I’m really enjoying lvling a new toon in the pre patch. But the nostalgia isn’t really that old classic feeling. Cata has a lot of new design philosophies that make the foundation for what retail has become. It feels more like retail v1 nostalgia. So far Im loving it.
But it doesn’t feel like classic wow. Classic retail? lol
Vanilla and TBC are classic.
Wrath and Cata are post-classic.
Mop and WoD are pre-retail.
and Legion onward is retail.
Ofcourse everyone will have their own list of feelings towards the expansion. I put Wrath in post-classic cause the first time around I felt it was the beginning of the downfall. I don’t care about the numbers, the praise and what not, this is just my opinion.
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It’s 14 years old, It’s a Classic.
What you’re thinking of is Vanilla.
Ye, in that sense its a classic. But when people say classic wow that’s not what they mean. I guess the most die hard approach is that each expansion removed it a little more from classic, but in my oponion cata is the point where some major design philosophy changes were made. In a sense, retail is the culmination of those design philosophies, and so cata is the start of retail. Just an opinion, of course.
“Classic” is interchangeable with each re-release.
There has been much ink spilled over the question of “classic” already. One thing i might instead suggest is thinking of classic as something from the not so recent past that stands the test of time. We can only define it as a true classic once we go through it again. Although since it isn’t a perfect copy you will always struggle to evaluate it properly…or alternatively it might offer a fresh and positive perspective on old criticisms. Cataclysm has baggage if we can take it with no expectations maybe we’ll be mourning it as a classic once MoP “classic” releases.
We always evaluate according to our modern criteria anyway. It’s why there’s a new remaster of 60s and 70s classics every decade. Our modern sensitivities about what good sound is are different from what we thought good sound was in 1970. Not to mention the fact that technology has improved too. And so re-releases are remastered to fit the modern sensitivities and modern tech, so we won’t hate them.
And there too the discussion goes on forever, with some claiming that the old vintage vinyl records sound better than the remastered modern releases.
If you can call tbc/wrath classic, then you can call Cata classic to.
There was drastic changes to the core of the game there already.
Cata merely added a bit more & changed the emblems to Justice point.
Raid change, emblems, class overhauls, flying, price reduction on mount, lfg tool.
All of that came in those 2. Cata changed 1-60 lvling zones, made emblem to jp, added lfr & expanded on the flying like wrath did.
Calling tbc or wrath similar to vanilla is just outrageous.
As I see it, there have been two schools of thought on the term “classic”.
The simplest term is that classic is “expansions as they were back then”.
The less simple term is that classic is an adherence to vanilla. Blizzard themselves seemed to adhere to this train of thought prior to the launch of Wrath Classic, where they wrote a blog on why they did the #somechanges that they did. Personally, I was on board, but I also think that they distanced themselves from their pillars throughout Wrath.
Now I don’t know anymore. Blizzard keeps doing #somechanges without elaborating on their reasonings. All of a sudden they decide to include stuff that would not appear until much later. It doesn’t feel as though these decisions adheres to the tenets listed in the blog above.
Why are movies like “The Good, the bad and the ugly”, or “Star Wars” or “Jaws” are called classic, and other movie from the same period are not.
To me, that means those movies have had a strong influence on the art, have had innovation in cinematography, story telling etc…
With that in mind, i think yes, Cataclysm has had a strong influence on modern design of WoW. It is a classic.
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you separate cata and mop? cos of the talent changes?
100% this. pre and post cata feel like different games
Well yeah you could say that is a part of the reason, not the entire reason tho. I dunno, to me the cata-mop time felt like a weird transition phase in development. Almost like half way through cata development they had some new ideas, but couldn’t squeeze them in before launch so they got pushed into Mop. And starting Mop things got a lot more… goofy… the tonal shift and everything, it just feels more like pre-retail than post-classic to me. I dunno, I can’t put it into words very well. I’m not saying you shouldn’t like it or that it’s bad just cause I’m grouping it with WoD, it’s just how I’d classify them.
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