Today is the day. Later on, at 15:00 Pacific Daylight Time, or 23:00 UTC, Cataclysm Classic goes live. The rubber will meet the road as we discover whether or not there is any market for “classic” beyond Northrend.
Can you re-run a cataclysm?
I suspect that Blizz is worrying a bit on that front, not that they have helped themselves much. They are launching this right into the teeth of the Pandaria Remix event on retail, a different attempt to farm nostalgia while bypassing Cataclysm. They didn’t even make one of those world-wide launch maps for Cata Classic. Kind of mailing it in it seems.
We got a features brochure
And when they aren’t busy ignoring Cataclysm Classic, they are telling everybody how they have a plan to move things the fuck along in the most expedient way possible.
Fast Cata, Best Cata?
Eight months tops and we’ll get you to Pandaria! If, of course, they haven’t ruined nostalgia for that with their retail event. So much to consider.
So while we wait for its arrival, I though I might recount my own problems with Cataclysm back in the day.
I mean, I had all the usual ones. I was annoyed at the complete removal of the old world, killing off a bit of the game’s history. The revamped world is arguably better, offering a smoother leveling experience to any new players who showed up. Perhaps a bit too smooth, really, and too fast, as with every expansion going forward the xp table was reduced such that you couldn’t do all the quests in a zone before they went gray on you.
And then there was the fact that many of the stories of the new zones were built on lore and references to the old world, which no longer existed. Fun for an old hand playing through I suppose, but was a new player supposed to get the joke or care about Old Blanchy?
Then you can add in the destruction of some of the best dungeons in the old world, the paring back of Sunken Temple and the dividing up into bite-size morsels places like Scarlet Monastery and Blackrock Depths, all in service of the all might dungeon finder.
Yes, maybe making an epic tale in a place like Blackrock Depths that required multiple runs to complete… I think we went there an even dozen times in our WoW Classic effort… was perhaps an antiquated approach to group content. But turning all five player content into “30 minutes or less” efforts because people will get angry and drop group if they get something that can’t be done fast and easy (as happens every time the dungeon finder sends you to The Oculus in Northrend) is no way to run a system of government a fantasy MMORPG in my opinion.
So I was on board with all of that.
Then you can add in our group’s ill fated decision to re-roll a fresh group of worgen to tackle the new world, which turned into a boring, too easy by half, face roll effort where we would just run multiple instances with the dungeon finder on guild nights, something that didn’t seem to be thrilling any of us.
That got us to leave. We left, and did not return to WoW until the tail end of Mists of Pandaria, mostly on the promise of Warlords of Draenor. (We’ll leave that story for another time.)
But even when our group wanders off, I often still play solo, leveling up alts or working on crafting or achievements. I did not even do that. I was annoyed by WoW and felt a bit betrayed by Cataclysm… which, honestly, didn’t have a lot going for it even in the 80-85 zones.
Sure, Vashj’ir might be the most beautiful zone ever in Azeroth, but it is also an under water zone, and few game designers come back after that experience thinking “we should to more zones like that!”
And Mount Hyjal… boring in that “looks like a generic Azeroth zone and I don’t really care about the story” sort of way.
But for me it goes deeper than that. The thing is, back on the far side of Wrath, I was more invested in WoW than I had been at any time before, and probably since.
When our group wandered off from Northrend, I stuck around and kept playing. Wrath is the only expansion where I did not take a break, playing through from it’s pre-patch into the launch of Cataclysm.
I was also closely following all the Cataclysm news. I was invested in the hype. I was reading the fan sites. I was in the beta. I was buying into the hype. I even subscribed to the short-lived official World of Warcraft Magazine.
Still in my bookshelf
And Blizz… honestly didn’t have a lot else going on… StarCraft II had just launched and was a bit of a dud while Diablo III was on the horizon but still not close enough… so they were feeding the Cataclysm hype engine and I was there for it. More! More! More!
So when it finally launched and the hype didn’t meet the incredibly inflated expectations set by Blizzard and my experiences with Wrath of the Lich King, I was naturally pretty let down and resentful. This was, I will certainly admit, driven by my own internal expectations, but what can you do?
It was certainly the event that solidified my view that, once I have decided to play some upcoming game, see some soon to be released movie, or watch some highly anticipated show on TV, that I then avert my eyes. I don’t play the beta, I don’t watch trailers, I don’t pour over reviews, or watch “making of” videos or whatever. I try to leave well enough alone, only gathering the minimum needed information required to get there when the time is ripe.
This is a sometime futile attempt to keep expectations under control, to not set myself up so that vision is so inflated that there is no way reality could match what was in my head.
And now here we, about thirteen and a half years down the road from the original Cataclysm launch, waiting for it to return in a new form. It isn’t the original, but probably a close enough approximation. I know there will be, inevitably, somebody out there who will be angry that it won’t be EXACTLY like the day one launch back in December of 2010. But I suspect that will be a much smaller group than those who were pissy about the previous WoW Classic events.
Still, not able to leave well enough alone, Blizz has a video reminding us of the stages the expansion.
I am interested to see how I will feel about it. I was angry about Cataclysm back in the day for all the reasons above and a few more unmentioned or forgotten by now. I have since softened on the expansion, having recognized my own part in my hostility towards it… and, no doubt, because Blizz has launched a few more stinkers since. I mean, wait until we get to Warlords of Draenor.
But has my opinion about Cataclysm softened too much? Has time and distance blurred memory enough that the needle of my expectations, while set low, might still exceed what the expansion is prepared to offer? Have I simply forgotten some aspect of how bad it sucked?
I mean, we have flying mounts right out of the gate in the new content, which will get us right into the “too easy to simply fly over zones and bang out quests” argument. I can only vaguely recall that being a thing and am not sure how I feel about it.
Anyway, the answer will be available soon. The servers will unlock later today and some of us will be on our way. I supposed you can expect another Cataclysm post tomorrow about the launch.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 