How WoW Classic builds on an already successful platform

WoW Classic

It suffices to say that it`s only natural as a gamer to switch between games. If we didn’t, we’d surely miss out on new games, right!? That same principle applies to the original World of Warcraft release. Fortunately, with the launch of World of Warcraft Classic this year we can play the same game we grew to love, and it doesn’t look as much like something from fifteen years ago!

There are always new MMOs springing up out of nowhere, but it’s relatively tricky to come anywhere near as close to the success of the original World of Warcraft. That was until Blizzard launched WoW Classic.

It’s not uncommon for a core MMO to launch classic versions of servers that run in unison with the base game. The Rift Prime servers are a great example of a game running alongside the base Trion Worlds title. And then there’s the idea of servers reliant on progression-based gameplay such as the eight servers available for Everquest.

WoW Classic 1

It was only two years ago that Blizzard decided to take the plunge into releasing a classic version of its WoW server which came a year before the BFA expansion.

The nostalgia behind WoW Classic is unreal. It’s quite surprising going back to an older game and realizing how much I enjoyed playing it. Any WoW player will agree that using a Night Elf Hunter as your first character selection is pretty average. But the Teldrassil Forest exploration still sticks with me to this day. It’s embedded in my memory using my first character and having to grind for ages so that I could play alongside my buddy to join in on their Gnome and Dwarf quests. This consisted of heaps of trekking and dying to reach the end result of Dun Morogh.

Players of the original WoW will certainly remember their first time playing and having to find the right direction to Scarlet Monastery. This was, of course, a horrendous grind on PvP servers!

Reminiscing further, I remember being online alongside thirty other players from my home country, fighting to recover the Molten Core. It didn’t work out how we wanted, and Majordomo wasn’t an easy battle whatsoever.

I’m confident I’m not the only one who still has these memories etched into my mind, but what is interesting when reading posts from other players of the MMO is how much I’d forgotten about when I was a regular WoW player. Of course, there are some good memories and other frustrating ones!

WoW Classic 2

Since World of Warcraft Classic launched, it has received some extremely positive feedback from Blizzard’s player base. One of the most notable pieces of feedback from players, however, is how much time and grinding they need to put into the game. Fortunately, classic boost is here to make your time playing WoW a lot easier, providing an alternative solution to save players hours of time and effort.

WoW Classic isn’t just a copy of the base game

Many players fresh to WoW Classic and those returning to the franchise get the impression that the game is the original code being recycled. That’s not the case at all. Back in 2017, there was a team of Blizzard’s developers that undertook a research mission to dig out that old code.

It was no secret that the WoW player base was keen on the idea of a WoW vanilla server, but since the original WoW released in 2004 things have changed significantly.

Patrick Dawson, WoW’s production director, explains that “There was definitely an outpouring from the community that they were interested in this, but it was always, ‘How do we actually do this?’ Classic was people using cheat programs like Glider, and it wasn’t on our current infrastructure; it had performance issues. We thought, ‘That wasn’t a Blizzard quality experience. We can’t just re-publish that.’ That doesn’t seem like it’s doing service to our fans or fanbase. How can we give players what they want, but still be true to our core values of quality and gameplay?”

The entire foundation of WoW has completely changed thanks to Blizzard Service, Battle.net and the Cataclysm expansion.

Blizzard’s answer was to create WoW Classic, taking the base World of Warcraft client, and building vanilla WoW on top of it. In other words, the original WoW code isn’t used for WoW Classic but instead a representation of the original WoW state.

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