Sorry I’m back to Wrath and out of loop. I’m interested which things will become unobtainable if Blizz decides to follow Classic with Cata afterwards.
In fact I’m interested are there things lost when Phase 4 launched? I remember there was dungeon meta achievement which rewarded protodragons and I wonder if those are unobtainable now.
Those are still obtainable even in Retail today, so I doubt they will be removed after Classic WOTLK ends.
That’s neat then, don’t have to worry. Any other things?
Most things that were lost at the end of WOTLK were things from Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor due to the world revamp. I hope they change Classic Cataclysm to allow us to teleport to a phase with the original version of the zones. That was not possible when Cataclysm launched but should be possible with modern servers.
Some notary achievements that are only available in the Old Azeroth were the Paladin and Warlock Epic mount quest chain, the Druid Epic Flight form quest chain, and the Opening of the AQ quest chain.
Benediction for Priest and Rhok’delar for Hunters were also removed. There were two achievements for this, but they were added during Legion retroactively.
Zul’Gurub (including its two mounts) and Zul’aman were also removed during Cataclysm (not at the start). There is still the chance they kept the old versions this time because here in WOTLK, Onyxia 60 was also removed, but in Classic, both versions are available.
Wasn’t ZG changed to leveling zone and only added as instance later?
Cata is not even confirmed and at this point unlikely
It isn’t confirmed but what else could happen?
Well the word ‘zone’ is a bit much but yeah it was used in one questchain. ZG/ZA weren’t in at cata launch but I can’t remember if the old ZA/ZG worked in cata up until that point /shrug
Can you share your reasoning why you think it’s unlikely?
Cata will never be released so you don’t have to worry about that.
Take a look at sub statistics from the past if you don’t believe me.
Hard disagree.
They would have never implemented the classic- wowtoken with only 1 year in mind. You can trust blizz looks ahead when it comes to stuff like this.
Not to mention people seem to look forward to try cata (again), not only here but also on reddit and ingame people seem more positive than negative when it comes to a potential cata classic release.
The classic team was recently confirmed to be very small, there’s no corresponding surge like there was for wotlk and tbc, the latest annual sub bonus mounts and content leaks don’t include anything hinting at cats (previous leaks included hints at wotlk).
On top of that the population of classic in general is small and declining, even icc didn’t substantially reverse that.
My best guess is well see permanent wrath servers with merges but no new content or new phases, and a very low effort SOM2. Nothing that would take more then 2-3 part time devs to produce, as that’s what they have on classic atm.
Classic in general is nearing the end of it’s life cycle. It did not substantially bolster Engagement for the main product (retail) and is far less monetizable (no store mounts, Store transmogs, or battle pass) and unnecessarily splits up the community.
I think we will see servers remaining open for a time before being sunset eventually.
Had absolutely nothing to do with other games like mobas blowing up at the time, sure
I personally knew alot of people in the pvp scene that stopped playing because of league. Even though pvp in cata was pretty good.
Don’t be naive. Blizzard will push WoW Classic as long as they can. If they would be smart about it, they would add extra content and work on the critics of every expansion, like creating cut content from scratch. This way they can ensure Classic project living up to Legion.
They actually said that the whole wow team work on all versions of wow, taking turns on each game.
The devs that would be doing that are needed for more strategically important and monetizable products instead. Blizzard is probably turning a good profit from classic especially with the small team, but not good enough to justify people continue to work on it vs diablo 4 content and revamps or retail or even diablo immortal.
They’re having substantial problems hiring devs atm because of location, policies and poor pay, so they prioritize the most valuable and strategically important projects
This quote is straight up wrong. You truly believe people that currently play any iteration of classic, be it era/hc/wrath, would play retail if classic didn’t see the light of day? People that lost their fav expansion go to private servers, period. Retail is both extremely niche and very casual, so it’s not for the players that only like wow’s gameplay from the first expansions.
Everything else you said might be true, and it’s possible they pulled the plug on any future classic expansions due to the small team or dev effort.
I still stand by my point that the wow token means there’s more after wrath. I refuse to believe they implemented this for 1 year only. They want to milk this, and the community has more than expressed their interest in cata. Even 100.000 players, would warrant them keeping classic alive, and according to IF.pro it’s way more than that.
How would you know? Are you a shareholder and invited to their meetings? I always find it hilarious when people make claims like they are a wallstreet paper pusher knowing the ins and outs of a company.
Not all of them, no. But a certain percentage of them certainly. Retail has much better monetization per player so even if only 30% convert it should be worth it consolidation wise.
I also think they’ll be far more aggressive shutting down pservers n the future. Now they have at least some quantifiable idea of what they’re missing out on.
It doesn’t take specific insider knowledge that blizzard is having a massively hard time hiring right now and that they’re scrambling to rescue d4.
It’s also public in various places how much of their future plans are staked on it.
The dev confirming classic having a small team is also public.
Everything else is inference and might still be wrong, but I’m pretty confident it isn’t.