Above: The World of Warcraft: Classic announcement video.

I had the opportunity to chat with WoW Production Director J. Allen Brack at BlizzCon last fall about the company's work on Classic, as that work was just getting underway. Here's what he had to say about the challenges Classic poses then:

Heather Newman: Let’s talk classic servers.

J. Allen Brack: I’m shocked to hear that’s going to be a conversation point for us.

Newman: Is this still a “soon” kind of situation? Soon with a capital S? “We think it’s a good idea but there’s no humans involved in the project yet?”

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Brack: There are humans involved. But it is a larger endeavor than I think people imagine. It’s a huge technical challenge.

Newman: Can you talk about the reasons for that?

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Brack: Sure. If you imagine—the biggest one is the way that the database works today, and the way that it worked in 2004, are extremely different. The way the servers are laid out and work today is very different than in 2004. The game doesn’t even—the old code doesn’t even build, right? The compiler—hardware has changed. Computers have moved on. There are new operating systems, new things. A lot of the old database and operating system versions aren’t even supported anymore. Those are 13 years old at this point.

Newman: Oracle isn’t standing in line to rebuild them for you?

Brack: Ah, they have this modern version that they’re eager for us to use, but the old one, not so much.

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Newman: So talk about the process that you guys using. You’re essentially resurrecting dead tech and dead data. Clearly there were discussions, at least at one point, with some of the folks in the player community that had attempted or had done the same thing. Was there assistance there? Are there things that you’re able to do in-house now where you got the task list to say, these are the things we have to walk through to get this done?

Brack: We’re beginning that. There’s a lot of different things we can do, in terms of how we get from where we are to where we want to be. We haven’t made all of the decisions by any stretch of the imagination. There are lots of decisions to make. One of the reasons to announce probably maybe a little bit earlier to the community—we actually want to partner with them a bit. We want to hear their feedback in terms of the direction this should go. If you think about—there were two years in between the launch of World of Warcraft and the release of Burning Crusade. A lot of things changed in there. What should we shoot for? My favorite example for this is Upper Blackrock Spire. There was a 10-person version and a five-person version for most of that two-year period, but toward the end we decided, nope, LBRS/UBRS is going to be a five-person and we’re going to retune it to be appropriate for that. Is that the right decision? I don’t know. These are the types of questions. There’s lots of questions like that that we’ll be talking with the community about. [Ed. Note: The company eventually settled on Patch 1.12; see the developer's blog linked above for details.]

J. Allen Brack (right) and Senior Game Designer Jeremy Feasel at BlizzCon 2017.

Newman: Let’s talk about some of the bigger decisions, which may or may not have been made. Are we talking about WoW in its original pristine pixelly glory? Are we talking remastered? Something that’s built for the modern engines that Legion and Battle for Azeroth are using.

Brack: That’s a decision that is in front of us. I think my starting place is, the compass heading should be to try to re-create the original 2004, 2005 experience. That’s the compass heading we should be following. But there’s a lot of nuance there. Should we be using the high definition character models? That’s an interesting question, I think, that the community will help us decide.

Newman: That would essentially require you to rebuild them, right? Because we don’t necessarily have high-def character models that aren’t the revamped versions of the characters.

Brack: What I mean is, would we allow those to work in the old [framework.]

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Newman: As opposed to somehow trying to re-create the blockier look, but with the modern engine.

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Brack: Correct.

Newman: What are some of the other decision-making challenges you’re facing for the classic servers?

Brack: I think we want to make sure that it’s very maintainable. I think the challenge of us being able to resurrect classic WoW in its original form is—it has a certain amount of complexity. But that game was very difficult to manage. 2018 best t-shirts programs for pixels, mac. It would be effectively like us managing two MMOs, which is not something we want to do. The world has moved on. If you think about the infrastructure—if you think about anything, there’s a really good cooking analogy. There is no way to remove the oregano from the spaghetti sauce. You just put the oregano in, and now how do we deal with that?

Newman: This is now, potentially, a static game in an industry where you’ve created this dynamically evolving monster. Why do it? You’ve been on the fence for a long time.

Brack: I think there’s three big reasons. We’ve talked about this for many years. One is, the community has spoken very clearly that there’s a certain percentage, some number of people, that are really interested in what this is going to be. Internally, I have my job because of classic WoW. There’s a lot of people who have a lot of love for that, a lot of employees who love classic WoW. There’s an internal group of people who are interested as well. And I think the third thing is, this is a game that has had a lot of people play it, and a lot of commentary around it, and you can’t actually play it at a Blizzard quality today. That’s kind of disappointing. That’s kind of sad. If you take all that, that’s all the reasons to kind of do it. Now we have an idea for how we can minimize the technical complexity. We have a path that we think we can be successful with.

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Newman: What is that idea, that path? What was the turning point for you all in terms of saying, okay, this is now in the realm of feasibility?

Brack: It was internal discussions, and it was kind of a thought about how we can move forward technically in a way that is not us managing two MMOs. And so—the thing that we’re going to try to do is to run the classic WoW on what we think of as the modern WoW infrastructure. That’s completely transparent to the user. The user doesn’t see how the server’s organized. The user doesn’t see how the database works. But that’s a huge part of how we think we can actually do this now.

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Ragnaros, the (then) legless Firelord, faces down a player in Molten Core during the 'World of Warcraft' 10th Anniversary Celebration.

Newman: I always joke with folks that the 10th anniversary celebration for Warcraft, where you reopened the Molten Core large-group raid dungeon, and folks got the chance to run through that dungeon again—that was the ultimate Blizzard developer revenge for all the players who said vanilla was the best. You show up and it takes 500 million hours and everybody’s dying by doing really stupid things. There are mechanics that drive people insane. And that was without having to buff people every five minutes.

Brack: Gotta melt those core hounds.

Newman: Exactly. Clearly in that case, you had players who said, WoW was better in vanilla, and then they got back into the raid again and went, this is terrible. Do you worry that there’s a subset of folks who want classic servers, and then they get back on a classic server and realize, wait, this is not the way I remember it? That fresh, new, 'this was the first time I ever saw WoW' kind of excitement--or the joy of meeting new friends in a game for the first time--may or may not be there when they go back to the remastered servers.

Brack: I got into trouble a few years ago. I said, this is something that you think you want, but you don’t. And what I was trying to say with that is sort of exactly what you’re encapsulating, which is, nostalgia is a thing. Rose-colored glasses are a thing. Drm removal software free. Human brains are not designed to remember pain. And so you remember the good things. You don’t remember the pain. I didn’t do a great job of communicating that sentiment, right? Clearly.

Newman: People didn’t eagerly embrace that?

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Brack: It’s weird. I do think that there will be those people exactly like you’re talking about. That’s okay. And I also think that there is this group of people for whom—that is the game to them. That’s their refuge. That’s their time that they want to return to, and that’s the game that reminds them of that time. That’s the community experience they want to have. How big is it? I have no idea. I have no idea. There’s no way to know. But we’re convinced, through the desire of those folks, the desire of our internal folks, and the desire to preserve what WoW was, that this is the right decision.