As with all World of Warcraft expansions, Blizzard ramp up an excitement with a "pre-patch" weeks before the launch, to get everyone ready for the changes, and have a sneak peek at the direction the game is going through. This time, the event is a "scourge invasion", which if you don't know basically means zombies, everywhere.
There are zombies that appear randomly in the world, and they can infect you, which turns you into a zombie. And in turn you can infect other players and some NPCs. It's turning out to be pretty enjoyable. I mean, it's like being asked to troll people, which can be very fun. And as you would expect, there's a lot of coronavirus related comments being made in the chat.
It's the not the first time they've done an event like this, with a similar (but more brutal) scourge event that happened in 2008 before the lauch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
While there are quite a few players in game spending hours moaning about the event, most of us are having a lot of fun. It's really cool that a game the size of World of Warcraft can have these types of events. It breaks up the sometimes monotonous grinding through the game, and allows people to interact and actually just relax and have some fun (Not everyone in-game seems to be a fan of that though).
If you've ever thought about trying World of Warcraft, or even just want to enjoy this event, I'd recommend it. There's a free trial always available, and it gets you pretty much the full experience.
World of Warcraft Classic now has a release date, and it has also entered into a beta testing phase. Which means some players are now getting the chance to either remember what World of Warcraft was in the early days, or in some cases I imagine they are seeing it for the first time, depending on when they started.
If you want to read more about WoW Classic, I would recommend checking out the website. But the short version, is that after 15 years, WoW has grown to be quite a different game than it once was. The sense of community has gradually disappeared, with more tools being added to the game, that simply add you to a random group to do a certain task, and then you leave. Before it was more organic. Another major difference is the difficulty, WoW was full of challenges, and although everything was a lot slower, you felt like you really earned any reward you got.
Just for the record, I’m going to play this game like mad.
So, while beta testing has been going on, there are clearly some people that either have clouded memories of the past, or just had completely different expectations. So much so, that Blizzard has had to write a post on the forums titled “WoW Classic “Not A Bug” List“. To inform beta testers that the bugs they are reporting, are actually art of the game. And most likely were there for some time.
They introduced the post in the most polite way I could think of:
As we’ve discussed before, the nature of WoW Classic sometimes invokes different memories for different players, and this leads to certain misconceptions for some about what is or isn’t working as intended.
I find it funny thinking about all of the reported bugs, and how many of these are actually features that people have forgotten about. It appears some people are going to have a bad time when they first play WoW Classic.
If you’re not a World of Warcraft player, the only background knowledge you need is that at the heart of the game, there are two factions (Alliance and Horde) which you’re character has allegiance with. This expansion returns the game to the roots of the fight between the two factions.
I think anybody that has seen Owen Wilson, can hear him saying “Wow” in his voice. Well, some kind developers have taken various clips of this, and created a mod for World of Warcraft, and used them to replace various sounds in the game.
