Warcraft's Changed, Man.

I've played World of Warcraft since vanilla. Contrary to the stereotypes, I have a life, friends and a wonderful woman in my life that's not waifu pillow. It's been quite the journey in this world and the digital experiences I've gained are some of the most wonderful moments I've had in gaming.

That said, I was a bit late to the party this expansion and picked up Warlords of Draenor quite some while after it was released. It took me 4 days of casual playing to get to level 100, geared up and raid-ready. I completed the first raid available (Highmaul) and got some neat gear out of it. I upgraded my Garrison as far as I could and even went as far as starting to collect treasures hidden around the game world. 

I'm not entirely sure if I've burned through the expansion this quick due to the design, or my leveling tactics. However, one thing that is for sure is that the game is a heck of a lot easier than it's ever been and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that yet. 

All classes have had their spells redesigned and removed in order to have less buttons to push in battle. Questing, much like in Mists of Pandaria has been streamlined to the point of being linear and seem to funnel the player exactly where they are meant to go. Quests even have a chance to reward epic gear while leveling, to get you geared that much faster. Where the fuck is crowd control? I have not seen a single crowd-control spell yet and every dungeon consists of running through and bashing everything with the biggest stick you can find. 

The biggest notable difference is the sense of community. There just...isn't anymore. You join a guild, not because you want to network, but because it's been incentivized and makes you feel you must in order to reap the benefits. Heck, you jump in a dungeon with random people and nobody utters a word until someone fucks up or they need to take a break. Warcraft is starting to feel like a single-player game again.

Maybe I'm seeing it through rose-tinted glasses, but I remember when my server was a bustling place filled with all sorts of interesting and wonderful characters. There were prestigious guilds with notable players that you'd inspect in town and longed for their gear. You knew players because they had reputations and accomplishments. Guilds had rivalries and they were common knowledge to the rest of the server, especially when some sort of "We're the best" debacle came about. We'd host huge raids on the enemy faction for fun, since back then there were no rewards from it. There was a great sense of camaraderie and that seems to have all but died in the Warcraft of today.

The absence of community is attributed to two things: cross server play and looking for group functions. Cross server play removed the border restrictions of playing within your own server's playerbase and you'll often see players from other servers questing in the same zone as you. I get Blizzard's reasoning for this - it's not fun to play on a low population server and hardly ever see players in the game world. However, one of the consequences is that it limits your ability to make friends on your own server while questing. Long gone are the days of grouping up with randoms while questing and getting to know each other to become friends that you can actively play with often.

Looking for group is a similar double-edged sword. On the one hand, you don't have to spend hours forming a group, travelling to the dungeon and praying to the The Light that nobody leaves and you're able to complete it. On the other hand, you're not getting to know anybody that you group up with in a dungeon. Very seldom do you get paired with someone from your server, and even in that rare occurrence, chances are that nobody will really chat enough to get acquainted. You go through the motions, get your loot and be on your way, oftentimes with not so much as saying hello or goodbye.

It's not just the social aspects which have changed in nature, but also gear acquisition. Epics in vanilla WoW were exactly as the name implies - epic. There was something about inspecting someone in town and seeing them draped from head to toe in purples that made you awe in astonishment. It meant that the player was a successful raider, that they put the time and effort into getting 40 people together and tackling some rather formidable monsters to earn their rewards. Epic gear was not something that you got from a random quest reward, as it is today. You worked hard for your epic gear and got the due recognition because of it.

One change that I have to give Blizzard credit for is the questing system. From having hundreds of unrelated quests littered around a zone with no sense of direction, to the current streamlined system is a welcomed change. The story delivery since Wrath of the Lich King has greatly improved, with animated cutscenes and integrated scenarios, the way the story unravels to the player is in a better state than it's ever been. Beautifully scripted stories and animations brings you closer to the story and characters than ever before and I'm glad that Blizzard took this approach and hope to see more of it in future expansions.

I don't think that WoW will ever return to its social roots. There's too much information out there with sites like Wowhead and MMOChampion giving us insight into new content before it even releases, so it's not like we have to interact to know what is where and how things work. There's no need to spend an hour in trade chat looking for a group any more because doing all the stuff that took time is literally one click away now. Everything is built around you, the player, and trying to accommodate you into making bite-sized chunks of play feel rewarding and fulfilling at the detriment of the one thing that made WoW what it is today - a community.

Warcraft History: The Beginning

(Disclaimer: Warcraft lore is deep and branches off into many story arcs. I try to describe it as best I can in a simple fashion, but don't consider myself knowledgeable by any means. If I have any information wrong, please let me know so I can rectify it.)

Like all origin stories, the one of Warcraft is a bit muddled the further back we go. However, bearing a likeness with our very own universe's beginnings, it is unsure what created the Warcraft universe. Some believe it was formed by a single, powerful being and others believe it was formed after a great explosion that sent infinite planets into the abyss known as the Great Dark. Sounds familiar? Damn right skippy it does.

