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Nostalrius, the World of Warcraft

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After being shut down by Blizzard for breaching its terms of service, the Nostalrius servers - which allow players to play World of Warcraft as it was upon its initial release in 2004 - will be making a return, courtesy of The Elysium Project.Elysium is an initiative that was started to recapture Blizzard's MMO in its original state. Check out the video announcement (spotted by Eurogamer ) below:Stress tests were held to great success this past weekend, pulling in over 10,000 concurrent players. Both the PvP and PvE-dedicated Nostalrius servers will open on December 17 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm UK time (or 4am AEDT on December 18).Those who have characters on either Nostalrius server will be able to continue their progress, as all of the data is being carried over. In addition, a completely fresh server will launch after the PvP and PvE servers go live, for those looking to start from square one.Earlier this year, following its shutdown, Blizzard met with the team behind Nostalrius . However, there has been little mention of a follow-up to that meeting since.Last month at Blizzcon, the studio assured fans that legacy servers is something they are "taking seriously." World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas told IGN: "There's no question it's something we want to do," and is "still something that we're discussing internally."However, in the absence of officially-sanctioned Blizzard legacy servers, the Elysium Project service has been relaunched, meaning there's still some question as to how long the newly reinstated Nostalrius will be able to stay online.IGN has contacted Blizzard for comment.

Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his video content on YouTube