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Tyler Colp is a games writer at Polygon specializing in criticism and reporting about extraordinary players and communities.
Hear that awful cacophony of farts, blips, and voice lines from the Mortal Kombat announcer? That’s the sound of 3,683 add-ons running simultaneously in World of Warcraft Classic. YouTuber Baltoboulbobbi brought the MMO to its knees with a bucket of custom tools and effects simply to see what happens. And what happens is a total nightmare.
There are so many add-ons in the first minute of Baltoboulbobbi’s video you can’t even see the game world. It’s an abomination that makes those spyware browser toolbars from the 2000s look tame. As they try to find WoW underneath all the mess, car horns and visual effects fire off in protest. Their naked Tauren is just standing in the corner of the screen for no reason and I think I saw four separate health bars.
“Game has become Mahjong,” the text in the video says before Baltoboulbobbi gives up and decides to try some combat. After dragging their Lightning Bolt spell to one of the 90 action bar slots covering their screen, they take a shot at an enemy and watch their game buckle. A fart sound effect starts playing on repeat and I’m pretty sure I heard someone say “Among Us” in there just before you can hear “Finish him!” by the Mortal Kombat announcer (or someone doing an impression). Other than when it bottoms out at zero, their frame rate never exceeds 20 during all of this.
The rest of the video is horrific for anyone who has played WoW enough to know what it’s like to accidentally leave a few add-ons enabled, let alone 3,683. That they were even able to play it without the game crashing is impressive, and according to the video description, it required omitting a handful that would prevent the game from working at all.
Normal players usually install a few add-ons to track their healing or damage in a dungeon, or to give Blizzard’s default UI a facelift. Nobody except Baltoboulbobbi is brave enough to strap thousands of add-ons to their game for the fun of it. It’s no surprise it’s basically unplayable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fascinating to know that it’s technically possible to live like this.
Baltoboulbobbi wrote in a comment on the video that if it gets 20,000 views they will attempt to level a character from one to 60 on a perma-death Hardcore server with all the add-on enabled. The video is currently at over 100,000 views.
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