World of Warcraft: Classic (later rebranded Classic Era) is a recreation of "vanilla WoW" as a server option for World of Warcraft announced at BlizzCon 2017. The goal of Classic is to let players experience World of Warcraft as close as possible to what it was before The Burning Crusade.
With the addition of World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic, existing characters must choose whether to stay in Classic or move on to the expansion. A character can be activated for use in both versions via the Activate Clone service, which creates a copy of the character as they were when the expansion choice was made. This service has since closed, keeping the Classic progression branch separate from the Classic Era.
Flavors
The game has since seen multiple different versions of itself:
Classic Era is the original experience of the game. It is still playable but remains unchanged since it has run its course from 2019 to 2021.
Season of Mastery was a fresh take on World of Warcraft: Classic since it debuted in 2019, giving players a chance to start fresh in a Classic setting in new realms. It has since closed in February 2023 as the season had run its course. It was designed as a more challenging raiding experience that included changes to raid mechanics (including restoring mechanics that were removed early on), the disabling of world buffs in raids, the removal of the boss debuff limit, the  [Soul of Iron] system, and more.
Hardcore brought permanent death to the Classic setting, with the focus on PvE content but a way for players to do their own Mak'gora via the Duel to the Death. Players who die can transfer to the Classic Era realms.
Season of Discovery is the current Classic season that was designed around drastic changes to the Classic experience. Starting with an initial level cap of 25, it saw some dungeons redesigned as low-level raids, the rune system, unique events for both PvE and PvP, unique dungeons, and narrative changes throughout the world.
Development
Before work began on World of Warcraft: Classic, it was only possible for players to experience the original World of Warcraft by using emulated servers, which are illegal, often have stability problems, and are generally imperfect recreations of the authentic World of Warcraft experience. As much as Blizzard had been aware of the desires of their community, until recently it seemed impossible for them to emulate Classic servers due to the technical hurdles of essentially having to run two massively multiplayer online games side-by-side. A breakthrough was then achieved that made it possible to run Classic servers on the modern architecture of current World of Warcraft servers.[3]
Blizzard had begun conceptualizing Classic by early 2017.[4]
Even though a modern server architecture is used, Classic servers won't have the same features that current World of Warcraft does. There won't be cross-realm servers or Looking For Raid and Dungeon Finder automatic party matchmaking. There are still a lot of questions about how the team will tackle it. This endeavor is being undertaken by an entirely separate team at Blizzard from the one working on World of Warcraft and its next expansion.[3]
In June 2018, the team settled on using patch 1.12 as a foundation for Classic. They managed to have a locally rebuilt version of patch 1.12 running internally, using modern code and data architecture.[5]
A demo of the game was available at BlizzCon 2018, and was downloadable on home computers (64-bit client only) for anyone who purchased a BlizzCon ticket or virtual ticket. The servers became available when Opening Ceremony started at BlizzCon 2018 and was set to end on November 8, but was extended until November 12.[6] Player levels ranged from 15 to 19, and the only available zones were Westfall and the Barrens without access to
Дата на публикация: 18 септември, 2024
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