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Blizzard did a big Warcraft Direct presentation yesterday… which I missed because some of us have day jobs you know… but even before I was able to dig into the videos and such I ran into the 2025 roadmap for WoW Classic and went… well… wow!
Blizzard WoW Classic 2025 Roadmap
First up is that Cataclysm Classic will be lingering until spring/summer, which I longer that I expected I guess. But we will be getting Mists of Pandaria Classic and all that comes with it, including pet battles and Panderan as a race and monks as a class and them being able to choose Horde or Alliance or… like that one person… just stay on the starter island and level up to level cap by harvesting herbs and never make the choice. It will be a thing.
In the absence of any other news that would be fine. Sure, Cataclysm would be well past its prime… which is has already passed for me… and the fact that the Pandaria per-patch is in the “summer” column, meaning July at the earliest, seems like a long long way away… well, I can live with that. There are other games to play and the group can find things to do any so on.
We do not live by Azeroth alone.
Meanwhile, down at the bottom there is WoW Classic Season of Discovery, which looks like it is going to wrap up with Phase 7 and be done. That was cute for a bit, but didn’t really do much for me. It wasn’t different enough from vanilla to satisfy any WoW Classic Plus fantasies. I won’t miss it when it is gone and takes a few characters with it.
But then there is the bombshell in the middle row, WoW Classic 20th Anniversary Edition which is starting pretty damn soon and is sending a lot of mixed signals to my brain. From the post:
Relive the World of Warcraft Classic experience with all-new fresh realms in the WoW Classic 20th Anniversary Edition arriving November 21. Join players on a whole new journey to level 60, with the first raid dungeon, Molten Core, becoming available a few weeks after launch. Choose to play on a PvP realm, a Normal PvE realm, or (for the very first time) a Hardcore realm progressing through content with the other realms — all from the beginning, with fresh economies, on very large realms.
These realms will launch with some of the quality-of-life features that came later in the WoW Classic cycle, such as the Chronoboon Displacer to save your world buffs and the improved PvP Honor Ranking system. The PvP and Normal PvE realms will also progress into Burning Crusade Classic!
It’s never too late to go back and re-experience World of Warcraft anew—just in time to celebrate 20 years of adventures in Azeroth!
On the one hand, I feel like we just did that… though, in reality, WoW Classic kicked off more than five years ago, so maybe it is time. The runs with Season of Discovery and Hardcore Classic make it feel like I’ve been in vanilla a lot more recently that 2019, which reduces my emotional investment in the idea of starting over fresh again.
On the flip side though… that is next week and it could be huge and maybe I should jump in and wasn’t this all so great back in 2019 and will it be the same and a half a hundred other thoughts all competing for attention in my brain as Blizzard taps into that retro nostalgia part of my brain with the chance at another bit at the apple.
So I am a bit conflicted. There is, without a doubt, some corner of my brain that wants to be in Elwyn Forest and Westfall again struggling to find Defias masks and what not. And there is another part… a much larger part, if I am honest… that feels like that need has been sated for now. I have done the whole “both ways, uphill, in the snow” version of WoW and, while I enjoyed it, I was also much happier when we arrived at Wrath Classic when things settled down and some of the rougher edges had huge, life threatening splinters sanded down.
That said, it does look like Blizz learned a bit about pacing. The new WoW Classic phases look to be a bit tighter and Burning Crusade Classic is on the roadmap in about a year. The first time around we went from August of 2019 to June of 2021 to get that far. So it feels like there will be less time lingering in expansions, which can be good or can be bad.
With the EverQuest retro servers they set a pretty fast pace and I can never keep up, but leveling in old Norrath is a group effort and a chore which requires effort and knowledge as to where to go. WoW is a bit different. If you can not make half a dozen alts… *cough* …and just focus on one character, getting to the cap isn’t anything like a year long task, even with the level 40 slump. Just grind through it.
Of course, all of this means that there will be two sets of WoW Classic expansion progression servers running in parallel. I guess I could go back to Wrath Classic and play again if I wanted. And with the new one running faster than the old one… I don’t imagine one will catch up to the other, but the gap will likely close.
This also does feel like a commitment to the expansion progression server idea so, in reference to my past post about when WoW Classic should end, the plan does look more like Blizz will ride this out to at least Shadowlands. We shall see.
Now to go look into the plan for retail, which has some promise of player housing… though we’ve been fed that line before.