World of Warcraft Classic to Launch Next Summer

BlizzCon is in full swing this year and for those of us that remember the good 'ol days (that grind) of vanilla World of Warcraft, the reveal that Classic is coming next Summer couldn't come at a better time. With the demo now playable, fans of the iconic MMORPG finally have a date to look forward to ... sort of.

The World of Warcraft Classic demo will be exclusively available for Virtual Ticket holders immediately starting on November 2nd before its official debut in Summer 2019. You can grab your ticket right here, it's not too late!

For those that remember the beginning stages, we remember the 20-hour raids, the insane grind to level, and some of the "shitty" side quests. Because of this, director Jeff Kaplan mentioned he was a little worried that fans were romanticizing the humble beginnings of World of Wacraft and urged them to look forward to the throw back with an open and realistic mindset:

"I think classic is a great idea. I have great nostalgia for what the game was. I think people need to be careful about what they think the magic was versus what it actually was. I don't think what made the classic servers great was the shitty quests. I'm allowed to say that because I wrote all of them.

I don't think it was my old crappy quests that made World of Warcraft great. What I think made old World of Warcraft great was the sense of community: that there wasn't dungeon finder. People don't know this, but the server concurrency was a lot smaller than it is today, purely because of technology we couldn't fit as many people on a server. When the game first launched, there were no server transfers, we didn't have server coalescing. There are a lot of systems in place now that I think actually make WoW a better game, that contributed to there being a small the community... people are going to be in shock at some things that were in classic WoW. Think about flying your griffin ... you had to go stop-by-stop, clicking each link. You couldn't go grab a beer while you flew across the world.

I think there's actually a huge lesson here that applies to all games. All of game design is a tradeoff. Oftentimes, people look at design decisions in black and white; it's right or wrong, you're dumb for not doing this, and why aren't you listening to us, it should be this way. But it's actually full of subtlety and nuance in every single design decision. I think it's less about black and white or what's right or wrong, people mostly just think about what they're gaining. But the thing players really need to think about is what asking for certain changes forces them to give up."

Though we don't have an exact date yet, Summer sounds really good right about now and it's more than the usual "soon" date placeholder.

World of Warcraft is available now exclusively through Battle.net.