Blizzard has announced that World of Warcraft Classic is going to launch in 2019. This announcement was made during their annual Blizzcon convention. Blizzard revealed that servers will be accessible to all players with an active subscription to World of Warcraft. This will be without an extra cost. World of Warcraft Classic is going to grant players an opportunity to play the original base game. They can have the experience of the game just as it was more than 10 years ago. This is before the gameplay changes and the different expansions. Specifically, Patch 1.12 will be the foundation of Classic: Drums of War. It was released in 2006.
To enjoy World of Warcraft, players will not be required to buy separate game. Instead, players will jump in after new servers have gone live. However, everything has gone back to basics and players will require to create new characters before playing. Everyone must agree that the previous version of the World of Warcraft was much challenging and slow paced. Players were leveling up with far much slower pace and the version had much less content. Much as Classic feels like a nostalgia trip, the updated version is going to be new experience and more exciting compared to the previous version. The current World of Warcraft will require much grinding and will be more time consuming. However, it features quality and instant leveling. The launch of World of Warcraft Classic will be in summer 2019 in the US. This means it will be anytime between June and August.
Players will get access to Onyxia and Molten Core. These are the 2 raids (40-man) that Blizzard launched in the 2004 in their original title. That will be the first stage of the launch. The second stage will feature Blackwing Lair and ZG (Introduction). Stage 3 will be the introduction of Gates of Ahn’Quirai as well as the opening of AQ which will be a major server event.
Remember that in World of Warcraft, what they used to call ‘Vanilla’ was just static. Changes was required, and it was required to considerable extent. Blizzard understood this very well. They overhauled the functionality of almost every class on the original base game. This was long overdue, and they needed to do it. Blizzard could have used 2 basics ways to approach vanilla server. The first approach could be the “simple” method where they could dump all “Vanilla” content. This would involve dumping all the content as it used to be just before re-opening of the Dark Portal. However, Blizzard chose a different route. They wanted to give people new experience by recreating the whole server. This will be achieved by inclusion of new introductions and major world events.
This recreation is of great magnitude which could help bring a feeling that many people would have wished to get from the original game. Some people had very bad experience. After getting into the server drive to try and unlock the gates of one of the game – Ahn’Quirai-the launch event became a disconnect disaster when the gryphon died mid-air after dis-pawning. This was caused by server lag and finally could not go into the relevant zone. That was just a feedback from an unhappy player. This will not happen after the recreation, this time round.
As stated before, the previous version of World of Warcraft game was much slower compared to new one. Will it be automatic that players are going to enjoy the game that is paced very differently? In the original game in 2004, classes of the character were more limited and there were fewer options in the game to choose from. The options were also far much varied compared to the updated version. There are more features such as pet battling systems and daily repeatable quests.
I am sure that no one wants to go back to the period of no kill sharing, one-tag-per-mob, slow movement, slow leveling among many other challenges with the old game. Some people say that the original version was very easy and old players used to be bored with the game. But someone can argue that they wanted to give inexperienced players a chance to join and play without many challenges.
Blizzard’s decision to launch World of Warcraft Classic game and to recapture most of the main world events is very important. It demonstrates their effort to give the game a chance to be very successful.
