Before BlizzCon 2023, there was one major wish from the community that they wanted to be revealed: World of Warcraft Classic +. Not a rehash of Vanilla World of Warcraft, but a revitalizing of the original content. Reusing known cut content, more engaging class fantasies, and unused storylines to push the game in a new direction and distinguish it from its retail counterpart. In a way, that wish was granted with the reveal of World of Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery. It’s a new take on World of Warcraft Classic where instead of releasing the original game all at once, it’d roll out in phases. Each phase would see new class abilities that change preconceived class roles. Classes have new uses and older content is being remade into harder raids for new, better loot. Phase 3 just launched for this new seasonal content, but one thing is clear. Season of Discovery is not what we think it is.
In its initial announcement and launch, there was one overpowering appeal of this new mode: no public test realm. Nearly every release in World of Warcraft‘s history until recently has had players test out that new content. It provided time to get player feedback beyond internal testing. It let a much larger testing pool find issues and, more importantly, break what’s new or find what doesn’t work. Most bugs were squished when they hit live servers. That’s not the case with Season of Discovery. As a player base, we knew next to nothing. Only that some classes would play differently and could fit into new roles and that Blackfathom Deep, a former dungeon, is being converted into a ten-player raid.
Get BWT in your inbox!
Get BWT in your inbox!
What is the point of re-releasing World of Warcraft Classic with a new coat of paint? There doesn’t always need to be a purpose, but releases do need to define their existence in a way. While many franchises occasionally release remasters and remakes, re-releasing old content within an MMO is much rarer. So why re-release the Classic experience with just some new features added? This comes down to how Blizzard defines Season of Discovery, a found-photograph adventure into the past.
What does that mean for the bigger picture of Season of Discovery? What if, instead of a rehash of history with a new mysterious twist, the X factor of this new long-term seasonal content plays into the grander picture of its new Worldsoul Saga? Usually, when something is described as a found-photograph adventure, it fills in voids in the memories of what we experienced way back when. Memory is faulty; it is imperfect. It also tends to mix recency bias into our motives and actions of the past. This is a little harder to pull off in a video game. Especially one where they still have active live servers of the original launch for people to play.
But it could be a good explanation for why classes based on the 2004 experience now have abilities from 2024. Thinking back, we could think why demonic-controlled warlocks could tank or mages manipulating time magic would be able to heal. The same goes for dungeons turning out to be raids. These larger dungeons that took an hour or two to complete back in 2004 could be confused as a ten—to twenty-person raid. But what if our history is being messed with subtly? Like by a larger foe who is just studying our past for a grander goal?
Someone who is about to be a central figure in The War Within and the Worldsoul Saga is Xal’atath, the knifu shadow priests wielded in the Legion expansion. Without going too much into her history here, she is the driving factor of the events in The World Within. And as we learned in the Dawn of the Infinite mega-dungeon in Dragonflight, she has some ability to jump around time. She’s already used that ability, with the help of Iridikron, to go back to the downfall of Galakrond to absorb its hungering essence for some nefarious purpose.
She may have started to appear in Season of Discovery as well. As part of some of the new gearing systems in Phase 1 of Season of Discovery, crafters can meet with a shadowy figure to get recipes that are void/shadow-infused. Then again, this same elf-like shadowy figure appeared in Phase 2, this time to use a Spent Voidcore for more crafting gear. In her limited interactions with the player, her dialogue feels very similar to Xal’atath. And her use of the void is something we rarely saw in the original Vanilla experience. So what if she’s there to give players a little nudge in her experiments that deal with our characters’ pasts? Will some ulterior motive come to fruition when we face her in The Worldsoul Saga?
World of Warcraft Season of Discovery is a fantastic remix on the Vanilla experience. However, it’s clear that something with its manipulation of classes and experiences something or someone may be pulling the strings in this found-photograph experience. Xal’atath, our upcoming grand foe in the Worldsoul Saga, is powerful in many ways. She’s also quite cunning, loving to bide her time.
What if she’s using that cunningness to study us, and mess with our past to study us as people to help her grand strategy? Regardless, suppose Season of Discovery is being used to play into the grand World of Warcraft story in this way. In that case, this is an amazing way to involve players in the new storyline being built by Blizzard for its long-running MMO.
World of Warcraft Season of Discovery is available now.
