World of Warcraft’s Warband character-select screen made me emotional

World of Warcraft celebrates the 20th anniversary of its launch later this year, and like any long-running game, it’s seen some massive changes in its time. The biggest of these typically arrive in the “pre-patch” updates that usher in major systemic changes shortly before a new expansion goes live. Past pre-patches have reworked all the questing on the game’s original continents, squished the stats on every item, reduced character levels, reworked talent trees, and basically restructured the entire game.

The pre-patch for the 10th expansion, The War Within, just dropped, officially moving WoW to version 11.0. With the new update came the first full redesign of the character-select screen in the game’s history — a seemingly minor update that still caused my heart to jump into my mouth.

Let me explain.

One of a couple of big systemic changes arriving in the 11.0 patch is Warbands. WoW developer Blizzard is moving a lot of progression in the game to be account-wide, rather than specific to a single character: For instance, faction reputation will now be shared across all your characters. It’s a recognition of the fact that these days, a lot of WoW’s audience 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 the characters on an account — even if they belong to opposing factions, or live on different servers. (You can read more about Warbands in this official Blizzard blog post.)

To visualize your Warband, WoW’s character select screen now groups all your characters together, regardless of server — and shows the top four characters hanging out together around a cozy campfire. (Previously, WoW would just give you an individual hero shot of each character against a background appropriate to their race.) Blizzard says it plans to introduce new Warband scenes later on, potentially making room for more than four characters.

It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been playing the same video game for 20 years, but getting to pose four of your alt characters — any of your alt characters — next to each other in this way is quite a big deal. It made me emotional. These are avatars I’ve spent years of my life with, but I’ve never been able to put them in the same space together before. Because they’re all on the same account, and to play one, I have to log out of the others, they’ve never actually met. Now I can watch them chilling together around that little campfire, and imagine them telling each other stories about their adventures.

It’s more than that, though. To me, these characters represent not just different eras of the game, but different times in my life, and different groups of friends. There’s my first troll warrior, who I tanked with in the game’s earliest days, 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 any time with, who I used to play with my oldest friend Rob when he was living at the other end of the country. There’s my troll hunter main, who’s been with me since 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 — who I made to play with my wife after we moved in together, when we sat next to each other and gamed on blissed-out lazy Sundays.

Twenty years! Any game you play for that long becomes part of your life, and your life becomes part of it. These are real memories, attached to real stories and real people. WoW’s new character-select screen is like a treasured photo album, bringing those moments together for the first time. I love it.