Blizzard relents to a popular request from fans with a throwback announcement — "World of Warcraft Classic." This will allow users to play the game as how it used to be, before all the updates and expansions came around.
Blizzard made the announcement at the BlizzCon video game convention in Anaheim, California to the surprise of fans who have been pressuring the game developers to do this for years.
"Fans of World of Warcraft around the world, we hear you," production director J. Allen Brack told the crowd, adding, "I am pleased and also a little bit nervous to announce the development of a classic server option for World of Warcraft."
The reveal came with very little details. Right now, the only things fans can really hold on to are its name and the promise that it will happen. "This is a larger endeavor than you might imagine, but we are committed to making an authentic, Blizzard-quality classic experience," Brack added.
There was also a trailer of what the revived classic would look like. This featured various cinematic clips from the game's many expansions, which led to a familiar figure from the very first edition — a bearded dwarf walking in the snow.
At the conference, Brack said their goal is to reproduce the same classic experience fans got from the original game, "but not the actual launch experience." Of course, they would also try to do away with the many issues they have encountered once the game started getting updates. Whether there would be changes in mechanics, settings, or characters, fans would have to wait a while to find out.
It was a brief news flash that ended even before fans started calming down from the great news, and Blizzard soon moved forward with further announcements. These include a new character for "Overwatch" and a new map called Blizzardworld, a free-to-play "StarCraft II," and a new single-player mode for "Hearthstone."
