If you flip back and forth between WoW Classic and World of Warcraft Retail, you will certainly agree that these are two very different MMOs in a lot of respects. Sure, they share some of the same DNA, but how they function and where their focus lies are far apart. Personally, I feel that each version can be appreciated and enjoyed for what they are, and each version is deficient in some way.

One of the most stark differences between Classic and Retail is the main gameplay loop. For modern WoW, this mostly consists of scooting to the level cap and partaking from a rather extensive buffet of endgame activities — delves, raids, mythic+, world quests, campaigns, PvP, and so on. For Classic, it’s pretty much all about the leveling journey. There’s something incredibly satisfying about taking a character from zero to hero with significant milestones for gear, talents, dungeon access, and abilities.

Out of all of the features that World of Warcraft has gained over the years, I consider the abandonment of the leveling journey to be its greatest loss. So is it possible for Blizzard to ever regain this in retail WoW, and if so, how?

I suppose the first question is whether the studio even wants to enrich and focus upon the leveling journey at this point, and the answer is almost certainly “no.” You can see that by how many ways there is to speed up XP gain, the sale of level boosts, frequent leveling events, and PR that emphasizes how fast and speedy WoW is these days. No publicist nor dev is talking wistfully of “slow and methodical leveling” in 2025 — unless they’re on the Classic team, which clearly sees this as a virtue.

But I have to imagine that Blizzard does recognize that Classic isn’t a fad that’s going to blow away. Since 2019, the studio’s seen an apparently strong surge of interest in this older version with its more time-intensive activities. And among the internal discussion about why Classic is popular, I’m sure that it’s come up that this older version offers something that’s practically absent from retail: a real, meaningful leveling journey.

Unfortunately, even if Blizzard suddenly smacked itself on the forehead and admitted that it streamlined WoW’s leveling almost out of existence, it’s practically too late to change course. The shift to “Chromie Time” so that players didn’t have to go through expansions sequentially but could merely vacation in one for a while until they were in the latest pack absolutely destroyed traditional leveling in this game. There’s no going back from that.

So acknowledging that it would be far too resource-intensive to undo that change — and that many players wouldn’t want it because they’re used to the current iteration of the MMO — how could Blizzard move forward to reclaim the leveling journey in another way?

I think we’re already seeing one experiment in this, which is the Remix seasons. These are basically accelerated leveling challenges that repackage an older expansion for players to explore and enjoy together again. While the leveling is lightning fast and the power curve insane, at least it does dust off expansions that most people skip over these days and encourages us to play them together.

I absolutely hate seeing all of these older expansions abandoned by the studio and playerbase, so I’m in favor of them getting a second life in any way possible, even if they’re repurposed for only a short time.

However, I want to push past what’s already being done to muse on what could be accomplished within the framework of the current MMO. Blizzard could take another cue from Classic, which is how it found success in adopting a hardcore ruleset for players looking for an additional challenge.

“Additional challenge” is the key phrase here. If the studio could see that this challenge could come during the leveling process and not just piled on at endgame, it could open up some intriguing possibilities.

So what about a special leveling challenge ruleset server? It would have all of the content of current retail WoW, but advancement would be slowed significantly. Instead of hitting the cap in hours or days, this ruleset would be paced so that it would take many weeks or months to climb all the way up to 80. Dungeon XP or rewards might need to be tweaked so that players wouldn’t endlessly chain-run those but instead focus on leveling through zones and storylines.

Perhaps you’d have to fully finish, say, three expansions to make it to level 70 and then go through The War Within. This would push the population down into more expansions, pump the brakes so that people would have the opportunity to fully experience these areas, and hopefully dissolve that mental pressure of needing to be at endgame to enjoy the game.

Another option would be to allow players on any servers to roll up new characters with special challenge options. Again, this could include — but not be limited to — vastly slowing down XP gain in return for the promise of exclusive future rewards or other tantalizing treats. Been there, done that, and bored at level cap? Try a challenge run with all sorts of crazy limitations and restrictions!

OK, maybe this is all odd hypothesizing, and we’ll never see a true leveling journey in WoW like there used to be. My point is that there are feasible things that Blizzard could do to inject life and purpose into literal decades of content rather than leave it out in the pasture to be forgotten.

War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with almost two decades of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre and Justin Olivetti for new installments of WoW Factor as they examine the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.