We’re just seven days from the release of World of Warcraft Classic, and the dev team has kick-started the grand countdown with a lengthy Reddit AMA. Eight staffers, from the Executive Producer to the Principle Software Engineer, lined up to answer over 2,000 questions from nostalgia-hungry Redditors and there’s a lot to go through.
As expected, plenty of questions regarding log-in times came in early, to which fans were reassured that new servers can and will be added if necessary. On the subject of how else they could combat potential overcrowding, the game’s Lead Software Engineer stated: “…while [realm caps and queues] are tools we have at our disposal, we don’t want to rely on them exclusively, because they keep people from playing the game.”
But perhaps the standout part of the whole AMA was less about the game and more from the tales of returning software engineer Ogronz rediscovering code they’d written all those years ago. When asked whether work they anticipated to be difficult turned out to be easy, Ogronz mentioned how their experiences of the early days were one of the “biggest benefits” in ensuring that nothing was “incredibly hard”, and that “as someone who has fielded 3am calls”, the benefits of using the modern World of Warcraft systems to rebuild Classic led to “a huge boost to productivity” compared to the vanilla days.
Principle Software Engineer ZoidWoW would eventually field a similar question. In their eyes, the Hunter class was “one of the most complicated classes in vanilla” and took “a huge amount of work” to restore.
Between all the talk of old code, fixed bugs from earlier stress tests, and confirmation of in-game holidays returning unharmed, one of World of Warcraft’s long-since dead memes was brought back into the limelight – Mankrik’s wife.
For the uninitiated, players were once tasked with finding the deceased wife of an NPC named Mankrik. Mankrik’s wife, or her remains, were hidden far away, with her name obscured to the point where she was just another body out in the wild. This led to a steady stream of new players asking for clues of her whereabouts only for bored veterans to send these wide-eyed adventurers to completely random locations.
When asked whether they would move her position to recreate that initial experience, they simply responded with their go-to mission statement of “No changes”. The meme of Mankrik’s wife will return as it was before the Cataclysm expansion scrubbed it from the game.
The promise of “no changes” continued throughout the AMA where it became obvious that World of Warcraft Classic wouldn’t have vanilla veterans experiencing the game anew. Instead, it’s more about reliving the past.
As for who out of the attending dev team will hit level 60 first, Kaivax is planning to steal the win from Aggrend and Pazorax by “distracting them with offers of delicious meats and cheeses.”
If you want to know more, you can read up on the whole thing here if you have the time.
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