World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic will be released before the end of the year, and while fans already knew Blizzard would make some changes to the beloved expansion, an official blog post offers new details and reasoning which is behind.
In the blog post, Blizzard describes a couple of basic design pillars that have informed how the company is approaching reissue. The first pillar is “nurturing and protecting social experiences.” The social nature of WoW Classic has become one of its defining features, and Blizzard seeks to preserve it both in Wrath of the Lich King Classic and in future versions of WoW Classic. As such, features like the automated group finder, which was added late during the original life of Wrath of the Lich King, will not be found in the Wrath of the Lich King Classic.
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Playing now: World of Warcraft Classic – Wrath of the Lich King movie trailer
Aside from the social aspect, another key pillar of WoW Classic for Blizzard is keeping the game accessible and familiar. Too many changes can easily destroy the familiarity and accessibility that many players have for a long time for classic expansions. On the other hand, the goal of keeping things accessible means that Blizzard isn’t afraid to play with systems that, by current standards, can seem confusing. Blizzard uses the Wrath of the Lich King’s Emblem system as an example, calling the original system “unnecessarily complex and confusing.” The new system used in Wrath of the Lich King Classic will make players win two types of emblems: one type of the most current raid content used to buy the latest equipment and another type of older raids and dungeons used by buy less powerful items.
The last pillar that defines Blizzard is the idea that the world of Azeroth is the main character of WoW Classic, with the goal of immersing players in World of Warcraft. This means that Blizzard will not make excessive changes to the world itself. An example of this philosophy in action is the previously announced decision not to include deeper mission tracking features that show players had to go on their map, a feature added at the end of the original Wrath of the Lich King .
As for other changes to Wrath of the Lich King Classic, Blizzard writes that it will increase the difficulty of Naxxramas’ foray into expansion and will also seek to make heroic dungeons relevant and challenging throughout the expansion.
In a separate forum post, Blizzard also announced a 50% XP boost event called “Joyous Journeys” that will hit Burning Crusade Classic servers before the release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic, which should Help players looking to level up new characters before launching the expansion. Blizzard does not yet have an exact duration or start date for the XP increase, but expects the event to last approximately 6 to 8 weeks until the release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic. The XP boost will initially be present on the newly launched Wrath of the Lich King Classic start servers during the previous patch of the game.
Blizzard recently announced that the next new WoW expansion, Dragonflight, will be released before the end of 2022.
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