While World of Warcraft’s all-new, limited-time Mists of Pandaria Remix brought back almost every feature from the beloved 2012 expansion within the context of the modern game, some features were left on the sideline—and players are definitely taking notice.
One of the most memorable and unique expansion-specific features from Mists was the Halfhill farm (aka the Sunsong Ranch). The farm was a player-specific experience that allowed you to tend to your own plot of land and build a garden full of crops from scratch over the course of the expansion. Farming enough crops gave you reagents for cooking recipes (which were incredibly prevalent back in MoP).
“One of the things I was looking to most in MoP Remix was chilling on my farm, and hopefully farming up some Bronze plants,” a user said on the WoW subreddit earlier today.
If you remember anything about Mists’ release year of 2012, you might recall that one of the biggest games of that time was a Facebook-operated communal farming simulator known as Farmville—and the Sunsong Ranch was Blizzard’s answer to that then-up-and-coming craze.
The Sunsong Ranch likely didn’t make the cut in the new event because it may have been just far too tedious of a task to fit in with the fast pace of Mists Remix. With just three months on the schedule for Mists Remix, it makes sense that Blizzard wanted players to focus almost entirely on closed-instance content.
While the Sunsong Ranch is great for WoW players who only log in for a few minutes a day, or better yet, for the “cozy gamers” who love to treat WoW like an extensive community builder, it didn’t necessarily fit the bill of the PvE-focused Remix event that completely reforged all of MoP’s dungeons and raids.
“I enjoyed the farm back then, and it would have been a nice way to earn thread or bronze that didn’t amount to ‘keep murdering stuff’,” a player named Special_Grapefroot said on Reddit. “After 20 years WoW’s gameplay loop is still almost exclusively ‘kill stuff’ where other MMOs have done a good job of expanding non-combat activities like farming, housing, etc.”
It’s likely, though, that we’ll see the Halfhill farm and all of the amenities of the Sunsong Ranch make an appearance when the WoW Classic franchise transitions over into Mists of Pandaria at some point in (likely) the next two years. If you’re missing out on the nostalgia that you felt while working on your farm back in the original version of Mists, you’ll probably be able to tap into it when Mists Classic comes out and the pace of content slows down.
