Speaking with Eurogamer recently, lead software engineer Ryan Birmingham was
asked about the four phases of content planned for Classic’s release.
“I'm glad you asked,” he responded. “It is no longer four phases, it is
six.”
As someone who has played the game since 2005, hearing that we would be not just revisit vanilla, but relive it, was a significant
shift in my perspective of what WoW Classic would be. Sure, it was
always going to be interesting on a base level, but beyond that, would
it really be worth logging in again and again? Could you really keep all
the players with a single moment, frozen in time? As both a player and
someone who has worked in the industry, I’d say no. You couldn’t. But
Blizzard went further than this.
World of Warcraft’s biggest strength wasn’t just that your environments would change over the course of your
journey, it was that your character world evolve, too. During a later
expansion, I saw a warrior log into Orgrimmar, the orc capital city. He,
a colossal Tauren, stood in a complete set of Tier 3 Dreadnought Armor,
so I knew he had endlessly crunched his way through the vast, evil
halls of Naxxaramas. This grand minotaur sat astride a giant bug, black
chitin plates shifting in the sun. A mount he could’ve only acquired by
being the first (or at least one of the first) to slam his scepter into
an ancient gong, and open the doors to Ahn’Qiraj, after the entire
population of the server had contributed hundreds of thousands of
resources and endless hours to the task.
Yet over time, WoW saw transmogrification introduced, the ability to make any weapon or piece
of armour look like so many others. The significance of armor sets
started to wear off. The prestige of those Dreadnought plates was worn
away. In Classic, gear becomes important again, even if it’s just
enviously side-eyeing someone standing around in full Bloodfang leather
as you lumber your mishmash jumble of multicolored nonsense through the
journey to level 60.
