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Why Burning Crusade Classic is Embracing Change
It's a busy time for Ion Hazzikostas, game director for World of Warcraft. His team is hard at work fussing with a new major patch for the game's retail version, while at the same time they're preparing to effectively re-release the game's first expansion, The Burning Crusade, as a part of World of Warcraft Classic.To get more news about Buy WoW WLK Gold, you can visit lootwowgold official website.
Hazzikostas doesn't seem too stressed out, though. In fact, he says the hardest parts of putting together Burning Crusade Classic's launch (including making sure players didn't lose all their in-game mail when the pre-patch dropped) are already done.
"Given the nature of the work that goes into reconstructing Burning Crusade Classic, so much of it is actually engineering," he says, speaking to IGN. "It's code work. We're not as worried about like, do the quests work? Do the creatures have the right stats? All that is in. Taking the entire game and updating it to use the Burning Crusade combat formulas, all of that stuff, that's behind us now."Now it's just a matter of making sure the servers don't fall apart on launch day, and aside from ongoing bug fixes, enjoying the ride. Hazzikostas, a World of Warcraft development veteran since the tail end of the original Burning Crusade launch, has a deep love for watching the community discover the worlds he's helping to create. It's understandable, given his history as a guild leader and enjoyment of high-level raiding that he maintains even to this day. And he's been delighted to see that the rediscovery of an Azeroth he's intimately familiar with in Classic has been met with enthusiasm from the World of Warcraft community.
The reaction over the last couple of years has been a mix of affirmation of our initial thoughts, and surprise," Hazzikostas says. "Plenty of people did have that exact experience. There are plenty of people who went in, checked it out, they were like, 'Okay. Yep. Super not for me.' And they went back to, back then, Battle for Azeroth, now Shadowlands. And that was fine.
"And then of course there were plenty of other people who were like, 'I've been waiting for this forever.' And they dove in headfirst. And they were the people who were the most passionate about Classic. The thing that was a surprise was the number of people who were new to World of Warcraft in its entirety, who came in because they just wanted to see what it was all about. They had heard about the legendary game of 15 years ago. And they have been happily playing there ever since."
The ongoing community interest in Classic is what ultimately pushed the team to move forward into The Burning Crusade, but Blizzard has learned some lessons along the way. With Classic, Hazzikostas says, the theme was "#NoChanges." Their goal was to represent the original release of World of Warcraft as faithfully as possible, warts and all. But with The Burning Crusade, they've embraced the philosophy of "some changes."
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