I did not watch the Blizzard update today; I only read the highlights, officially known as "Catch Up on the State of Azeroth in our Recap".
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| You know, this thing. |
Good thing I did, because the overall lack of WoW Classic information wasn't that great of a surprise. To me, anyway.
The 2019 Classic Train is still in Mists, and that was highlighted in the roadmap along with the Anniversary Servers currently on a somewhat watered-down TBC Classic that's designed to be blasted through in less than a year.
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| To see this better, click on it to see the full-sized version. From Blizzard. |
Basically, the WoW Classic train got some vague promises of wanting to stay true to the community, and there will be surveys heading out over the year to gauge interest in various things and how you want to play.
Oh, and there's now a WoW Ambassador Program, that's supposed to be the community helping the community. Given how some people play, I'm not so sure this will work out very well --or maybe about as well as other community initiatives, which is damning by faint praise-- but at least they're trying.
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Oh, and did you know that there's Player Housing in Retail WoW?
Oh yes, housing alone got about more of a mention in the recap than all of the Classic WoW versions combined, which also speaks to the fact that Blizzard devoted 2/3 of the recap (and likely the video itself) to Retail WoW. Bully to those who play Retail, but that also says to me that Classic WoW is definitely the red-headed stepchild of the WoW community. Which is honestly just fine for the Classic WoW players, who are going to do their own thing.
How do I know this? The Classic community is already reviving the community-driven Hardcore mode, this time for TBC Classic Anniversary Edition.
This is in direct response to Blizzard deciding to pull the plug on official Hardcore Anniversary servers when the TBC Classic pre-patch dropped. And I'd bet a couple of doughnuts** that TBC Hardcore will be far more popular than people expect. Even if Blizz didn't throw a bone at the Hardcore community by allowing for a buff/debuff identifying those Hardcore players, they'd be out there anyway.
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One thing that people will point out is that there's still a gigantic black hole for what will happen to WoW Classic once both Mists Classic and TBC Anniversary Classic reach their conclusions at the end of the year. I presume any news there will happen at BlizzCon, which is smack in the middle of September, right around the time when the WoW Classic Anniversary servers were announced in 2024.
I guess that the reckoning will be put off a bit longer, but if I were a betting man this is what I'd expect:
- Warlords Classic will be a thing as the Classic train will keep running towards an eventual merging with Retail WoW, likely sometime around 2029-2030.
- TBC Anniversary Classic will progress to Wrath Anniversary Classic around mid-Q1 2027.
- No Classic Plus will be announced, but Blizz will tinker with another Seasonal server along the lines of the Chinese Titan Reforged servers.
*I'm borrowing "whelming" from Josh Strife Hayes, who uses "it was whelming" in place of the more standard "it was meh".
**To me in my current state of health, that's a pretty serious bet.
***Didn't you ever play "telephone" using a couple of cups and a string connecting the two? Well, shit, I guess I really AM old.
I sincerely hope Classic makes it to Legion at some point. The Artifacts and Class Halls sounded very cool. That is the only part of retail I feel like I may have missed out during the long break I took from the game. I know they did a Legion+, but I am really curious to explore the original version.
ReplyDeleteApart from that, another chance to play the WoTLK era game is about all that would get me back right now. LotRO and a replay of FFVI on my Switch are taking up most of my spare time, and I have Project Gorgon cued up behing those.
As for Retail, I don't much care what they do with that game, it's dead to me. I mean yeah sure, if I sub up for Classic I'll stick my head in. But they pretty much stopped designing that game for me after MoP, and even in that era I felt the game was much diminished.
At this point I expect them to follow the Classic train all the way into Retail, because if they didn't stop at Wrath nor at Cataclysm, they're definitely pushing through to Legion at the very least.
DeleteBy not watching the video, you missed out on this tidbit after the Classic roadmap:
ReplyDeleteHolly: "And that's not all we're cooking up. I can say with confidence that all Classic players across the globe have a LOT to look forward to. I'm REALLY excited to announce that-"
Off-screen voice: "Holly, no!"
Holly: "I guess we'll save that for later." [chuckles]
It doesn't quite carry the same troll energy without the staged interruption seemingly preventing a major reveal. Really does make me wonder about Classic+ to be honest.
Anywho, as someone who plays multiple modes I thought the video was fine, even if I've personally not been that excited by their implementation of housing. I get why Classic-only players feel a bit trolled though.
Eh, that's just theater. For all I know, it could simply mean that they're skipping Warlords of Draenor entirely and heading straight to Legion Classic.
DeleteI have no illusions that the Classic team is big enough to pull off a true deviation from the Official Warcraft timeline within a reasonable period of time, so my guess is that they're either skipping Warlords in the 2019 Classic or that a new Seasonal server is where they do something such as change the factions or have full-on Caverns of Time remixing of alternate timeline raids.