Blogs World of Warcraft Classic: “We had to recreate bugs to get back to how it once was”

World of Warcraft Classic: “We had to recreate bugs to get back to how it once was”

If your memory’s become a bit fuzzy over the past 15 years and you haven’t dug into the myriad unofficial legacy servers we’ve had in the meantime, you’ll find the old WoW to be a much slower-paced, more exploratory game than it is today. The map isn’t dotted with convenient quest markers, it takes ages to travel between locations, and any encounter can turn deadly in an instant if you pull too many enemies.To get more news about Buy WoW Items, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

In other words, it looks like the game is exactly what WoW fans have been asking for. At a Blizzard event showcasing WoW Classic, I spoke with senior producer Calia Schie and game director Ion Hazzikostas about the challenges of bringing retro WoW back for a modern audience, the things players have forgotten along the way, and why it has taken so long for Blizzard to finally get legacy servers ready to go.
Because we finally figured out a way to do it. As you know, questions have been asked at BlizzCon and elsewhere for a long time, and the answer of ‘no’ or ‘we can’t do this’ was never a philosophical one on our part, nor a matter of stubbornness. It was simply that every time we had looked back at what it would entail to bring the original World of Warcraft into the modern era, the obstacles seemed insurmountable.

We had the original 1.12 client and server and data. But they were designed to run on hardware that hasn’t existed for a long time, in an overall tech stack and part of a broader Blizzard infrastructure that hasn’t existed for a long time. It was full of bugs and exploits and tons of things that really were addressed over the course of literally tens of thousands of hours of programming efforts between 2006 and today. So the idea of trying to retrace those steps seemed virtually impossible.

But I think it was really just a few years ago – two and a half or three years ago – in part due to a more intense community focus, we took a much harder look at the question and said, ‘ok, we think this is impossible, but what if we had to do it – what approaches might we take?’ We started to go down some R&D paths. One of the ideas we came up with was an experiment that was spearheaded by a programmer on the WoW team, Omar Gonzalez, one of the members of the Classic team. What if we took our modern client, our modern server architecture and instead taught them to speak the original 1.12 data? Rather than working forwards, what if we took what we have now, trying to kind of interpret what was there back then.He spent a few weeks hacking together a rough prototype, and there were tons of bugs – things didn’t fully render, and there were all sorts of UI elements missing, and things weren’t accurate. But at its core, it was 1.12 WoW. It was the old world. It was the old skill system and talent system, and it was there running in the modern client. And the fact that he was able to get so far in that amount of time gave us confidence that this is something that we actually could do. There wasn’t going to be hundreds of thousands of hours. It was to be something that we can actually deliver in a number of years and get to our players at a level of quality that we deemed worthy of Blizzard and worthy of what they expect of us. That’s the story of WoW Classic.

Ultimately, I think we came to that conclusion really late into summer 2017, and announced it at BlizzCon a couple of months after that. Uncharacteristically early in a lot of ways for a Blizzard announcement. In part because we were just really excited that we had found a path to make this happen and wanted to share it with the world. We knew there’s gonna be a ton of enthusiasm behind it. We knew those those questions were going to continue. People have been asking them forever. We wanted to be able to say, ‘yes, we’re doing it’.