unusual consequences when it was
reintroduced. “People asked for it, so we
put it back in, and because of some
additional changes we’d added to the code
over the years, it actually introduced
about a second and a half of loot lag,”
Birmingham says. “It didn’t occur to us
that the two things could be related. When
we saw we were experiencing it, we didn’t
know where it was coming from, but
tracked it down, we found it and we
removed it again. Sometimes these
systems are complicated, interrelated,
and you go to fix one thing and it causes
a different issue.”
Meanwhile, other things that have
been working as designed have been
misidentified as bugs. Birmingham recalls
noticing an issue with the Charge ability
in an early build where it stunned the
enemy instead of putting them into
combat with the player, and only once the
player had arrived at the enemy and
auto-attacked would it retaliate. He
assumed it was a bug, but comparing it
to the original 1.12 behavior, that was how
it was meant to work.
That data is one of the things Blizzard
has over private vanilla servers, at least
one of which plans to continue after
Classic launches. “I think we have a better
promise of stability, and also a better
promise of authenticity,” Birmingham tells
me. “We actually have the original data,
so we can go back and look at what it
was actually like.
“We’re not trying to do it just based on
memories, which can be flawed. That can
be a starting point, to give you that sense
of ‘I remember this, I feel this, it feels right
to me,’ but when you get down to the
nitty-gritty details, sometimes you think it
was one way, but when you go and look it’s
actually different.”
Nostalgia and our selective memories
also make it easier to gloss over a game’s
shortcomings, but there’s one place
where rose-tinted glasses aren’t
necessary. Classic has an abundance of
style and character, and I was surprised to
find that even with the newer textures,
character models and graphics options
stripped out, the world remains lavish,
eye-catching, and completely resistant to
the passage of time. It’s an aestheticinextricably linked to the MMO, but really it
started in Warcraft.
“We do have a Warcraft style, and
that’s largely things are over-proportioned,
and colors are bright and vibrant,” Senior
Art Director Samwise Didier says. “A lot of
times people just say ‘Well, yeah that’s
how games are done’, but there wasn’t a
lot of that before. Lord of the Rings and all
the traditional medieval fantasy stuff was
a bit dingy, not bright and colorful, so we
sort of took that comic book coloring style
from comics like Thor and all these
vibrant, over the top, heroic things, and
applied it to our game.”
The big shoulders, for instance, which
feel so very World of Warcraft, were
initially handy in the RTS because it made
soldiers easy to identify. Now they make it
easy to identify fashion criminals. The
world and style development over the
course of multiple games meant it was
already refined by the time World of
Warcraft launched, so just like players
returning to Classic, Azeroth’s first
denizens were already familiar with it.
“I think Warcraft, with a lot of its
iterations, the art got better, the stories
got deeper, the technology improved,
and the designers got better,” Didier says.
“So you had ten years of Warcraft before
World of Warcraft even came out. And
as soon as it came out and people
started at level one, they knew exactly
what was going on.”PLAYER BASE
I got lost, chased by raptors, lost again in
my talent trees and achieved very little,
but it was a great way to waste a day. The
pace and trickier one-on-one duels feel
like a palate cleanser now that Battle for
Azeroth lets you blow through a vast
chunk of the game like an invincible
demigod. But spread out across months
or years? I’m not sure I have the patience
for it. Classic is a seductive prospect, but I
suspect I’ll just be one of the tourists.
World of Warcraft Classic will begin—
all you need is a subscription to the regular
game—on August 27, with a closed beta
kicking off on May 15. Blizzard hasn’t
announced dates for the patches, nor
what happens after the Scourge invasion.
A lot of that will be down to the players,
and right now there are no plans beyond
the final vanilla update. It will exist as a
snapshot of the game as it used to be. If
you want it to move forward, maybe to
Wrath of the Lich King, the greatest
expansion of the lot, let Blizzard know.
Fraser Brown“WE’RE NOT TRYING TO DO IT
JUST BASED ON MEMORIES,
WHICH CAN BE FLAWED”World of Warc raf t Cla ssic
PREVIEW
LF boat friends.