It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

Now there’s something I never thought I’d see — thanks, perhaps, to my one ill-fated former experience in the Ahn’Qiraj region, with a pick-up group so mythically inept that it instilled a deep terror of that whole place in my mind, a group so thoroughly uncoordinated and inexperienced that I’m surprised they could even unsheathe their own swords without falling upon them. In retrospect, part of me wishes they had, but I digress.

While being somewhat of a self-indulgent segue and not entirely relevant to the point at hand, given Ahn’Qiraj was designed back in the days when level 60 was the highest rung on the ladder, it does seem like the game is changing — evolving, some may say — into something which is, to put it bluntly, easier. With a mass appeal that already extends across the globe to people who would never normally play an MMORPG, it makes perfect sense for Blizzard to cater to their biggest paying audience, that being the oft-derided casual gamers. As someone who has played WoW on-and-off since launch, and seen the ‘hard mode’ of things before the way became paved for the newer players, I can understand and even relate to the bitterness some feel, with newer players having their hands held through content that the older players had to slog through. We also had to walk to work uphill both ways in the snow, and all that.

In the years since launch, the world (of Warcraft) has changed around us in numerous subtle — and not-so-subtle — ways. With the upcoming expansion Cataclysm promising to rend the world into something new and unfamiliar, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the smaller changes that happened ‘under the hood’, so to speak. Once upon a time owning an epic mount was something of a badge of honour, an achievement in its own right, yet now we see freshly-rolled characters charging mounts through the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale with wild abandon, tearing up the roads as early as level 40 on cheaper-than-ever epic mounts, and even soaring through the skies of Outland shortly after their arrival.

Speaking of flying mounts, Hellfire Peninsula has certainly become a lot less of a headache-inducing nightmare compared to previous visits as older characters, and I’m sure Squick — my venerable shaman — has only the happiest Tauren feelings about the whole thing. Stranglethorn Vale and Desolace, once the banes of re-rollers everywhere, are now almost enjoyable. Heirloom gear with bonuses to experience provide a smoother run. City reputation is no longer the stuff of tears and misery. Even the classes are easier to play than ever — I for one am immensely grateful that, not only do shamans have abilities to provide a built-in totem bar, but we also have fewer, more general-use totems instead of a million and one to cover all the minutiae.

In a way, patches 2.0 and 3.0 were more than mere patches — it’s as if we’re playing World of Warcraft 2 and World of Warcraft 3 already, with changes and improvements to the game system happening fluidly and almost inconceivably around us, a perspective driven further home by Cataclysm’s promises to reshape the now rather dusty old-world, which is shoddy and outdated compared to Blizzard’s more recent offerings. Rather than other games — such as EverQuest, which attempted to re-make itself from scratch with a newer engine and modernized gameplay in EverQuest II — it seems as though Blizzard consider World of Warcraft a work-in-progress, a piece of art which is constantly being changed and improved, with the old, ugly parts cut out and replaced as seamlessly as possible to follow the game’s constant, organic evolution.

I can’t help but miss the old days, though. Sure, they were the days when only the best of the best could even hope to acquire any kind of good gear, back when trying to find a group was a case of standing in the middle of Orgrimmar yelling, “LF4M UBRS, NEED TANK!” But no matter how clumsy, how shoddy (at least, compared to Wrath and future promised offerings), how brutally unfair and obnoxiously limiting the old-world was, it’ll still always hold some small place in my heart — a very, very small place. In a crazy sort of way, some part of me will be a little sad to see it gone, when the world is broken and reshaped forever — or, at least, until the next expansion.

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