What is known for sure, is that from this chaos emerged the Titans, a race of incredibly powerful beings intent on balancing out the universe. These motherfuckers were like a kid playing Minecraft in sandbox mode with the universe and they went from planet to planet shaping them as they saw fit. They raised oceans and mountains, created the winds and the clouds and even went as far as empowering the primitive life on the planets in order to maintain the planet and ensure that their ideology was fulfilled. The Titans were ruled by a group called The Pantheon, which is Warcraft's equivalent of the United Nations, but for the whole universe.

As it is with all things in life, where there is a Ying, there must be a Yang and the Titans weren't the only beings of power in the universe with motives. The Twisting Nether, an ethereal dimension of magic that connected the worlds held its own powerful beings and they weren't as nice as the Titans. For lack of a better description, The Twisting Nether is Hell, if Hell is a different dimension. A place outside, but connected to the Warcraft universe that was as equally infinite, but much more sinister than the realm of the Titans. This place was inhabited by many beings with the opposite virtues of the Pantheon and only sought to bring out chaos and destruction to the universe, as it was in the Twisting Nether. Sounds like a swell place.

Eventually, the forces of the Twisting Nether began to encroach into the Titan's realm and brought chaos to the developing universe. To combat them, the Pantheon elected one of their most powerful beings, Sargeras to be the first line of defense against the demonic forces of the Nether realm, and he kicked their asses...for a while. Sargeras fought the forces of evil for many millennia before encountering an evil race of sorcerers which used their warlock magic to enslave civilizations and ultimately transform them into demons. These fuckers were the definition of pure evil and thrived on agony, destruction and the disorder of the universe through suffering.

Sargeras, being a God by all definitions made quick work of them before banishing them to the Twisting Nether. However, during the process, something changed in Sargeras. Bearing witness to the unmeasurable evil and maliciousness of the warlocks, he could not grasp how anybody could have such an insatiable lust for suffering and he slipped into a depression which became a turning point in the evolution of the Warcraft balance of good vs. evil.

Not only was Sargeras in a slump of depression and internal self-conflict about the purpose of the universe, but he was also forced to suck it up and go deal with yet another evil race of beings intent of destroying the balance that the Titans sought to bring. This race was called the Nathrezim (or Dreadlords), demons of great intellect and power that brought havoc into the universe by not destroying civilizations themselves, but by corrupting them and forcing them to destroy each other. The Dreadlords are the goddamn Illuminati of the Warcraft universe, playing puppeteer behind the scenes and carrying out their evil agenda vicariously.

Again, Sargeras steps up to the plate and knocks the Dreadlords down a notch, but he has seen too much at this point. His virtues and ideology now corrupted by the inherent evil in the universe has manifested into an ever-gnawing doubt, eating Sargeras from within and loosening his grasp on faith. Sargeras began to believe that due to chaos and evil being so rife in the universe, it was the only constant to uphold, and instead of fighting it, chaos should be embraced and adopted as the virtue of the developing universe.

His fellow Titans tried to convince him otherwise, but Sargeras, already wallowing in a pessimistic pit of depression and disillusion would not hear it. He denounced himself from the Titans and sought to find his own meaning in the universe. The Pantheon reluctantly let Sargeras go and appointed Aggramar, Sargeras' lieutenant and right-hand man as his successor. Should the Pantheon have known what would become of Sargeras, they would have never let him go.

Sargeras traveled the universe to try and carve out his own notch in history. However, an unrelenting-rage was consuming him and the fires of despair and disbelief burned out what little bastion of morality he had left. Maddened by rage and lack of reason, Sargeras began to believe that not only were the Titans wrong in their efforts to balance the universe, but they were also responsible for the failure of creation. Not only did his mentality change, but also his very existence. The fires of rage and hatred burnt so much within him that they manifested themselves on to him. His eyes, hair and beard erupted in flame and his once metallic skin now burst apart by flaming embers of burning hatred. At this point, Sargeras is basically Lucifer.

In order to change the worlds, you need an army and Sargeras realized this. He went forth to the Twisting Nether and broke the Dreadlords and other demonic races free from their captivity, to which they submitted and pledged their eternal loyalty to him. Sargeras now had an army and he needed generals to lead it. As luck would have it, he found an incredibly powerful and magical race called the Eredar from the planet Argus which he deemed suitable for the job.

The Eredar were a race of highly intelligent beings with an affinity for magic. They had a vast civilization of many magical cities and were lead by three leaders called Archimonde, Kil'jaeden and Velen. Sargeras promised them great power and immortality in exchange for their services and fealty. Archimonde and Kil'jaeden agreed with Sargeras' proposal, much to the dismay of Velen, which refused to join due to a vision of demonic evil he had about Sargeras and the army he was forming.

                                        Archimonde                                        Kil'jaeden
                                 

Velen, with the help of the Naaru, a race of beings comprised of energy, left his people and took along with him the remaining group of Eredar that would not side with Sargeras, to form his own faction called The Draenai (The Exiled Ones).

Sargeras, now with two incredibly powerful generals, an army of demons and sentient sympathizers to his cause had everything he needed to set the stage for the beginning of Warcraft universe as we know today. The Burning Legion was born and it would be the catalyst that shapes Azeroth into what it is today.