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WoW Classic Is Showing Me The Limits Of Nostalgia
Once every month or two, I have this dream. I’m standing in a cavernous entryway to what my brain tells me is absolutely a World of Warcraft raid dungeon. Its walls are streaked with throbbing orange and purple veins, akin to the armor sets dropped in Molten Core, an actual WoW raid dungeon. It is dark. It is strangely cold. I am supremely under-leveled. And I am alone.To get more news about best place to buy wow gold, you can visit lootwowgold official website.
I wake up from this dream with my heart pounding and an almost painful clenched feeling in my chest. It’s my version of the nightmare where you’re back in high school or college, and you realize you’re seconds away from taking a test you haven’t studied for in a class you never attended. This makes sense: From 2005-2007, toward the end of my time in high school, World of Warcraft was as formative for me as any class, probably more so. For a solid two years, it was part of my day, every day. I’d get home from school and Taekwondo in the evening, and then I’d level or—later, once I’d joined a serious guild and gotten In Too Deep—raid for anywhere between four and six hours. But a few months after the game’s first expansion, Burning Crusade, came out in 2007, I burned out and stopped playing. I’ve popped in again at various points over the years, but my returns were never habit-forming. I’d poke around for a few days, realize the game wasn’t for me anymore, and move on.
Until now. For the past couple months, I’ve been semi-regularly dipping into WoW Classic with a small group of friends. I’m playing a troll rogue named Trollthan. He has a pink mohawk. He likes to dance. It’s been nice, even if, as an adult, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that WoW’s trolls are just thinly-veiled Jamaican stereotypes. Because WoW Classic is an official imitation of pre-expansion WoW, I’m back where it all began. But even if the game is the same, I’m not. My motivation for continuing to play has shifted monumentally. Where once I was driven by loot and lore, now it’s all about people.
When I first started playing WoW, I was a quiet kid, and a pretty lonely one to boot. Some upperclassmen I looked up to—the cool nerds—got into Blizzard’s MMO soon-to-be-sensation shortly after it came out in 2004, and they told me I should roll a Horde character on their server, Thunderlord, and join them. So I did. Maybe I’d become friends with them. Unfortunately, my Tauren shaman never met up with their edgy in-game avatars; I was too anxious to admit that I was interested in playing WoW with people I barely knew and that I’d gone through all the necessary steps to make it happen (Note to past me: intensely counterproductive thinking there, buddy!). Ultimately, they didn’t stick with it for long. |
