World of Warcraft is preparing some big things for its Classic-era servers. While fans don’t know exactly what to expect yet, World of Warcraft Classic players can expect some exciting things to come in the near future.
The classic era server in World of Warcraft is the most complete preserved world of Vanilla WoW. While the Wrath of the Lich King Classic servers have been updated in the past, the true classic World of Warcraft experience hasn’t received much attention since the Mastery Classic season servers shut down in February.
However, some new evidence suggests that this will change in the near future. Blizzard recently rolled out a new version of World of Warcraft Classic Era patch 1.15 on the developer branch. Because it’s encrypted and available only to developers, little additional information can be gleaned about what this update is all about. That said, former World of Warcraft Classic co-head Brian Birmingham lent credence to the hype by adding a cheeky comment to World of Warcraft creator MrGM’s post about the discovery.
In January, Birmingham was fired by Blizzard for protesting its mandatory employee ranking system. However, his comments suggest that he knows exactly what this secret patch is all about. Apparently, Classic WoW was doing big things long before Birmingham’s demise–and it’s coming to live servers soon.
This big World of Warcraft Classic patch could be anything. This could indicate that a second mastery season is imminent, or that World of Warcraft is implementing a hardcore realm to cater to the growing community involved in custom permadeath modes. Alternatively, World of Warcraft could launch Classic Plus – a concept that grew in popularity among fans as a vanilla WoW server, with some parts of the later expansion added. The player concept for Classic Plus focuses on adding content that was removed from Vanilla, but revisited in later expansions to World of Warcraft Classic servers. This could add areas like Hyjal to the base game, and reintroduce other exciting features and quality of life improvements to the WoW Classic servers, such as transmogrification, faster leveling, world bosses, and talent changes.
There’s no official word on what this big change might be, or when it’s coming; right now, players just know that something big is coming to Classic WoW. Fans may hear something soon—perhaps after World of Warcraft releases 10.1 Patch “Cinders of Neltharion” to retail servers on May 2.
World of Warcraft Classic is now available on PC.