Mr Party Hat

I reckon we need a rewind, rather than a crash.

Imagine if all of gaming's resources, talent and money was being plowed into consoles from the Xbox 360 era. Modernised with SSDs, and a few quality of life tweaks, but fundamentally frozen in time.

Development times would plummet. Game releases would accelerate. AAA risks could be taken. And we'd never have to hear about ray-tracing again.

Lots more job cuts at Microsoft.

Halo studio essentially dissolved, Activision now making Halo. Rare now a part of Activision. Obsidian part of Bethesda.

Hundreds of jobs gone.

I don't raid. A few things!

Firstly, there's an incredible amount of story content. You can zip through the main quests of an expansion (they have icons like FF14) in 30 hours or so, but there are thousands of smaller quests that often hide wonderful storytelling moments. I complete as many of these as I can, even though the rewards are irrelevant by the time I earn them. The quests themselves are the reward, I suppose. Unless you're into achievements, in which case you also get a dopamine ding every time you complete quests that are off the beaten track.

Because the game is (or was) split down faction lines, there's also 20 years of expansions that have another side to them, which is worth creating alts to experience. WoW makes alts very enjoyable. Pretty much everything is shared by your 'warband' (all your characters). So any currency, rep, outfits, mounts etc that you earn on your main are immediately available on your new alts. And you can choose which expansion you'd like to level through - the game then plonks you into it via some lore-appropriate 'time walking' mechanic where you level about 20x faster than usual. So you'll hit max level in the space of one expansion.

Then there are delves, single-player dungeons that offer some serious loot, and have a season-long story running through them. The more you delve, the more story you unlock. And the rewards really are great, I haven't raided at all in this expansion and my gear is pretty on par with hardcore raiders. We're talking a few percent weaker.

That's a few things, but WoW is the biggest MMO of all time. So they can afford to spend a lot of money pumping out a LOT of content. It introduces new zones, stories, mini games etc faster than any other live service game out there. I just found an entire Dave the Diver homage, complete with its own loot and about a hundred fish, that I didn't even know existed.

And of course there's Classic (soon to be Forever), which is installed as a separate game but part of your sub.

Mileage will vary, but it's easily the best value-for-money thing I buy.

It's included in a normal WoW subscription, no additional game to buy. So you could always sub for a month and see.

I know I'm the only current WoW player here, but Forever is very exciting. They're basically going back to the original WoW and capping the player level - 'forever' - at 60. So instead of expansions that introduce new lands, and force players to abandon the old continents, instead they'll create new zones and content within the existing landmasses.

Horizontal progression, as it's called. It works brilliantly in Guild Wars, so I'm very excited to see if Blizzard can pull it off. The 'forever' aspect is very appealing, because it means you'll never be behind the curve. Everything you fish, mine, kill, discover, and wear will still be relevant in a decade. The new stuff will be different, but not better.

Plus they've given the old world a lick of paint, which is always welcome.