‘World of Warcraft Classic’ developers reminisce about old Azeroth

World of Warcraft Classic is nearly upon us. 

The excitement surrounding the relaunch of one of the most beloved video games in history is electrifying. For long-time players, it’s an opportunity to relive some of our earliest memories from the version of the game we sunk hundreds (or thousands) of hours into. For others, it’s an opportunity to experience the most legendary MMORPG of all time from the beginning.

Millions of people are psyched, but there’s no one more excited than the developers.

Ahead of the Aug. 27 launch, I spoke with WoW Classic developers Brian Birmingham, lead software engineer, and Omar Gonzalez, senior software engineer, about how much they’re looking forward to Classic. We also chatted about some of their favorite memories from the early years of World of Warcraft and discussed the unique development process of reviving the original version of WoW.

The hype is real

Birmingham and Gonzalez both began working on World of Warcraft during the early days before the launch of the first expansion in 2007. They’re beyond ready for Classic to go live on Tuesday.

“This is like a dream come true,” Gonzalez said. “It’s exciting and also surreal, thinking back to the very beginnings and now being able to tie it back all over again. It’s been crazy and wonderful and exciting and I can’t wait ‘til launch.”

When World of Warcraft Classic was first announced in 2017, the news exploded online as fans imagined diving back into the annals of WoW history to feel that ineffable magic that captured so many people when it first launched in 2004. So much has changed over the game’s lifetime that the original, vanilla experience that Classic is bringing back is shockingly different than retail version of the game is today.

“It was really, really great to see the passion and dedication our fans have”

“This is something that, when I heard we were planning on doing this, I was jumping at the opportunity to be a part of it,” Birmingham said.

Fans also jumped at the opportunity to be a part of it, signing on as participants in the closed beta test, eager to see the old world and help fine-tune the game so it could be as perfect as possible at launch. With more than three weeks left to go in the beta in July, Blizzard updated players saying that more than 17,000 bug reports had been filed by diligent testers.

“It was really, really great to see the passion and dedication our fans have to be able to give us so many reports,” said Birmingham. “This is such a big game with so many things to do, so many nooks and crannies to look in.”

Image: blizzard entertainment

“There are some very dedicated theory crafters that are really into all the math and all the combat mechanics, and they would try to figure out if we get things like the chance of parries and crushing blows correctly,” Gonzalez added, referencing equation-based events that pop up in combat in the game. “They would just find a spot in the world where they could just punch turtles thousands of times so they could have a large enough sample size to say, ‘OK, taking randomness out of the equation, we average out to the expected combat chance whether it’s a dodge or a miss.'”

He acknowledged the amount of time, energy, and effort that kind of testing takes and commended the community for helping the developers so thoroughly.

A trip down memory lane

People are really invested in making sure the experience matches the one they had nearly 15 years ago. There’s the desire to slip right back into that world, like slipping under a warm, cozy blanket of nostalgia.

I personally began playing World of Warcraft back in 2005. I remember New Year’s Eve that year, when, as a level 30-something Tauren shaman, I was sitting at Thunder Bluff chatting with friends when trade chat came up about raiding an Alliance city. Instead of hanging out with my family that night, I walked with dozens of other players from Undercity to Ironforge to try and kill the Dwarf king Magni Bronzebeard. We failed, but it was a blast.

Birmingham and Gonzalez both had fond memories of one of the game’s earliest and most iconic raids, Molten Core.

“I remember both with great joy and horror the time that the first Binding of the Windseeker dropped for my raid and I got that binding. I was so happy,” Birmingham said.

There were two Bindings of the Windseeker in World of Warcraft, each dropped by a boss found inside the Molten Core raid. When players got both, they were sent on a quest to create one of the game’s first legendary weapons, Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker. The problem was, the bindings had a very low chance of dropping.

“I was our guild’s main tank, so everyone was like, ‘Of course you have to have it.’ I was thrilled,” Birmingham said. “I was like, ‘When’s the next one gonna drop?’”

Image: Blizzard entertainment

Birmingham never got that other binding despite doing that raid over and over again, but the memory is still a fond one.

“That is something that’s still precious to me, even just the feeling that all my guild members were so happy to give it to me,” he said. “It was a group experience even though I was the one getting loot. Everyone was excited this was happening.”

“The world is really intimidating and challenging and difficult”

Gonzalez recalled his first raiding experience, which happened when he received a phone call from a friend on a Saturday morning asking if he could log on and be a part of a raid. Molten Core was a 40-player raid, and as Gonzalez said, sometimes you just needed some bodies to fill out the group.

“So I’m like, ‘OK, sure, I’m not doing anything,'” he said. 

He changed the specialization of his Paladin to Holy so he could be a healer and was given his instructions for the boss Gehennas: Stand there and keep casting heals at the main tank.

“I’m just like, ‘All right!'” Gonzalez said with a laugh. “And they did a healer rotation switch, so everyone had to run off in that group, [regenerate] their mana, and the second group came in. I didn’t know that so I just kind of stood there and just kept healing, just kept healing. I run out of mana and I jump on Ventrilo. I’m like, ‘I’m out of mana guys!’ and they’re yelling at me because I’m not in the regen group and I’m like, ‘I’m sorry guys! I don’t know what I’m doing!’”

