WoW Classic
Setting: Fantasy | Developer: Blizzard | Platform: PC | Release Date: November 23, 2004 (February 11, 2005 in EU) | Model: Pay2Play
A driving force behind the implementation of the Progression Servers of EverQuest was a certain Holly Longdale, who has been with Blizzard for 5 years and currently holds the position of Vice President & Executive Producer for World of Warcraft.
At the beginning of her time on the WoW team, she helped bring Burning Crusade Classic and the Classic Season of World of Warcraft to life… she used her experiences with EverQuest to build a comparable Legacy offering for her new employer.
The trailer for the Hardcore servers of WoW Classic:
Forced into your own happiness
If it were up to Blizzard officials, WoW still wouldn’t have a single Classic server today. Former Blizzard president J. Allen Brack, for example, shot down a visitor’s question about Vanilla servers for WoW at BlizzCon 2013 with the sentence “You think you do, but you don’t!” (in German: You think you want it, but you don’t).
Only after the shutdown of the popular Nostalrius private server, the resulting increasing pressure from players as well as former Blizzard developers and because Blizzard veteran Omar Gonzalez worked on a prototype on his own for weeks, WoW Classic ultimately came to be, launching in August 2019.
The agony of choice
Today, more than five years later, there are more WoW versions than ever. All fans of nostalgic WoW content can dive into the following variants of the MMORPG:
- Era servers of WoW Classic: The era servers remain at the stage of the last Classic phase when, among other things, the Naxxramas raid opened its doors.
- WoW Classic Hardcore: This is a variant of the era servers of WoW Classic, which was expanded with Hardcore rules in August 2023.
- WoW Classic Anniversary: For the 20th anniversary, Blizzard once again provided Classic servers in which you can relive the different phases of World of Warcraft. The servers are optionally available in a Hardcore variant.
- WoW Mists of Pandaria Classic: The first WoW Classic servers have just arrived on Pandaria on July 21, 2025. With the Pandaren, monks, great dungeons and raids, talent trees, pet battles, and much more.
- Season of Discoveries in WoW Classic: With the seasons of WoW Classic, Blizzard presents you with a heavily adapted version of Vanilla WoW, which follows its own rules and guides you through the various content phases much faster than it was in Vanilla WoW.
All you need is an active WoW subscription to access all Classic content. You do not need the current expansion The War Within. For further details on the various Classic variants, check out our overview: What you need to know about Era, Hardcore, Season of Discoveries, and Cataclysm of WoW Classic
