Someone in China created thousands of fake social media accounts designed to appear to be from Americans and used them to spread polarizing political content in an apparent effort to divide the U.S. ahead of next year's elections, Meta said Thursday.
World of Warcraft Classic is becoming its own game — is Fortnite OG next?
10.11.2023 - 17:45 / polygon.com
A couple of significant things happened in the world of online gaming over the first weekend of November. At its BlizzCon convention in California, Blizzard devoted quite a lot of time to World of Warcraft Classic — the nostalgic, retro version of its 19-year-old massively multiplayer game — and revealed surprisingly ambitious plans for Classic’s future. At the same time, Fortnite’s servers were melting under the load of its biggest day ever, which was all down to the launch of Fortnite OG, a special season bringing back the game’s original map and 2018 gameplay.
All of a sudden, in the proudly impermanent world of online gaming — where change is always good, and if it’s not, never mind, because here comes more change — winding back the clock is big business. It’s a kind of paradox: Because online games are always evolving, a sense of scarcity and intense nostalgia forms around the way they used to be. If you can find a way to bring that feeling back, especially for an audience that’s getting jaded, then you’re on to something.
Blizzard initially seemed reluctant to get on board with a growing movement in WoW’s community that wanted to go back to the way things were in 2004-2005. It squashed unofficial “vanilla” servers and prevaricated over creating an official alternative for years. In a way, it’s understandable: If you have spent many years of effort on (in your eyes) modernizing and improving your game, why would you want to indulge this rose-tinted exercise? Isn’t World of Warcraft just better now?
Of course, that’s a value judgment — but what’s undeniable is that WoW is now extremely different from how it used to be. And that’s exactly what makes Classic a viable and interesting, if slightly old-fashioned, alternative. After Classic arrived in 2019, included in a standard WoW subscription, it became a roaring success, partly because of the strong contrast between it and the two unloved expansions (Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands) it launched between.
But what’s really fascinating about Classic is where Blizzard is taking it next — because Classic is an online game, and no online game can stand still, even a throwback. It began as a relatively faithful version of the original MMO with smart tweaks: It moved through content patches at an accelerated rate, while locking to a single iteration of game design and balance. Then it bifurcated, with some servers moving forward through classic expansions, while others stayed in the “vanilla” era. This year, it acquired a third track, something completely new that WoW had never had before: a permadeath Hardcore mode, which turned out to be a game-reviving innovation that was quite brilliant in its simplicity.
From its showing at BlizzCon, Blizzard is
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