The character selection screen of World of Warcraft Warband touched me emotionally

World of Warcraft celebrates the 20th anniversary of its release later this year, and like any game that’s been going for a long time, it’s undergone some massive changes over time. The biggest of these usually come in the “pre-patch” updates that usher in major systemic changes just before the release of a new expansion. Previous pre-patches have reworked all quests on the game’s original continents, squashed the stats of all items, reduced character levels, reworked talent trees, and basically restructured the entire game.

The pre-patch for the 10th expansion, The war within, just dropped, official move 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 nonetheless made my heart leap into my throat.

Let me explain.

One of the big systemic changes in Patch 11.0 is Warbands. Wow Developer Blizzard is shifting many game progresses to the entire account and no longer to a single character: For example, faction reputation is now shared by all characters. This is a recognition of the fact that nowadays many WowThe audience of plays multiple characters (or “alts”) and doesn’t necessarily want to do the same grinding over and over again. To simplify this process, Blizzard created Warbands, a grouping of all characters on an account – even if they belong to opposing factions or live on different servers. (For more information on Warbands, see this official Blizzard blog post.)

To visualize your warrior band, WowThe character selection screen now groups all of your characters, regardless of server – and shows the top four characters hanging out together around a cozy campfire. (Previously Wow would simply give you an individual hero shot of each character 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.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Polygon

It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been playing the same video game for 20 years, but being able to position four of your alternate characters – any your alternate characters – next to each other like that is a pretty big deal. It hit me emotionally. These are avatars that I have spent years of my life with, but I have never been able to put them in the same room together. Since they are all on the same account and I have to log out of the others to play one, they have never really met. Now I can watch them chilling together around the little campfire and imagine them telling each other stories of their adventures.

But it’s more than that. For me, these characters represent not only different eras of the game, but different times in my life and different groups of friends. There’s my first Troll Warrior, who I played with as a tank in the earliest days of the game and who made mechanical squirrel pets for every member of my original guild. There’s my Night Elf Druid, the only Alliance character I spent time with, who I played with my oldest friend Rob when he lived across the country. There’s my Troll Hunter main character, who has been around for at least The Burning Crusade, and who had a brief raiding career in the late 2000s. Here’s my Tauren Monk – an inherently hilarious race/class combination – that I created to play with my wife after we moved in together, when we would sit and play next to each other on gloriously lazy Sundays.

Twenty years! Every game you play for that long becomes part of your life and your life becomes part of it. These are real memories, linked to real stories and real people. WowThe new character selection screen is like a precious photo album that brings together those moments for the first time. I love it.