Wrath of the Lich King Classic’s devs talk about rebuilding and relaunching the classic

Wrath of the Lich King Classic, Blizzard’s return to one of WoW's greatest expansions, is finally here, and fans of the MMO have been swarming back into the servers to once again explore the frosty lands of Northrend. Now that the launch has come and gone, we were able to sit down with Kris Zierkhut, principal game designer, and Josh Greenfield, game producer.

Return to Northrend

Both developers have been with the company for a long time, and were part of the original expansion’s team. Regarded as one of the fan favorites, they agree that there’s a big amount of pressure behind its return, but there’s also a huge amount of excitement in the team both as devs AND as players.

“I’ve got three level 70 characters ready to go. I’m logging on every night and talking with my friends on my raid team, making plans for what we’re gonna do [at launch]… We’re all super excited as players”, said Zierkhut. “It’s doubly exciting as a developer because I helped build this stuff the first time around. And seeing people get excited about it AGAIN, really into all the details and the amazing world that we built in Northrend, all the zones and the raids, Ulduar and fighting the Lich King in IceCrown Citadel, just all those things have me really excited”.

Greenfield admitted that “the most fun thing about recreating these old expansions is getting to rediscover a lot of things you’ve sort of forgot. We talk a lot about Death Knights and the zones and all the new dungeons. But I’m kind of a “nuts and bolts” type of player, so I really like discovering little mechanics that I had forgotten about, interactions, that sort of stuff”.

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A Classic Experience

But being such a large addition to the already massive MMO, how would the players who haven't experienced anything else apart from WoW Classic and Burning Crusade Classic take this changes? Things like Dual Specialization, a harder difficulty to classic dungeons, massive faction combat as an event and such?

“One of the first things that players experienced in Classic is how expensive Respecs can be” Greenfield said “It’s kind of part of the Classic experience having that friction, but now going into Wrath, Having it from the start seems to make a lot of sense”. According to the devs, they believe that these kinds of upgrades and changes to WoW's main mechanics allow for more flexibility and choice for players to do the content that they want to do.

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Changes, difficulties and rebalance

However, rereleasing the expansion was not as simple as pressing a “relaunch” button. After 15 years of active development, WoW is no longer the same thing it was before, and Wrath presented a few issues when it came to bringing it back from the dead. A large part of Wrath had to be recovered and rebuilt from the Blizzard archives, but many things that made it work before are no longer a part of the game’s code. From basic talents in the classes to glyphs and certain items, all sorts of things had to be reintegrated into the game by hand. One very large example of that is Wintergrasp.

For those that don’t recall, Wintergrasp was a huge outdoor zone where players from both factions battled for control of the titular fortress. Originally, players in the vicinity of the area and in major cities received an alert that a battle was about to begin, and they would have to queue and wait to be transported into the fight. It was a huge, massive and epic spectacle where Alliance and Horde fought it out: Sadly, the servers no longer allow for that kind of iteration of the zone. Their answer then, was to transform it into the largest Battleground in the game: 120 vs 120 players in and around the fortress every three hours, with situational buffs for the teams depending on their size and some great factional rewards for the winners.

Similarly, a lot of the content has been rebalanced and slightly changed for the sake of the players’ enjoyment. Far from toning down the difficulty or simplifying the leveling up process, Wrath brings with it a lowering of prerequisites for certain content, like flying mounts and expert riding. Prices have been reduced and quests have been streamlined just as they were when the original came out, and all of it is in order to get people excited about coming back to Classic without feeling like they have “chores” or “catching up” to do.

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Curiously, Zierhut was a part of the team that dealt with balancing in the expansion during it’s first release, over a decade ago. Now, they made the decision to start Wrath Classic with Patch 3.35, the last patch released for the expansion, from the get-go. “When we design new talents and abilities for a new expansion, we want players to see them. So what that means is that we design them to be more powerful instead of less powerful.” According to Zierhut, this means that at the beginning most things feel a little overpowered. This gets fixed little by little with every patch, and by the time they were done with the expansion, everything felt balanced. This means that while Death Knights are not going to feel like bulldozers, every new piece of content feels powerful and scalable, and nothing gets left behind in the META.

Having said this, this does mean that the dev team won't be doing many more changes “week to week”. Classes are going to work the same during the whole experience, and there won't be “disruptions'' to player strategies, as the pair puts it, from tweaking or altering of stats during the expansion. However, they will be intervening in case they find new bugs or issues that can ruin the experience.

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Something that every player can enjoy

Apart from that, it seems like the expansion remains largely untouched. From the new areas to the epic Raids, and of course the Achievement system that is introduced with Wrath and changed the endgame for many hardcore players, everything that was in the game during the original launch is back in full force. Instead, they’ve focused on making things better for everyone. Raid lockouts have been reworked so guilds can ease up on running raids as if it were a second job (meaning you can enjoy Ulduar, Icecrown citadel, Naxxramas and everything else at a more leisurely pace). All the achievement rewards are still there, and some are still time-sensitive, but some have been fine tuned to make them less impossible to complete.

“So few people back in the first time around actually got to the end of Ulduar”, they said. The devs looked at the data they had retrieved 14 years ago and at one point might have considered making raids and dungeons a little easier. However, nowadays the players seem to be much more skilled. They’re hopeful that more people will see the endgame content for the first time this time around.

“Enjoy it”, says Greenfield. “Take your time. Like really really breath it all in, turn your sound up in Grizzly Hills. Read the quest text! Watch all the scripted events that play, stuff like that. It’s a super enriching experience especially if you played Warcraft III”.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic is available now on PC via the Blizzard Launcher.