Games UX: World of Warcraft Classic
How does the classic experience hold up from a user experience perspective?
Growing up, World of Warcraft (WoW) was a really formative game for me. I started playing it in 2007, shortly after the first expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, was released. Born and raised in the rural Midwest, where I usually felt bored, WoW became a huge part of my life. I haven’t spent anywhere near as much time doing anything else as I did on WoW, and over the years I’ve fostered some great friendships and have a lot of fond memories. However, the retail version of the game has changed a lot since it was first released in 2004, and those changes have significantly impacted the general experience of the game, for better and for worse.
The recent launch of WoW Classic provides an ideal opportunity to look at some of the basic usability principles for that version of the game — as opposed to retail WoW — because I’m curious to evaluate how the original game holds up without all the changes that have been made over the past 15 years. I was also very skeptical of WoW Classic when it was announced, but so far, playing it has been a surprisingly pleasant experience.
Learnability
Visibility and feedback
Feedback in WoW is constant; you encounter some core elements of feedback very early in the game. For example, if you play a class that uses mana as a resource, the game has multiple ways of telling you how much mana you have left. Your mana bar visibly depletes whenever you cast a spell, and if you use too much of your mana, the game displays a warning message in red lettering to let you know that you don’t have enough mana to keep using spells.
Mapping
While WoW lacks natural mapping, the keybindings should be easy to pick up for people who’ve played other PC games before. Even if you’re unfamiliar with PC gaming, the default keybindings directly map to the layout of a keyboard, which makes basic character abilities easy to use.
Efficiency and memorability
The default interface is fairly simple, and after spending some time with the game, you’ll probably be able to perform most basic tasks with ease. The game involves performing a lot of repetitive actions, which helps commit the functions of the interface to memory.
Each class also starts off with a limited number of abilities, which lets you become familiar with how the game works before you delve into more of the mechanics of your class. New abilities are learned over time as you level, which allows you to ease into more complex gameplay and feel more comfortable with your class once you reach the level cap. This progression over time helps to solidify your knowledge of your abilities and hold onto a general understanding of the game for the long term.
Some other examples of memorability in WoW include the default keybindings for things like your backpack (B), (L) for quest log, and (M) for map. The similarity between the words and the keybindings is pretty intuitive and easy to remember.
Satisfaction
Though satisfaction can be difficult to quantify, I think the high demand and extremely positive response to WoW Classic is evidence that the original version of the game was something special. As someone who never played vanilla WoW, I was really skeptical of Classic initially. With all the quality of life improvements Blizzard has made to the retail version of the game over the years, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to enjoy the less forgiving experience of Classic.
As it turns out, a huge number of people (including myself), actually really enjoy being significantly more involved in the experience. Though some aspects of the game are very time-consuming, and even border on feeling disrespectful to the player’s time, it’s the long journey and real sense of progress that keeps you wanting to move forward. The slower pace really provides you with a greater feeling of accomplishment and discovery, because you actually have time to take in the world when progress doesn’t come as quickly. This helps foster a highly satisfying experience, quite unlike the retail game.
I think the success of WoW Classic is — perhaps counterintuitively — an example of “good” usability in video games gone too far. Blizzard made retail WoW so frictionless and accessible that they alienated much of their audience and created an empty experience. On paper, it sounds good for people to be able to progress through the game more quickly and easily. That accessibility leveled the playing field between casual and hardcore players a lot. However, in practice, this made a game that doesn’t provide the player with any sense of accomplishment. It removed the player’s investment from their character and greatly reduced their involvement in the world. It also diminished the social aspect of the game, which is essentially the core of an MMORPG.
WoW Classic, as antiquated as it might be, still possesses solid usability, and it brings back a level of satisfaction that’s almost completely absent from the retail version of the game. While Blizzard might have greatly enhanced the retail version of the game’s learnability, efficiency, and memorability, doing so caused it to sacrifice the elements of the game that made it so captivating and rewarding in the first place.
