World of Warcraft Classic has been with us a few weeks now and it’s time to check in on how the Classic experience is going.
Level Playing Field
I’m going to be completely honest here and say that exactly what I thought would happen has happened – being left behind. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that my friends have just abandoned me and left me to my own devices. They have however put in a lot more time to the game than I’ve been able to. As a result I’m now at least 20 levels behind most of them. Meaning there is no way we will be playing together any time soon. Which leads to me wandering what the point of playing is?
Getting home from work on an evening and facing queues of 2-4 hours is just not something I’m willing to commit to and quite frankly I shouldn’t have to. The fact that people have had to log in to remote desktops to manage their queuing in order to be able to play on an evening is ridiculous. The queues are now much better than they were, but they haven’t completely disappeared.
Going Solo
Up to this point (I’m around level12) I’ve not been able to play with anyone bar teaming up with the odd random person in a cave here and there. Playing WoW has been a solitary experience. There have been moments that I’ve enjoyed, such as getting to Orgrimmar for the first time which was cool. Exploring the huge city was – whilst kind of confusing and vague, still pretty fun. But there haven’t been any moments that have been amazing, or anything that has really stood out to me. That’s not to say it’s been bad per say, just…a bit average I guess.
I came in to this wanting to be able to share cool moments with people, to be able to look back and say “hey guys remember that thing we did together, that was cool!” and I can’t. On the whole unless you entirely commit to, and mirror what others around you are playing you can’t do that.
I feel like I’m just playing an RPG at the moment and not an MMORPG and the thing is, is it’s not a very good single player RPG.
A Chore?
The questing is kind of monotonous. “Go here, kill these things and bring me back 10 of whatever it drops. Oh and the items it drops is random as hell”. I waited 30 minutes to get a pelt from a tiger. There were tigers to kill and kill them I did. All I needed was one more pelt to finish a quest, but it took 30 minutes for it to actually drop on a dead tiger. After a while it starts to get repetitive…. Stupid tigers.
Then we have the combat; in almost every single fight I’ve had, I go through the exact same process – get within range, press 5, press 6, press 7, then 3, then 4, I then repeat pressing 1 and 2 until the enemy is dead. That’s basically how every fight unfolds. If you end up pulling more than one enemy you basically just kite them until you can deal with them or they leave you alone. For the most part it doesn’t make the combat more interesting or challenging, just more frustrating. Don’t get me started on how enemies will respawn around and instata gank you, that’s not fun. At all.
Hopeful!
I do think the game would’ve been more fun to play if I was questing with friends. But seeing as I’ve just been playing it alone I may as well be playing a better single player game. Ultimately I feel like I’m still waiting for something to click with the game and I don’t know when that will be.
That being said, I haven’t had a bad time playing it. Sure the quests can be very samey, but it can be quite nice to just stroll around casually killing and collecting.
The main question I have to ask myself is am I getting my monies worth, and right now I’m probably not, so I either need to step up my play time or just stop playing. I’m hoping that as I get to some higher levels a few more interesting avenues will open up.
Time to jump back in!
-Will
