If your memory’s become a bit fuzzy over the past 15 years and you haven’t dug into the myriad unofficial legacy servers we’ve had in the
meantime, you’ll find the old WoW to be a much slower-paced, more
exploratory game than it is today. The map isn’t dotted with convenient
quest markers, it takes ages to travel between locations, and any
encounter can turn deadly in an instant if you pull too many enemies.To
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In other words, it looks like the game is exactly what WoW fans have been asking for. At a Blizzard event showcasing WoW Classic, I spoke
with senior producer Calia Schie and game director Ion Hazzikostas about
the challenges of bringing retro WoW back for a modern audience, the
things players have forgotten along the way, and why it has taken so
long for Blizzard to finally get legacy servers ready to go.
Because we finally figured out a way to do it. As you know, questions
have been asked at BlizzCon and elsewhere for a long time, and the
answer of ‘no’ or ‘we can’t do this’ was never a philosophical one on
our part, nor a matter of stubbornness. It was simply that every time we
had looked back at what it would entail to bring the original World of
Warcraft into the modern era, the obstacles seemed insurmountable.
We had the original 1.12 client and server and data. But they were designed to run on hardware that hasn’t existed for a long time, in an
overall tech stack and part of a broader Blizzard infrastructure that
hasn’t existed for a long time. It was full of bugs and exploits and
tons of things that really were addressed over the course of literally
tens of thousands of hours of programming efforts between 2006 and
today. So the idea of trying to retrace those steps seemed virtually
impossible.
But I think it was really just a few years ago – two and a half or three years ago – in part due to a more intense community focus, we took
a much harder look at the question and said, ‘ok, we think this is
impossible, but what if we had to do it – what approaches might we
take?’ We started to go down some R&D paths. One of the ideas we
came up with was an experiment that was spearheaded by a programmer on
the WoW team, Omar Gonzalez, one of the members of the Classic team.
What if we took our modern client, our modern server architecture and
instead taught them to speak the original 1.12 data? Rather than working
forwards, what if we took what we have now, trying to kind of interpret
what was there back then.He spent a few weeks hacking together a rough
prototype, and there were tons of bugs – things didn’t fully render, and
there were all sorts of UI elements missing, and things weren’t
accurate. But at its core, it was 1.12 WoW. It was the old world. It was
the old skill system and talent system, and it was there running in the
modern client. And the fact that he was able to get so far in that
amount of time gave us confidence that this is something that we
actually could do. There wasn’t going to be hundreds of thousands of
hours. It was to be something that we can actually deliver in a number
of years and get to our players at a level of quality that we deemed
worthy of Blizzard and worthy of what they expect of us. That’s the
story of WoW Classic.
Ultimately, I think we came to that conclusion really late into summer 2017, and announced it at BlizzCon a couple of months after that.
Uncharacteristically early in a lot of ways for a Blizzard
announcement. In part because we were just really excited that we had
found a path to make this happen and wanted to share it with the world.
We knew there’s gonna be a ton of enthusiasm behind it. We knew those
those questions were going to continue. People have been asking them
forever. We wanted to be able to say, ‘yes, we’re doing it’.
