Link: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/21881587#1
Seems like the development process it's still very early...
I just saw this! My hype died down for a while as I was through some personal stuff.... but now, IT'S BACK 100%! Even though they're obviously still in the early stages of development, receiving any sort of communication about it is so good to hear. I hope they keep us updated as things progress more.
It also looks like they are staying pretty true to vanilla? (No transmogs, yay!)
Additional improvements will include modern anti-cheat/botting detection, customer service and Battle.net integration, and similar conveniences that do not affect the core gameplay experience.
Battle.net integration.
What do they mean by that? Will you have your Battle.net friends in the in-game friend list? This definitely affects parts of the core gameplay experience.
We don't know, as this is the only update we've got so far.
Awesome. Some hand picked highlights:
After careful consideration, we decided on Patch 1.12: Drums of War as our foundation, because it represents the most complete version of the classic experience
So they decided on a patch to build on. This could means all BGs, cross realm BGs, mount changes, cross linked AH, nax/zulgurub, tier 0.5 sets, epic quests for legendaries too! It’s also a great indication that they won’t slowly trickle out the content and features as I had feared they would. Really great news and answers a lot of questions.
After stitching various key pieces together, we had a locally rebuilt version of Patch 1.12 running internally.
That they have an internal build running already is also a fantastic milestone this early in development.
Our initial runs exposed a few (expected) issues: the game sometimes crashed, didn’t recognize our modern video cards, and was incompatible with our current login system.
So by this system I assume they are building it on the modern software if they have mentioned the ‘login system’.
So we asked ourselves, would it still be possible to deliver an authentic classic experience if we took our modern code, with all its back-end improvements and changes, and used it to process the Patch 1.12 game data? While that might seem counterintuitive, this would inherently include classic systems like skill ranks, old quests and terrain, talents, and so on, while later features like Transmog and Achievements would effectively not exist because they were entirely absent from the data.
Yup. No achievements or transmog either sweeeet.
I’m a bit bothered about bnet integration though - what’s the point? Let people make friends in game!
Immense, was expecting something way more piecemeal. First official update and they have already got a build running and have decided on 1.12!
HYPE
Was a bit technical with the bits about database tables but nonetheless good to hear some news.