World of Warcraft Classic will make things much more difficult for players

Some interesting new details have emerged concerning World of Warcraft Classic, and exactly how the reboot will be implemented as a ‘much rougher game with more difficulties and friction in its game systems’ compared to modern WoW.

As spotted by Wowhead, this is according to a couple of members from the WoW Classic team – Brian Birmingham and Omar Gonzalez – who spoke to German website Computer Bild, and underlined the fact that the vanilla reboot is a much harsher environment than current World Of Warcraft.

And this is a major part of the point – to encourage more social interaction because players have to band together to tackle those greater challenges.

When talking about how challenging Classic will be, and how relatively difficult the old version of WoW was, Brian Birmingham (text translated from German) noted that: “Leaving the city was terrifying! Even a harmless looking creature could pose an extraordinary challenge … In Classic, you are a newcomer to adventure who has a lot to learn in a dangerous and hostile world. This difficulty drives you to rely on other players to help you – and that in turn strengthens the emerging social connections.”

As we found in our time with the WoW Classic demo, combat is very different, and the old systems feel somewhat clunky – or indeed very clunky – but these sort of rough edges are seen as a definite positive by the dev team, not a negative, or something that needs to be smoothed out.

Grappling with groups

Indeed, the overarching aim is to fully recreate the initial hardships of the old World of Warcraft experience, not just in terms of potentially clumsier in-game mechanics, but also the greater difficulty of simple things like getting a group together to tackle a dungeon. Finding players in chat, communicating with them, coordinating getting to the instance – all of which aims to create more social interaction, and a greater bond between players.

Gonzalez noted: “This solidarity between the players was partly due to the lack of fine-tuning that the classic WoW had in comparison to the modern WoW. For WoW Classic, this is a critical aspect that we want to preserve.

“Yes, we are aware that there may be friction between players trying to master more difficult content. But it was precisely this friction that helped to weld groups and guilds together to tackle the different challenges of the game together.”

That’s the theory, anyway, and doubtless many players will want exactly this – a true recreation of the old game, and thus a heady hit of nostalgia. However, balancing the line between driving to achieve this, and ensuring gameplay isn’t overly frustrating, will be the tricky bit.

Remember, though, that WoW Classic will be modernized in terms of adding the bells and whistles that the modern game boasts such as anti-cheat measures, and delivering the full stability of the contemporary engine to keep lag to a minimum, among other benefits.