Classic WoW is no walk in the park.
Players must manually search for others to team up with for massive raids that involve 40 people communicating and working together —
moments that have led people to make real-life friends.
Traveling from town to town will take time. The graphics are significantly pared back to resemble the original.We really approached
this as almost like an archaeological dig. 'What was it like back
then?'" said John Hight, World of Warcraft's executive producer and vice
president.
"We're carefully scraping the dust off the dinosaur bones and bringing it back to life."
The company said interest in World of Warcraft Classic was so strong that it overwhelmed Blizzard's servers.
More than 2 million players created characters in anticipation of the launch, Blizzard said.Although there are over 140 million accounts
on World of Warcraft, the game currently has just five million
individual subscribers, data collector Statista estimates, down from the
12 million players the game had back in October 2010.
That represents an opportunity: Activision Blizzard is betting on nostalgia to bring back some older players and to lure new ones.
"We have this audience that played it originally, and they want to come back, and then we have this new audience that has never played it
and they want to check it out," said Hight.
"What will be interesting to see is in the months to come, who stays with it."
Because WoW has lost millions of subscribers, the potential market for World of Warcraft Classic is huge, noted Will Partin, a doctoral
candidate studying the gaming industry at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill.
"The big challenge is that many of the players who left WoW left because life took over and their priorities shifted," said Partin.