Even though he messed up the rotation, he still walked away with some epic loot: Lawbringer Gauntlets.

“I was just really excited and kept logging in and raiding ever since,” Gonzalez said.

New opportunities in old Azeroth

Famously, Gonzalez has always been a member of the Alliance, and Birmingham has always been a member of Horde, but with the launch of Classic, they’re looking to switch things up.

“Some of it is like, I want to go back and play through some of those earliest memories I have of like leveling up in Tirisfal Glades and Silverpine Forest, but I also have this desire to explore this other side of the continent,” Birmingham said. “I have been Horde for 15 years and I think I’m gonna go try to play Alliance this time. There’s a whole world to explore there that I have not seen.”

Meanwhile Gonzalez stuck to his Paladin through all those years, which until late 2010 was an Alliance-only class, and mostly did PvE content (quests, dungeons, and raids) rather than PvP (fighting players on the Horde).

“I’m likely to actually go Shaman and PvP my whole way up,” he said. “Literally the same game but a completely different game.”

Image: blizzard entertainment

There are a myriad of different ways to experience World of Warcraft, and not just within the confines of Classic. For players who’ve only started playing the game in recent years, Classic, which is playable as long as you have a subscription to the current retail version of WoW, will feel like a completely different game.

Birmingham spoke to some of the things that players new to the original vanilla experience will find jarring.

“The world is really intimidating and challenging and difficult,” he said. “I believe finding out how challenging it is to explore the world and finding out how hostile of a character it is is something that will be really new and exciting for people to discover. If you’ve only played WoW in the last couple years, it will be surprising how much you will need to rely on your friends to get through some of those difficult quests.”

“You have to make a little bit more of that social effort”

Retail players can level through a whole expansion solo without too many hiccups, but that’s not the case with Classic. Gonzalez echoed that sentiment.

“There’s a much greater emphasis on team and group play and this notion that you just can’t do everything by yourself,” he said. “If you want to take on some of the more difficult challenges, whether they’re elite quests or dungeons, you have to reach out, you have to make social connections.”

Certain features (or lack of features) in vanilla WoW made the game much more social and collaborative.

“There’s no Dungeon Finder,” Gonzalez said, referencing a feature added in the Burning Crusade expansion in 2007. “You have to speak up and try to start and kick off these social connections.”

He also explained another feature in the retail version: If you try to invite a player to form a group with you but they’re already in a group, the game will send a message to the leader of that player’s group for you and you can be added with just a click. That’s not how it worked in vanilla and not how it will work in Classic.

“What you get in Classic now is simply a message saying ‘That player is already in a group,’” Gonzalez said. “If you want to join their group, you actually have to whisper [i.e. message] to that other character, ‘Hey! Hi! How are you? Can I please join your group?’ You have to make a little bit more of that social effort, and we think that’s really important to fostering and trying to build up these social connections, because that was a critical part of Classic.”

Creating the authentic Classic experience

One word that kept popping up in our conversation was “authenticity.” 

“Our design mandate was pretty clear and well-defined from the very beginning. We wanted to take an approach of authenticity and preservation,” Gonzalez said. “We had the original code, the original data, and we had that game running internally so most of our design was just ‘Match this exactly.’”

That’s not always so easy. When taking the original data and running it on the modern code, there are inevitably going to be some things that don’t translate over perfectly. 

“One of the things that’s challenging is trying to decide if something is actually a bug or not,” Birmingham said. “You go back and find something and go like, ‘We fixed that bug later but when did we fix that bug? Did we fix that bug in Mists of Pandaria [in 2012]? Well then, in that case, that’s not a bug and we need to put that back.’ It’s a balancing act.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

When asked if there was anything particularly painful to put back into WoW Classic, Gonzalez answered pretty quickly: “Hunters.”

Both of the developers laughed, and Birmingham explained that Hunters were one of the last classes added to the game originally, and they have so many detailed mechanics. Gonzalez noted that when putting Hunters in Classic, there was an odd bug that made Hunters wait an extra long time when their ranged auto-attack was interrupted. But that bug wasn’t fixed until a later expansion. The developers wanted to keep the experience how it felt up to patch 1.12, the final patch before the first expansion released.

It’s been a years-long process

“When we realized this, we looked back and we just undid that fix and brought the bug back, because that’s how it worked in 1.12, and we are aiming for authenticity in the core gameplay systems as closely as possible,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez listed off some other bugs that did need to be fixed in development, including one that took out the chat in the zone Westfall and an error where the dual-wielding Risen Constructs in the Scholomance dungeon were dealing double the amount of damage they should have. Birmingham remembered another bug where some of the water planes in Elwynn Forest had holes in them for some reason. Those kinds of things just happen when you run old data on new code.

Passion project

It’s been a years-long process developing World of Warcraft Classic, and it’s all been built from passion — passion from developers who have worked on the game since the beginning and passion from players who want to live that experience again.

“I want to thank all the fans,” Gonzalez said at the end of our conversation. “We would not be here launching this game if it wasn’t for their love and dedication and support, so a huge thank you to you and the community.”

Happy leveling.