WoW Classic is a step back in time—and a step back for World of Warcraft

Few of us ever get a chance to start over from scratch, but recently World of Warcraft players got exactly that with the launch of WoW Classic.

Blizzard Entertainment’s “newest” game is essentially the popular massive multiplayer online roleplaying game exactly as it played in 2004, right down to molasses-paced quest text, a dearth of quest markers, and enemies so tough that you feel compelled to group up with other players to beat them. Together, features like these made World of Warcraft’s earliest incarnation more social than its current form, and almost 15 years ago they helped lay the foundation for some of the most enduring friendships of my life.

Yet it’s important to remember that isn’t a hard reset—a reboot that gives us a truly new game with wildly different storylines with content patches. So far, at least, looks as though it’ll be the same we knew all those years ago with roughly the same: At one point, more than one million people tuned in to watch folks slowly slaughter 30-50 feral hogs and find themselves slaughtered by .