World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th anniversary later this year, and like any long-running game, it’s gone through some massive changes in its time. The biggest ones usually come in “pre-patch” updates, which announce large system changes shortly before a recent expansion goes live. Previous pre-patches have reworked all of the quests on the game’s original continents, squashed the stats of every item, lowered character levels, reworked talent trees, and basically rebuilt the entire game.
Pre-patch for 10th expansion, The war within, it just dropped, I’m officially starting Wow to version 11.0. With the recent update came the first-ever complete overhaul of the character select screen in the game’s history — a seemingly minor update that still made my heart jump into my throat.
Let me explain.
One of the few major system changes introduced in Update 11.0 is Warbands. Wow developer Blizzard is moving a lot of game progress to be account-wide rather than character-specific: For example, faction reputation will now be shared across all characters. This is a recognition that many currently WowThe general public plays multiple characters (or “alts”) and doesn’t necessarily want to do the same thing over and over again. To simplify this process, Blizzard created Warbands, which are a group of all the characters on an account—even if they’re from opposing factions or live on different servers. (You can read more about Warbands in this official Blizzard blog post.)
To visualize your team, WowThe app’s character selection screen now groups all of your characters, regardless of server — and shows your top four characters hanging out together around a cozy campfire. (Previously Wow (It would simply show you an individual shot of each character against a background appropriate to their race.) Blizzard says it plans to introduce recent Warband scenes at a later date, potentially allowing room for more than four characters.
It’s difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t played the same video game in 20 years, but being able to pose for four of your alternate characters — everyone your alternate characters — side by side like that is quite a grave matter. It moved me. These are avatars that I have spent years of my life with, but I have never been able to put them in the same space before. Because they are all on the same account, and to play one I have to log out of the others, I never really he met. Now I can watch them relax together around that little fire and imagine them telling each other stories about their adventures.
But that’s not all. To me, these characters represent not only different eras of the game, but also different periods in my life and different groups of friends. There’s my first troll warrior, who I played with in the earliest days of the game and who created mechanical squirrel pets for each member of my original guild. There’s my night elf druid, the only Alliance character I’ve spent any time with, who I played with my oldest friend Rob when he lived across the country. There’s my main troll hunter, who’s been with me for at least Burning Crusade, and who had a brief raiding career in the overdue 2000s. Here’s my tauren monk—an inherently fun race/class combo—that I created to play with my wife after we moved in together and we’d sit next to each other and play on blissful, indolent Sundays.
Twenty years! Every game you play for that long becomes a part of your life, and your life becomes a part of it. These are real memories, with real stories and real people. WowThe recent character selection screen is like a treasured photo album, bringing those moments together for the first time. I love it.
