The Forever Home of Azeroth

I've been playing World of Warcraft for the best part of 25 years now, but I never really considered myself a "Classic" connosieur—the now-branded term for the vanilla experience that represents the original World of Warcraft as it launched in 2004.

Sure, I played in vanilla WoW—fleetingly, a handful of Night Elves that barely ever made it past level 30—but it was not the experience of the MMO that would shape my decades of love for it. It was really The Burning Crusade that would kickstart things, thanks to the arrival of the Blood Elves, but that remained fleeting until Cataclysm and its revamp of that vanilla experience that would really seal the deal that I was a World of Warcraft player for, well, forever.

Azeroth will always find a way to get me back in fits and starts. I've played every expansion at launch, some I've stuck around with during all the patch content (shoutout to Legion, where I was logging in from the Burning Shore all the way through to Argus). But it took until this weekend's Blizzcon and the reveal of a new project there—World of Warcraft: Forever—to make me realize that spark of going home, to that original setting, still carries a spark in me.