HiGame

Almost 12 years ago, Blizzard launched World of Warcraft, the monster MMORPG that went on to dominate US sales charts and the entire MMO genre. It’s been almost nine years since the original version of World of Warcraft was available to play — the game’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, fundamentally overhauled many aspects of the game. For some players, these changes were less than welcome. Last year, a group of dedicated fans and gamers launched Nostalrius, a server devoted to running World of Warcraft 1.12, the last version Blizzard released before TBC hit store shelves. As of yesterday, the nostalgia server is offline at Blizzard’s “request.”

The French group behind the project announced that the servers will go dark on April 10. The software behind the Nostalrius server will be released into the wild for others to use as they please, and Nostalrius was far from the only private WoW server. It does, however, seem to have been one of the largest groups of players, with 800K registered users. There’s no word on how many of those players were active on a daily or weekly basis, however.

The ephemeral nature of gaming

I played WoW in beta from just after the Tri-Horde push to 2011. Having watched the game evolve through multiple expansions, I can honestly say vanilla WoW isn’t an experience I’d personally care to focus on. At the time, Blizzard’s design philosophy treated hybrid characters as second-class citizens. Paladins and Druids were expected to be healers in the end game raids, and their ability to perform in other roles was extremely limited. Smaller guilds with limited rosters also had real trouble making the leap from 10-man raids to 40-man Molten Core, and the PvP honor system was a horrifying grind. The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King made dramatic changes to the game that, in my personal opinion, made it far more fun to play.



Never managed to get the Baron’s mount