Originally Posted by
Rorcanna
Rose-shimmering glasses, or the fact that a lot of people hailing Classic the wildest, actually never played it when it was current. They get their intel from certain people wearing the thickest rose-shimmering glasses, and from playing Private servers during WoD... An expansion which instantly killed the "worst expansion"-argument to most but a select, tiny minority.
In Classic, the leveling was the content to most people. It took a long-ass time, was fractured/unpolished, but a lot of people were young when they started playing and felt such wonder back then that as they grew jaded, they started remembering Classic as this pinnacle of game design. Now they're busy proclaiming how what they feel for the game is somehow by design once more, only this time in the negative direction. Meanwhile, Classic simply didn't have any deeper design in many areas, questing included. Wanna talk about questing being "a means to get to max level"? Check the content where you'd be forced to mindlessly kill mobs and there was no story in many areas... Wanna talk about questing being a means of story delivery and adventure, even if "on rails"? Check later expansions. Exploration has never been more encouraged.
But alas, people will feel what they feel.
I was the same way about Robocop. I watched it as a kid, one of the first movies I was old enough to enjoy and remember. For over a decade following, I never watched it again but I revered it all the same. I LOVED it, thinking it was superior simply by the fact that I had felt what I did when watching it the first time.
And then, when I was 25, I watched it again... Needless to say, I no longer hold Robocop up as the greatest movie ever made. It's fun, it's campy, it's aging quite well, but I've grown to expect a bit more from movies in my adult years, and I've seen tons of superior movies since.
Was Classic a marvel of its time and genre? Yes, it was considered shit and "casualcraft" by many MMORPG-players, but proved those wrong at hilarious levels. However, a game given the same development, polish and content released today, would make Wildstar come across as a gargantuan success story. The proof is in the pudding, really. If Blizzard were to recapture Classic designs, they'd need to devolve the game, strip it and abandon everything they learned about what players want in favor of the few whom believe that the game at its absolute core, had more complexity to it than 13 years of accumulated content + the current expansion's addition to the WoW universe...
If/when they remake the 1-60 content, I sure hope it'll adopt story delivery akin to what Legion brought... And hopefully, less pop culture references and more local threat focus. Cataclysm added some amazing questing such as the Undead starting experience, but it could be better in every single zone.