World of Warcraft Classic has been in closed beta for just under a week. In that time hundreds of players clashed in the Arathi Highlands, the Classic WoW subreddit crested 100,000 subscribers, and the beta has garnered over 150,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch. I've personally invested 20 hours into the beta at this point and am shocked to find myself enjoying parts of the 15-year-old MMO that I remember as mundane. Going in, I knew I'd love the single-shard servers, non-homogeneous classes, lack of flying mounts, and many reasons to interact with other players, but I didn't expect to enjoy the surprising difficulty of simply questing on my own. It's easy to take what I'm playing for granted but the fact of the matter is that WoW Classic wouldn't exist without years of deliberation on the part of a passionate fanbase, followed by years of development on the part of an equally passionate developer.

I had the privilege of traveling to Irvine, California to play before the beta started and talk to the folks at Blizzard behind the project. They told a story of learning, enthusiasm, and cautious optimism in regards to WoW Classic, perhaps best articulated by J. Allen Brack, the recently appointed President of Blizzard Entertainment. He’s a thirteen-year Blizzard veteran who, until recently, had been with the WoW team since vanilla.

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Blizzard’s stance on old-school servers wasn't always so eager but evolved due to fan demand and the arguments presented in their favor. Somewhat infamously, Brack himself said “you think you do, but you don’t” in regards to the desire to play older versions of WoW back in 2013, and the internet hardly let him live it down until he personally announced World of Warcraft Classic at 2017’s Blizzcon. So does the sentiment that you can’t go home again still hold water in regards to WoW Classic?

“ One of the things that made us say "hey we want to do this and we believe in it" was this game feeling like it deserves to exist.

“I think the answer to that is that it doesn’t matter what I think.” he told me, “We have decided to make WoW Classic... You know, one of the things that made us say ‘hey we want to do this and we believe in it’ was this game feeling like it deserves to exist.”

“WoW has been a huge game,” Brack continued. “It’s had a huge community impact, it’s created a lot of bonds and friendships. Not being able to experience that game felt like a bit of a tragedy. So that was part of the lens as well was like ‘hey this game should exist, we should find a way for this game to exist!’ And now we’ve done the work and it will exist, and you saw the release date at the end of August, we’re really excited to bring a multi-year journey to that kind of conclusion.”

As I wrote in my preview, World of Warcraft Classic has much more to offer than just nostalgia. The world is filled to the brim with abstruse and challenging elements that coerce you to make and maintain relationships with other players if you want to succeed. As a result, I believe that WoW Classic’s MMO ecosystem offers an experience that can’t be found anywhere else in 2019. And, it would appear I’m not the only one who sees something special in the more-than-decade-old game. Just last week more than 100,000 viewers congregated in the chat of popular streamer “Asmongold” to watch him successfully fell Edwin Van Cleef in the classic Deadmines. A vindicating spectacle that would have been impossible to witness without Blizzard overcoming certain technical hurdles.

“ WoW's had a huge community impact, it’s created a lot of bonds and friendships. Not being able to experience that game felt like a bit of a tragedy.

“We talked about it [making Classic] for a number of years and we couldn’t figure out what the right way to do it would be,” Brack explained. "The problem was, the codebase that shipped with WoW and encompassed the WoW Classic timeline was a codebase that we had really moved on from in subsequent years. Software is a very iterative process, and its development was more than 10 years in the past at this point. So thinking about the hardware that didn’t exist anymore that we would need to run on it, running two MMOs simultaneously with two different toolsets, two different toolchains, it was not something we could really get our head around.”

“By the way, one of these codebases [Vanilla WoW] is extremely buggy, and we had already solved a lot of those [bugs]. But we can’t solve them [this time around] because... ‘reasons’ if we’re thinking about the Classic timeline. And so we really struggled with it for a very long time, and one of the things that we talked about when we were discussing different ways to do it was to do what’s called a ‘fork.’ So we did a fork of our existing modern server stack and then reimplemented the systems that we needed to support Classic WoW. And made sure that the tuning was right and imported the old data, we had the old code and a way to compare. Having the backend tools, and the backend server, and the modern hardware was a requirement to realize this project.” Essentially, what the team did, was teach modern WoW to speak old Classic data.

Fifteen years of iterative design means that the World of Warcraft that existed in 2006 is dissimilar to World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth as it exists in 2019, even if you’re playing the same content. The cumulative effect of thousands of tweaks means that pinpointing exactly what made Classic so special is a nebulous undertaking. Flying mounts, for instance, were a welcome addition when they were introduced in The Burning Crusade. It eventually became clear to players, however, that the convenience and fantasy they offered came along with a number of significant drawbacks like reduced interaction with topography, enemy NPCs, and other players. In spite of this, flying limitations are met generally with negative feedback on the part of BFA’s community. Such conveniences are difficult to unlearn.

“ What are the systems that people gravitate to that modern WoW has moved on past, but really have a strong hook?

“What will be most interesting, and you alluded to this correctly, which is: what are the systems that people gravitate to that modern WoW has moved on past, but really have a strong hook? Whether it be the travel, whether it be the no flying,” mused Brack. “I mean I’m sure you’re familiar with the saga of different kind of flying motifs that we’ve done over the years. I think we finally ended up at a good compromise, but certainly flying will not be a part of Classic.”

My own experience with the WoW Classic beta in the past few days has reaffirmed my longstanding suspicion that the MMO genre ran out of gas entirely too soon. The motifs of progression, classes, and challenging raid content have successfully disseminated into other genres at this point but these concepts are much more interesting when applied to a dynamic, communal space. I hope that both fans and developers will discover that World of Warcraft Classic has lessons left to teach when it releases on August 27th.

For more on WoW Classic check out my preview , and stay tuned to IGN for coverage of Overwatch’s anniversary event

James Duggan is IGN's resident WoW nerd. He will gank you but won't camp your corpse because that would be rude. Follow him on Twitter @ThuggnDuggn