World of Warcraft Classic Launches Tomorrow
By Jack O'Dwyer
The long awaited Classic mode for Blizzard's hit multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft (WoW), will be going live globally tomorrow, Aug. 27 to the delight of hundreds of players.
Fans have been so desperately waiting for the return of "vanilla" WoW that at one point there were several dozen fan made and maintained realms—much to the chagrin of Blizzard who went through to shut most of them down. It appears, however, that they are now ready to answer the call and give their customers the experience they've been asking for.
WoW Classic will hit the live servers in the Americas on Aug. 26 at 6 p.m. Players who already subscribe to the game can jump on a classic server right now and reserve a character name for the official release.
Blizzard developers are aiming to right the wrongs of their previous release nearly 15 years ago. According to senior software engineer Omar Gonzalez, the team has multiple contingency plans in place and has their sights set on avoiding those infamous log-in queues.
"On our backend, we have a number of backup and contingency plans. We can grow and expand our servers, and we’re ready to adapt immediately," he said.
The official patch for this mode is 1.12, building off the original "Drums of War" patch from vanilla.
Some changes made to the game are the modern WoW polish that the original game has. Textures and animations have been updated—nearly turning Classic into a remake in the same vein as Warcraft III: Reforged. They have also installed layering to avoid large clusters of players in a single area and reinforced the amount of traffic the server can take to allow the epic-scale battles the game was known for.
Players can expect that stretch of land between Southshore and Tarren Mill to be an absolute bloodbath from the moment of launch.
"One of the core tenets of this whole project was a commitment to authenticity," said Gonzalez, "That extends all the way from large scale systems like PVP to the number of chairs in the capital cities."
World of Warcraft: Classic is available for free to all existing subscribers. More information about the game can be found on Blizzard's website.
Photo courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment.