It’s still a little hard to believe that World of Warcraft has been around long enough for people to be nostalgic about “the good old days.” At this point, WoW has been around for longer than what’s sure to be a sizable chunk of its player base has been alive. We’re talking 11 years of clicking tiny icons on bars, watching spells cool down, and saving up enough gold to buy a shiny new mount that’s totally better than your other, functionally identical mount.

The newest expansion, Legion, is definitely an attempt to feed on that nostalgia. Familiar faces and locations return from throughout the game’s tenure as the premier MMO on the block. That seems perfectly targeted at players like me. It’s been nine years since I last played World of Warcraft, back in my halcyon high school days of 2007 when I had plenty of time to sink into the game’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade.

So, as I set out to review the nostalgia-tinted Legion (how does one review something on this scale?), I felt I should see what two-presidential-terms’-worth of updates and expansions had already done to the game I knew and loved. What changed? What stayed the same? What did “Hearthstone” mean before it was a collectible card game? This is my tale of Rip van Winkle culture shock experienced in revisiting a virtual place I haven’t lived for years.