World of Warcraft fans have been begging for years for a vanilla WoW experience straight from Blizzard. In that absence they’ve turned to third party servers, which Blizzard recently shut down in a highly controversial move. But fans will now finally be getting what they want, with an official vanilla WoW release called World of Warcraft Classic.

Announced at Blizzcon, World of Warcraft Classic seems to take the game all the way back to the beginning, giving players the same experience they once had in Azeroth. Fans are obviously excited for this release, though it does bring up a lot of questions.

For one, Blizzard had a lot of reasons that they said they did not want to create this type of game. A particularly inflammatory remark came when one Blizzard developer essentially said that while players think they want a vanilla WoW experience, they actually don’t. Apparently Blizzard is backtracking on that, or has rethought their position and is willing to take the chance.

For longtime World of Warcraft fans, this is a dream come true. While the current version of the game is still enjoyed by millions of players, there was something magical about those early days that fans have been dying to return to. Now they’ll get that chance.

Wold of Warcraft Classic Announcement