20 years old and yet some people can’t let go. WoW Classic HC is exciting – and the players often don’t know why they’re playing.
Most games are relatively short-lived. You play it for a few months and then put it aside. Maybe after 10 years you’ll pick it up again in a fit of nostalgia and have fun with it for a moment. But World of Warcraft in its “hardcore” version seems to be different there.
The question is also asked in the WoW Classic subreddit. Here the user centcentcent asked himself why he actually enjoys the game so much – because all rational considerations speak against it:
It’s 2023, I’m 38 years old and playing a level 17 priest in WoW Classic Hardcore. Why am I playing this? The gameplay is slow, the questing is tiring, it takes forever to get somewhere, and my rotation is easy and repetitive. Why is this the only game I can think of recently? Hours pass and all I’ve done is kill Cloudy-Eyes the Old One and collect condor meat.
This is the most fun I’ve had playing a video game in a long time. Why? I’m spending hours on something that could be ruined by a simple disconnect. I love it. There are people everywhere, the world feels alive. Everything has a weight, it has a sense of danger and progress. Soon the deadly mines. And when I die… I’ve always wanted to try out a dwarf warrior.
The post was well received by the community and has now received over 1,500 upvotes. However, some fellow players have ideas as to why WoW Classic Hardcore still works a good 20 years after the base game was released.
This is how Erva420 writes:
It’s a good video game, made with the love of gaming, rather than being a platform designed to sell you micro-transactions and investor metrics. It’s just a good video game.
artevelde8 also sees the problem in the newer game generation:
Nowadays, games just make you grind to the endgame content, trapping you in a cycle of just keeping up with the latest updates. Not to mention, games currently try to make you complete daily, arduous, repetitive tasks to keep you playing.
What is the appeal of hardcore? Putting the exact appeal of hardcore WoW into words is probably quite difficult. Many people find it incomprehensible how the “1 life” mechanic can be fun and how hundreds of hours of gameplay can be wiped out with a single mistake. But that seems to be exactly what keeps many people in line, because Barbz182 sums it up like this:
Sense of progress.
Feeling of success.
Feeling of community.
Feeling of adventure.
All of this is only compounded by the common threat of sudden digital death.
Did you also fall under the spell of WoW Classic Hardcore? Or can’t you do anything with it?
Some also lose their character if they are careful: through an unplanned explosion.