Cataclysm Classic is live now, having been unlocked about ten minutes before the promised 15:00 Pacific time launch.
The email announcing the unlock has arrived
I mistakenly said that we would need to wait until the server’s unlocked in yesterday’s post, forgetting how Blizz has this dialed in. This isn’t an EverQuest expansion or special server, with a 6am server lock down, a noon launch target and a 19:00 actual go live.
All the rough part came with the pre-patch three weeks back. That is where all the issues were. I went to look how things were going at lunch and, realizing the servers were still up, I logged in and got one last Wrath achievement done.
Did all the zones now
I was six quests shy one character and had to fish around a bit to find those quests, but I did it.
I also got my main setup for the unlock. I finally remembered where the focus of the expansion was, which is the new portal area in Stormwind. I parked myself there so I could watch if anything happened.
The portals on that new island
I logged myself back in about 30 minutes before the expected launch and kept at my toils on my work computer, glancing over once in a while to see what was going on with my home machine. I noticed, a bit after the fact, that the expansion went live 10 minutes early. The sign was the “You feel rested” message, which meant my xp bar had returned for the next five levels.
About 15:50 Pacific Time
Clearly a couple of people had prepped for the moment to get realm first achievements. I saw a couple more crafting related ones as I turned to join in on the fun. By the evening there were already realm first messages for classes hitting level 85.
There was a bit of a crowd down on the island, but you don’t stay there for long, so it dissipated quickly. I flew down and watched the cinematic, then went towards the Vashj’ir path. The word was that Mount Hyjal was going to be the primary destination, so I went down to the dock with those casting out to sea.
As always, waiting for another boat
I had actually forgotten all the intros to the new zones, so it was kind of fun to go for a ride and then see how we ended up in the sea.
Hint: Sea monsters… also, good thing I held onto those Nagrand Cherries!
Even in Vashj’ir it was kind of crowded. The quest chains are single threaded, as opposed to the smorgasbord way they were back in Outland, so there was quite a bit of competition for mobs and objectives.
So many shipwreck survivors rescued
Still, I managed to find my way forward, netting my first gear upgrade for the expansion which, true to form, made my welfare epic axe look wimpy compared to the first round quest reward weapon.
The truth about every expansion
I followed things along for a bit, then realized that I hadn’t trained up my trade skills. So I hearthed back to Dalaran, visited the trainers, then went back to Stormwind where the Vashj’ir portal on the island above sent me back to where I left off.
I followed that trail long enough to get my seahorse mount and the first of the under water flight points.
Another flavor of mount… 450% swim speed boost
Did we ever get to use under water mounts again? Did Blizz ever do another under water zone? Or did they learn their lesson on the first one.
I settled in there and went and got out an alt with an eye towards checking our Mount Hyjal. The island was pretty sparsely populated by then.
Just a few passers by
Granted, it was also Monday evening. The big rush probably won’t come until Friday and the three day weekend. (At least here in the US.)
I ran through the opening scenes for that, getting to meet Deathwing.
You get to fly by and wave
Mount Hyjal was, as expected, much busier. I left a character there for later and went back to poke around a bit under the sea.
I did not get all that far down there… 19 of the 130 quests listed for the achievement… but I still managed to pick up about a half a level of xp. We will be spending a lot of this expansion at level cap I guess. How many will be around by the time it is done though… that remains to be seen.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Like you I made it to the sea horse mount and first “flight” point in Vash’jir. In your earlier post, someone commented about the rigid “on rails” approach. We certainly started to see some of that in WOTLK, which along with phasing, allowed some heightened degree of immersion and story progression at the expense of being able to play with your friends.
Its interesting that one of the innovative, defining characteristics of WoW that in part differentiated it from its predecessors was the now ubiquitous “!” quest marker (and indeed, the supremacy of questing over kill camping for progression). I remember early commentary about the impact on players that the then novel “Christmas Tree” effect had– when a player entered a new area, there was a host of “!”s lit up tempting the player to explore and engage. A smorgasbord of adventure that awaits for the taking whether it was what we would now call a story line quest or merely a diversion or other ancillary amusement. Grab them all and choose your own path from there.
That key defining feature which reinforced worldliness and encouraged exploration and grouping/cooperation started to be eroded in TBC, further restricted in WOTLK and really arrived in earnest with Cata. Its the start of the era where we all play the single player game of WoW together.
As we have seen, without heroic efforts, it may be all but impossible to keep a group of players in sync so they can experience the game as a group. Likewise, gating subsequent quests behind only a few key starter quests further reduces agency and erodes the sense of worldliness further.
I really started to feel that way as I progressed through the first quest chains in Vash’jir and found myself looking for a place to stop. Apparently the mount and seahorse flight point was it finally.
I’m still keen to play through, but if I’m honest, Cataclysm couldn’t have been more aptly named given the impact it had on the game I enjoyed so much up until then. Of course it can still be fun, but just not in the same way that it was circa Lich King.
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There’s an interesting discussion to be had about the decline of traditional MMORPGs as a commercial force compared with the relatively recent growth of sandbox/survival/cosy multiplayer games. I have a sense that what players were searching for fifteen years ago was both a clearer sense of purpose and a feeling of community, only without the levels of commitment early iterations of the MMORPG required.
WoW and its copyists chose to address those needs by increased focus on linear storytelling and friction-free access to group content via the dungeon finder, an approach that suited the more focused, driven core of the community quite well but left the much larger penumbra of casual players feeling disoriented and cast adrift. That demographic is now finding much of what they’d lost returned to them in the more loosely-structured, less prescriptive and crucially less socially toxic games we’re seeing blow up one after another right now.
How long it wil be before the developers of those begin to make the same mistakes as they try to please their highly vocal and articulate hardcore will be fun to watch – from the outside. I’d argue Nightingale’s panicked rush to turn their game into an offline, single-player experience and Valheim’s doubling down on difficulty would suggest lessons have not been learned.
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So will everyone stop playing WoW classic again at the beginning of Cataclysm, like we know it happened last time? :D
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I hear the retail WoW Pandaria Remix is pretty fun.
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