Finally! New Info About Blizzard's Classic WoW Development
"Wanna know how you can tell someone played during Vanilla? Don't worry, they'll tell you." Yes, we will tell you!
“After careful consideration, we have decided on Patch 1.12: Drums of War as our foundation because it represents the most complete version of the classic experience.”
— Blizzard Developers
Blizzard developers have finally given us a little bit of info on what to expect with WoW: Classic. Classic will be centered on Drums of War, Patch 1.12.0 for a complete a "vanilla" experience. Drums of War was originally patched in August 2006 and was the last major patch before the release of The Burning Crusade expansion.
Drums of War was basically a PvP patch. It introduced Cross-Realm battlegrounds or Battlegroups. This was Blizzard's answer to players having to wait literal hours to get into a battleground because battlegrounds, once upon a time, were relegated to players from the same realm. Although the wait was shortened due to having new players to play with, this was a sad day for me because cross-realms effectively ruined inter-realm, PvP guild rivalries (wanna know how you can tell someone played during vanilla...I told you we'd tell you). Patch 1.12 also introduced World PvP, turning Silithus and Eastern Plaguelands into PvP zones where players would battle to control the land for their respective faction. For those of us who were born and raised on PvE realms, this was pretty exciting and gave us a bit of a taste of PvP-realm life.
Blizzard developers settled on Drums because it was the last patch before Vanilla became TBC. In my personal opinion, Blizzard should use June 2006's Patch 1.11.0: Shadow of the Necropolis as its base. Shadow of the Necropolis was the last time Classic felt like the classic WoW that so many Vanilla players reminisce about. Patch 1.11.0 introduced the last 40-man instance raid, Naxxaramas, the floating necropolis above Eastern Plagueland's Stratholme.
But the developers do have their hands full with this project. They're on a journey to "recreate an authentic classic experience with modern engineering" to deliver to players a beautiful classic experience.
“Our initial runs exposed a few (expected) issues: the game sometimes crashed, didn’t recognize our modern video cards, and was incompatible with our current login system. That first pass also couldn’t support any of our modern security and anti-cheating capabilities.”
— Blizzard Developers
We're confident Blizzard devs will give us fans another glorious WoW experience. But for now, this is all we know. Do you think Patch 1.12.0 is the best starting point to deliver a Classic WoW experience? Will you be playing when it's finally released? Let us know in the comments or on Facebook.
