At BlizzCon 2017, Blizzard finally answered the prayers of their most loyal World of Warcraft fans. Along with the announcement of the Battle for Azeroth, the seventh expansion to the game, Blizzard also announced that they were working of World of Warcraft Classic.
Players who began their World of Warcraft journey back in 2004 had been clamouring to go back and experience it how it was in the beginning. There was also a curiosity and desire amongst newer players to see the game in it’s vanilla state.
With each big patch and expansion Blizzard has changed the game. There’s been a huge focus on accessibility and the game now tends to hold your hand and guide you as you play. The original release was a much harder game to play which forced you to work things out for yourself or team up with other players. These days it’s become quite a lonely experience as everyone races to get to the level cap and end game content.
Watch the World of Warcraft Classic announcement trailer below:
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As Blizzard hadn’t provided a way to go back to how things were, players have been playing on private servers. These are built on a leaked version of the game that with some effort allow people to run their own version. Private servers have never been officially allowed by Blizzard and there have been high profile cases where they have forced private servers to shut down.
The original version of World of Warcraft was full of bugs and problems. This has left players wondering what version of the game Blizzard would build World of Warcraft classic upon. This question has finally been answered in an official development update.
World of Warcraft Classic is being built upon Patch 1.12: Drums of War. Long-time players should remember this as it was the final patch for the original game before The Burning Crusade released.
Watch the first World of Warcraft cinematic trailer below:
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Rather than just package up World of Warcraft 1.12 and release that, Blizzard have been working on combining the game data from 1.12 with the modern backend from the current version. This will allow them to deliver the vanilla game experience but with much more stability.
One ‘feature’ we’re hoping Blizzard leave intact is wall-jumping which allowed players to scale certain surfaces to gain access to unfinished content and areas that players weren’t supposed to access. This was removed somewhat in Patch 1.1 but not completely fixed until Patch 2.4.
There’s currently no release date for World of Warcraft Classic but we can’t wait to step back in time and experience the game we remember. Hopefully we’ll here more over the coming months with a proper update at BlizzCon 2018 in November.
EF Games will bring you more updates on World of Warcraft Classic as they are announced.
