World of Warcraft is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its launch later this year, and like any long-running game, it’s seen some massive changes in its time. The biggest of these usually come in the “pre-patch” updates that usher in major systemic changes shortly before a new expansion goes live. Previous pre-patches have reworked every quest on the game’s original continents, compressed every item’s stats, reduced character levels, reworked talent trees, and basically restructured the entire game.
The pre-patch for the 10th expansion, The war within, just dropped, officially moved Wow to version 11.0. With the new update came the first complete redesign of the character selection screen in the game’s history — a seemingly small update that nevertheless made my heart leap into my throat.
Let me explain.
One of the big systemic changes introduced in patch 11.0 is Warbands. Wow Developer Blizzard is moving a lot of progression in the game to account-wide, rather than specific to a single character: for example, action reputation is now shared across all of your characters. It’s an acknowledgement of the fact that a lot of Wow‘s audience plays multiple characters (or “alts”), and doesn’t necessarily want to grind the same thing over and over again. To simplify this process, Blizzard created Warbands, a grouping of all the characters on an account — even if they belong to opposing factions, or live on different servers. (You can read more about Warbands in this official Blizzard blog post.)
To visualize your Warband, WowThe character select screen now groups all of your characters, regardless of server, and displays the top four characters hanging out together around a cozy campfire. (Previously Wow (You would simply give each character an individual hero photo against a background appropriate for their race.) Blizzard says it plans to introduce new Warband scenes later, potentially making room for more than four characters.
It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been playing the same video game for 20 years, but it’s awesome to get to pose four of your alternate characters – each of your alt characters — side by side like this is quite a thing. It made me emotional. These are avatars that I’ve spent years of my life with, but I’ve never been able to put them in the same space before. Because they’re all on the same account, and to play one, I have to log out of the others, they’ve never really MetNow I can see them chilling together around that little campfire and imagine them telling each other stories about their adventures.
But it’s more than that. For me, these characters represent not only different eras of the game, but also different times in my life and different groups of friends. There’s my first troll warrior, who I tanked with in the early days of the game and made mechanical squirrel pets for every member of my original guild. There’s my night elf druid, the only Alliance character I’ve spent any time with, who I used to play with my oldest friend Rob when he lived across the country. There’s my troll hunter main, who’s been with me since at least The Burning Crusade, and had a brief raiding career in the late 2000s. Here’s my Tauren Monk – an inherently hilarious race/class combination – that I made to play with my wife after we moved in together, when we’d sit next to each other and game on blissfully lazy Sundays.
Twenty years! Every game you play for that long becomes part of your life, and your life becomes part of the game. These are real memories, connected to real stories and real people. Wow‘s new character-select screen is like a cherished photo album, bringing those moments together for the first time. I love it.