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At BlizzCon 2013, then-World of Warcraft executive producer (and later, Blizzard president) J. Allen Brack infamously said, “You think you do, but you don’t,” in response to a fan asking about being able to replay old expansions from World of Warcraft’s history.
Flash forward to 2024, and there’s not just one old-school, “Classic” version of Blizzard’s enduring MMORPG to play, but four. It’s an impressive accomplishment for a bite-sized team of a few dozen developers that exists within the larger WoW development team at Blizzard. GameSpot recently sat down with WoW Classic lead software engineer Nora Valletta and associate production director Clayton Stone to learn more about how, exactly, such a small team is able to operate so many different versions of the same game concurrently, its most recent seasonal experiments, and the team’s goals for the future.
WoW Classic, which launched in 2019 as a largely unaltered version of the original game as it used to be in 2004, proved to be hugely successful. Since then, Blizzard first re-released the game’s popular Burning Crusade expansion before having players progress to Wrath of the Lich King, the most popular expansion in the game’s history. Somewhat controversially, but citing player demand, Blizzard will soon convert its Wrath of the Lich King servers to the game’s 2010 Cataclysm expansion, with the Cataclysm beta recently kicking off ahead of a full release slated for this summer.
