Back in late 2024, new WoW Classic fresh servers opened up and I hopped onto that bandwagon. Looks like the roadmap for this iteration of Classic is on a quicker cadence, so I've seen a lot of comments about the sweatiness. Funnily enough, I had actually bought The War Within to try the expansion and holy moly that actually was some of the most Subway Surfers type gameplay I'd ever seen. Everything is so smooth, visually and mechanically. It's uncanny. I played for maybe 30 minutes and then refunded, so that was nice. But now I have a month-long sub for WoW so I figure I might as well play on the fresh Classic servers! Trying to approach it from the mindset of just playing it as the slow-paced social grind game that it was originally intended as.

Assorted Observations

• Lots of people still in low-level areas, with the occasional Level 60 spotted. Easy enough to find quest groups if I'm looking for them, has organically happened to me a couple times already.
• Orc and Undead writing is pretty uhhh colonialist? And I can't tell if it's intentional? With the Forsaken, it makes sense because they're talking about the Scourge and there's some reasonable justification there that they aren't sentient and in control of their own faculties. Could be looked at as doing them a favor if I'm being charitable. The Orc side of things is more blatantly fucked up. They talk about how the Razormane Quillboars are encroaching on their territory. Territory that Orcs are not native to? And they're using this "encroachment" as justification for LITERAL GENOCIDE? Maybe it's something that changes
• Tirisfal Glades is a pretty good starting area. Straightforward, a mirror to Elwynn Forest in how it's forested, flat, and centrally clustered around the starting hub town. Elwynn definitely feels bigger though, especially with the river coast running along the bottom. The run from west to east is also rough, but maybe that's because of how often the quests in Elwynn feel like they're designed as such? Durotar is more erratic in some ways, taking in mind how much swimming pops up in quests.
• The way that enemy mobs are laid out has noticeably scaled in the 10-19 level range. One of the Razormane quests in the latter half of Barrens questing has the player hunt down three different unique Razormane types across a pretty wide area. Furthermore, each of those individual enemies are surrounded by Razormane Hunters, which are not tracked by any specific quest. However, there is a quest that has you collect tusks from Razormane units you kill. Practically what this translates to is a LOT of grinding lmao.

Ultimately didn't continue playing after the sub ran out. Part undiagnosed ADHD part I-aint-got-time-for-this-shit-no-more-I-want-to-play-other-games-without-feeling-obligatory-FOMO.