WoW Classic – Blizzard Picks a Vanilla Point

With the looming launch of the Battle for Azeroth expansion for World of Warcraft, I haven’t been expecting to hear much about WoW Classic.  For the most part, my expectations have been met and rightly so.  Talk of WoW Classic would just get in the way of the expansion, better to leave anything big for BlizzCon in November.

So I was surprised to see a Dev Watercooler update from Blizzard about WoW Classic.

Classic Vanilla Flavor

The update has some discussion of the technical issues and changes that the development group has had to deal with.

Probably the biggest bit of news in the whole thing is that they seem to have picked a version that will be WoW Classic.  From the update:

The first—and among the most important—decision we had to make was which version of the game to focus on. As many of you have noted, the classic period was two years long and full of changes. Core features like Battlegrounds were introduced in patches after WoW’s original launch, and class design similarly changed over time. After careful consideration, we decided on Patch 1.12: Drums of War as our foundation, because it represents the most complete version of the classic experience.

Version 1.12 brings us all the way back to late August of 2006, literally weeks before the instance group started its journey in Azeroth. (Full recap of the instance group in Vanilla available in this post.)

Us back in the day

All of the Vanilla raids and dungeons had been in place for a while and Blizz was just tuning things as they worked on the first expansion, The Burning Crusade.

I personally cannot remember much else back that far, but you can find patch notes for it all over the web.  From that I can see that 1.12 did indeed usher in cross-realms battlegrounds as one of its features. (Old WoW Insider did a look back at the 1.12 update back in 2011 that you can still find on Engadget if you want narrative and context.)

Anyway, that was a decent nugget of new, a point in time having been picked.  Fans of Captain Placeholder are no doubt disappointed, but it seems like a reasonable place to call Vanilla to me.