World of Warcraft Classic players begging for fresh “vanilla” servers are finally getting their wish, with new servers set to go live on November 21 in celebration of WoW’s 20th anniversary. Meanwhile, those playing Cataclysm Classic will progress on to Mists of Pandaria in 2025.
Blizzard announced the news as part of its Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct, along the way confirming in advance the new vanilla servers (minus the fresh Hardcore servers that are also coming) will automatically progress to The Burning Crusade Classic when the time comes. Blizzard said that just because TBC is already confirmed doesn’t necessarily mean these new servers will keep moving forward all the way to Cataclysm (the expansion players who have kept progressing from WoW Classic’s 2019 launch servers are currently on), but it’s hard not to get some sense of deja vu.
In an interview with GameSpot, WoW Classic lead software engineer Nora Valletta and software engineer Kevin Vigue offered more details on what players starting from scratch on the fresh servers can expect, their thoughts on moving on to Mists of Pandaria, and what the team has learned from more experimental swings like Season of Discovery.
Blizzard is using advances in server technology to have larger realms that can hold more players but fewer realms overall for this batch of new servers. In a departure from normal, there will not be dedicated role-playing or RPPvP servers as has usually been the case in the past, Valletta confirmed. Quality-of-life improvements, like the world buff-saving Chronoboon Displacer, faction balancing on PvP realms, and updates to make the original game’s punishing Honor PvP rank system less punishing, will be present at launch for these new servers, as will a ban (at least in North America and Europe) on the controversial practice of GDKP runs–something Blizzard first implemented in Season of Discovery. In a change from 2019, the game’s first raid, Molten Core, won’t launch for a few weeks. The new servers will additionally have a group-finder tool (similar to one that appeared in TBC, Vigue said) to help players find groups without the need of an add-on.
A recent, unpopular change that saw Blizzard update the guild interface in WoW Classic and Season of Discovery to a more modern version will be reverted come the rollout of the new fresh servers, Vigue announced. Players will instead have the option of choosing between the more modern UI or its original appearance: a choice Blizzard doesn’t want to make a habit of offering but said felt right in regards to guilds.
“We realized, especially once we saw the community reaction, ‘Yeah, there is something really nostalgic about the original UI and how it’s presented and what it means for that game experience,'” Vigue said.
Adding to the sense of we’ve been here before is Blizzard’s announcement that Cataclysm Classic servers will move on in Summer 2025 to yet another “new” expansion, 2012’s Mists of Pandaria. Players may have already revisited Mists of Pandaria as part of modern WoW’s Mists of Pandaria Remix event earlier this year, but Valletta and Vigue said they think the two experiences are different enough to warrant another go around.
Mists of Pandaria Remix used the expansion as backdrop for players to collect exclusive cosmetics and gain new overpowered abilities that could almost one-shot even the game’s toughest bosses, but it still played like modern WoW, with all of its current class design, talents, and abilities. Mists of Pandaria Classic will instead play as it did when it first launched over a decade ago. Vigue and Valletta also raised the point that every expansion was some WoW player’s entry point into the MMORPG, and so Mists of Pandaria is, for some people, their “classic.” It’s an expansion that was perhaps under-appreciated in its time, but players now have fond memories of.
“I think the fact that MoP Remix was so well received speaks to…how much people love Pandaria as a continent and as an expansion,” Vigue said.
As for the currently ongoing WoW Classic Season of Discovery, Blizzard’s more experimental take on original WoW that was released towards the tail end of 2023, there’s still some new content coming down the pike. The game’s Naxxramas update will arrive later this winter. In addition to vanilla WoW’s final raid, it will add new “instanced” content in the form of a new encounter against the Scarlet Crusade as well as the Karazhan Crypts, which Blizzard originally teased back when it first announced Season of Discovery at BlizzCon 2023. Vigue and Valletta wouldn’t say whether the new content will be in the forms of raids, dungeons, or a combination of both, and instead said players will have to “discover” what’s in store themselves.
Vigue and Valletta also wouldn’t comment on what may come next after Season of Discovery–the “team’s always cooking,” Valletta said–but did say they have learned a ton from the seasonal server in regards to how to create new content for a 20-year-old game while still trying to maintain its original feeling.
“We’ve found Season of Discovery to be incredibly successful,” Valletta said. “I think part of what made it successful is that sense of…[the new content] is very much down to earth. It wasn’t massive, universe-ending world threats. It’s you, yourself, as that character in that world…You’re not some mighty fine champion hero who everybody knows and everything revolves around you, right? You exist in the world but the world is the main character, and you’re part of that.”
All the WoW Classic news was just one part of the Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct. Blizzard also launched new remastered versions of Warcraft 1 and 2, announced a StarCraft mini-set for Hearthstone, and more.