster, with many of those "familiar faces" I mentioned belonging to some truly bad guys.
The magically evil Gul'dan from the original Warcraft games has apparently been un-killed, now taking the role of central villain. Illidan, the traitorous bad guy last seen alive when I was playing World of Warcraft in earnest, is coming back as well, although it's still not clear what sort of role he's playing this time around.
Gul'dan, however, still seems like bad news. After powering Bigknucks up to level 98 I was able to unlock my first "Scenario." These story-driven, cut scene laden events are probably old news to many WoW players, but it was all new to me as I watched a Normandy-style sea-based invasion into Legion territory. A whole lot of important-seeming characters died horribly at the hands of Gul'dan.
From a technical perspective, the cut scenes here seemed especially impressive, even rendered using the game's own engine (unlike those gorgeous pre-rendered numbers you see in all the trailers). It's clear that Blizzard is stretching their own technology to the very limits with these new scenes, in ways they probably never intended. It's especially clear how far the technology has come when you compare the new cut scenes to the Pandaria-era cut scenes, which now seem like a visual history told in low-grade textures and video compression.
We are legion
Mostly, though, what I've been doing in World of Warcraft are those damned Legion invasions. They're essentially just organic kill quests, where you and five hundred of your closest friends pummel demons for ten to 20 minutes. They're all nearly identical, and they only occur in the same six places across Azeroth.
That's a bummer, since none of them are set in zones I've never visited. Northrend, central location of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, continues to exist only as a name on a map to me. The same goes for Draenor. And while I visited Outland during The Burning Crusade, there's no good reason for me to return.
Instead, at the behest of my friends that never stopped playing WoW, I just ran those damned demon invasions over and over. Visually, they're very impressive, further showing just how far Blizzard is stretching their tech. But today’s game seems driven more than ever by the need to grind out those experience points and to hit that level cap. I was actively encouraged to skip past most of the game's deeper content—dungeons, raids, PVP, etc.—because it will all be moot once Legion comes.
I'm well aware that's largely "the way of things" for an MMO, but to see all the raw numbers condensed like that into a single week was something else entirely. Hopefully Legion itself will be worth this particular slog.
Next!
Coming back after nine years away from WoW, I’ve also caught up on the general consensus surrounding the game’s advancement so far. One tidbit in particular stood out to me: the last expansion, Warlords of Draenor, was largely considered not so hot. Besides being more expensive than its predecessors, it was light on content—both at launch and in the year that followed.
As a result, there seems to be a lot of goodwill riding on Legion. Blizzard seems to know it, too, given all the callbacks to the early days of both Warcraft, and World of Warcraft. By reintroducing fictional names and faces that even a lapsed player like me can recognize, they seem to be actively trying to remind players of a time before the disappointment of Draenor.
So far my return to the game pre-expansion has been felt a bit wide and shallow. That seems almost by design, as nearly everything "worth doing” in the game has been put on pause leading up to Legion. I must admit, this frozen moment has me anticipating whatever new tidbits the expansion will throw at me. I wonder if that still would've been the case had I chewed through what Azeroth had to offer at its natural pace over these last nine years.
reader comments
114