What do we do when Phase 6 is over?
A BRIEF HISTORY OF WORLD OF WARCRAFT CLASSIC
Referred to by the community as retail WoW, World of Warcraft is currently in its 16th year. With the release of Shadowlands, it now has 8 expansion packs. After all these years, many players have started to feel burned out on the game’s newer expansions. Naturally, some of those players fled to free private servers that hosted the original WoW (vanilla), most notably to a server called Nostalrius.
World of Warcraftit developers, Blizzard Entertainment, shut Nostalrius, and other servers like it, by threatening them with lawsuits. Nostalrius closing in 2015 left private server players confused and upset, with nowhere to go. Fans of older versions of WoW were forced to play retail or nothing, leaving a vacuum for vanilla players. To say that Blizzard was criticized for this move is a gross understatement.
Nearly four years later, in August of 2019, Blizzard finally seized the opportunity to fill that nostalgia void with its own re-release of the original WoW: World of Warcraft Classic.
World of Warcraft Classic is an official re-release of the original 2004-2006 World of Warcraft, free of any expansion packs. WoW Classic is included in the base subscription price of retail World of Warcraft. Classic is updated independently of retail and has separate, dedicated servers.
WoW Classic has been out for more than a year now, and with the recent release of Phase 6, patch 1.13, WoW Classic content is inevitably coming to some kind of end. For the Classic community at large, this end is nebulous, to say the least.
BURNING CRUSADE WHEN?
It seems that Blizzard has few choices for where to take World of Warcraft Classic after Phase 6 is finished.
They could release The Burning Crusade, and continue on the path of releasing its old expansions in sequence just like retail World of Warcraft. That raises a few questions, like will players still be able to play vanilla WoW? If so, will there be dedicated servers for each subsequent expansion in concurrence with vanilla? How will character transfers work? None of these questions have been answered because nothing has been confirmed by Blizzard.
The only piece of official information players have in regards to a release of The Burning Crusade (TBC) is this survey sent to some members of the community. In the survey, several options are entertained, but the verbiage suggests TBC will inevitably be released.
SOMETHING NEW?
A second option, which would be the most interesting by far, is to release new expansion severs for the players that want it, and expand WoW Classic in a totally new way. It isn’t completely unheard of, just look at Old School Runescape (OSRS).
Jagex, Runescape’s developer, decided to expand upon their old content instead of pushing it toward its current form. OSRS allows players to decide where the direction will go through in-game surveys. Now, OSRS and current Runescape (Runescape 3), are almost entirely separate games. OSRS is simultaneously nostalgic and new while being extremely democratic. The community and the developers work in tandem to decide what is best for the future of the game.
If Blizzard pulled a similar move, players could have their cake and eat it too. World of Warcraft Classic could branch off into entirely new content. It’s extremely unlikely, and obviously wouldn’t please everyone, but it could be an interesting experiment. There’s a precedent that it works in OSRS, and World of Warcraft Classic isn’t so vastly different that something similar couldn’t be implemented. Blizzard has the money, and they have the resources. Why not try something new?
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How Blizzard goes forward with World of Warcraft Classic could mean a lot for the future of the game. If they listen to their community and are more communicative on the whole, it could even help to repair Blizzard’s emaciated public opinion. No matter what Blizzard chooses to do, the nostalgia dopamine drip simply cannot stop.
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