26, a near-perfect recreation of the world of Azeroth as it existed back in 2004. Then World of Warcraft Classic launched on Aug. I’d put it down for a while and then pick it back up to see if it sparked that comforting feeling, only to put it back down again, dissatisfied. It was still fun, but so much of it just wasn’t the game I remembered. WoW was that, too, for a while, until Cataclysm. Revisiting them from time to time is a great way to transport myself back in time. As much as the world around me changes, the games from my younger years stay the same. Playing familiar games is my go-to method for injecting a little nostalgia into my veins. Or I could take an old character and re-explore some of those old locations for a hit of nostalgia. I knew if I started a new character, I’d be seeing the same content I'd seen a few years ago. It was fun to see new takes on old territory, but it also upended that comfortable familiarity, so reliable for so long.īefore Cataclysm, World of Warcraft felt a bit like home to me. The titular cataclysm reshaped huge areas of the world that had remained mostly unchanged for six years. Not only did it add new areas to explore in the game, just like the past two expansions had, it was the developers’ opportunity to dig back into the old content and rework it. Three years earlier, in 2010, the World of Warcraft expansion Cataclysm came out. It was still home, but it wasn’t exactly the home I remembered. I was treated more like a special guest than the staple resident I was used to being. My parents got some new furniture in the back room by the deck, and things just felt different. The first weekend I came back home after being away at college for a couple months was the first time my house didn’t feel like my normal home. Home was also my desk, my computer, and the game I poured hundreds of hours into year after year: World of Warcraft. The reality, in any case, can never live up to that old idea we hold in our hearts.įor a while, home wasn’t just my house and my family, or my room on the second floor with the window facing east that let the sun light up my bed as it rose over the house next door. Sometimes home gets painted a new color, or a piece of home is lost entirely. Sometimes the people that made it feel like home move away. Home changes - sometimes physically, sometimes spiritually. You can’t go home again, as the author Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, because home is never what it used to be.
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