Retro Revival – World of Warcraft Classic

Chris Berrow - The original World of Warcraft game is what people call "vanilla". That is what has been rereleased here, so World of Warcraft Classic is the vanilla version of the game. Marco tweeted us saying that the queue time to get into the game was obscene.

We're not the best people to review this game so I've drafted in Wedge from the Mana Source to be our World of Warcraft Classic correspondent. He's known for his youtube videos about Magic The Gathering the card game, but he's also had absolutely huge fan of World of Warcraft. He played you know I think he told me people like 5000 hours worth of time and that's not even as much as some of the really hardcore players.

Wedge - It's definitely not exactly the same. The game now is so much bigger than it was in vanilla, one of the biggest difference they're doing is layering servers. It was fine in '05 right, but now there's like millions of people and that's just it's not realistic. So they're putting different like instances of areas on one server, so you can go in one area and some people just disappear because they're on another like a load of that server which has turned into a really huge difference... because now people are trying to get invited to different layers where there are different amounts of people in them... and that's totally different. But the core is the same. So there's a lot of inconvenience and a lot of like ridiculous things that shouldn't exist. They were we're going back to before Blizzard learned anything, so it's kind of like rudimentary but it brings with it the difficulty that we all remember. I've put in an absurd amount of game hours and I'm like nowhere near the highest level yet. It's a difficult game and that's definitely like I would say nostalgia is the reason I started playing again but the difficulty of the game is what keeps me playing because it's just so interesting.

Chris - It's nice to actually play something that's a bit unforgiving, and I was hearing that when it first ever... in day one kind of thing people were queuing for like 10 hours well you know you put your character in the queue then you maybe go to sleep wake up and then you play once it finally loaded in. Is that still the case now?

Wedge - Is it still take ages to get in the game at like 5:00 p.m. Eastern time. Everyone's going to be playing all night so the queue is going to go down pretty slow but yeah. It's while it's completely... it's like the Wild West. You really have no idea how long it's going to take once you try to queue.

Chris - But isn't that one of the attractions of it now is that unlike games that you can play nowadays you know you can mostly do it when you want log in. They try and make it like you say quite easy to play at any time. Do you think there's something about actually the fact that you can't just get in immediately that makes you appreciate it more as a game because when you finally get there you like right... it's game time is serious now?

Wedge - Oh 100 percent. It's definitely part of the new culture. The guild I run which is quite large... that's become a part of the community is people log on and they'll share their que times and they'll be like "Oh man like I can't wait to get on" like it's this thing that they never that especially the new players who have never played this before they've never dealt with... cuz right like how many new players are coming... it's this wild experience almost like you're waiting in the line for a movie or like a ride at Disney World or something.