Imagine coming home after an exhausting day. You kick off your shoes, turn on the TV or computer, and fire up your much-beloved video game that helps you relieve stress and escape from the frustrations of the world for a while. But your much-beloved game has changed. It's as if, overnight, someone took your game and altered it to the degree that you no longer know how to play it anymore. Instead of being the much-beloved game you know, you're having to learn the game all over again. Welcome to the world of overhauled games.

We've moved into an era where games change. This is something old-school gamers aren't used to. It used to be that you bought your video game and enjoyed it. When the game was over with, it was over with, and if the game was fun, you'd get a good amount of replay value out of it. But it was playing the same game you already played before. Now, thanks to digital downloadable content and expansions, no game has to stay the same forever. This idea of change is especially true in the world of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). In fact, even from the start of MMORPGs (EverQuest), the players expected things to change. Expansions offer new content and choices, patches fix problems of overpowered or underpowered classes, and over time the game grows and changes.

Some titles take this idea of change farther than the basic expectations of expansion and small shifts in power. Occasionally you'll see a game undergo a complete overhaul right in front of the player's eyes. Entire mechanics in the game will change, simplifying the needlessly complex or adding new depth to the mundane. The problem is that this nature of change isn't always well executed, nor is it well received. By nature, people tend to fear change, and altering the familiar can be a quick way to alienate players, making it a risky proposal.

My argument about the risk of change does not go unsupported. To this writer's knowledge, Star Wars Galaxies was the first MMORPG to undergo a drastic overhaul. Within days of the game's first major expansion, the game was simplified drastically, homogenizing play styles and even going against one of the game's philosophical foundations by allowing Jedi to be created from the get-go (originally they had to be unlocked by players through a super-secret combination of events that varied from player to player). Response to the overhaul was not positive, with players even demanding their money back for the game's expansion since Galaxies was no longer the game the players had bought into. While Sony Online Entertainment had reportedly hoped to maintain their player base by altering the game, the move wound up costing Galaxies some of its player base. Instead of enjoying the rich history you'd expect a Star Wars title to carry, only two more expansions were released for the game, both within less than a year from the overhaul. Since then, more players have moved on, servers have been closed, and the title carries a mere shadow of the popularity it had upon launch.

Not all overhauls are for the negative. Sony Online Entertainment has been a force behind change in many MMORPGs, from graphical updates to the original EverQuest to the recent changes to its sequel, EverQuest II . The change wasn't an overhaul of game play as much as an overhaul of the subscription model behind it, moving from a subscription based model to offering the game for free, but supported by micro-transactions (as I've discussed previously). While both of these games saw people react both positively and negatively to the changes, neither of them were received as poorly as the Star Wars Galaxies transformation.

And now we come to World of Warcraft. As we've mentioned before, a Cataclysm is coming to the game, altering the original landscapes of the six year game. If it was just the land that was changing, I doubt there would be much threat to the game's success, but Blizzard Entertainment is using the opportunity to modify nearly all of the classes in the game as well, altering gameplay on a class by class basis. The result is a change akin to the Star Wars Galaxies changes - an alteration of the original game on a core level, with nearly every player of the game finding themselves having to rediscover how to play characters they may have had for years.

As you might expect, there have been a variety of responses to the class changes, which were added into the live game on the last major patch. Naysayers are calling the upcoming Cataclysm expansion aptly named, declaring it the end of World of Warcraft's success. Others are enjoying a departure from the game play they were familiar with, observing the changes as an opportunity on Blizzard's part to keep the game from becoming tedious and repetitive.

Casual players are, no doubt, one of the most heavily affected by these changes. Without ample time or resources to pour into the game, many casual players are just now discovering end-game content such as raiding. Having to change how they play the game can be a daunting task, especially when you consider that the average casual player probably doesn't spend a ton of time reading blogs and news sites about the game. I've seen more than a few players who had no idea of the changes coming to the game; players who logged in to frustration when everything they knew had been altered.

Can World of Warcraft survive a game overhaul? For years the title has remained at the top of the MMORPG genre, staving off attacks from would be "WoW-killers." As Star Wars Galaxies has shown us, it may not take an outside force to damage the player base and reputation of a game, and Blizzard is taking an awfully big risk in overhauling its star product. Fortunately the company has a reputation for working with player feedback to try and keep their product as familiar and friendly as possible. How will this overhaul fare? Only time will tell how cataclysmic the fallout will be.