WoW Classic Announced And It Lets You Play Vanilla World Of Warcraft Without Expansions

Before announcing what's next for World of Warcraft, Blizzard announced something old. World of Warcraft Classic allows players to dive into a legacy version of the game before it received countless updates and expansions, answering a very popular request from fans.

Unfortunately, details were very light on how this will work. Besides the name and a promise that it's coming, Blizzard had little to say about WoW Classic. Production director J. Allen Brack described it as a "larger endeavor than you might imagine," which is perhaps an acknowledgement of fans' attempts to provide a playable version of vanilla WoW.

Brack described Blizzard's goal as reproducing the experience from the original game, but without any of the launch issues players encountered all those years ago. Whether mechanics or any aspects of the game will change, how Classic is accessed, and many other questions remain unanswered. Brack discussed it only briefly, and the studio rolled a video that showed major cinematics from the game's many expansions being played in reverse.

Blizzard had a lot of news to share during BlizzCon's opening ceremony, including a new Overwatch character and map called BlizzardWorld, StarCraft II going free-to-play, and a new Hearthstone single-player mode. You can see a recap of all the BlizzCon 2017 opening ceremony news in our roundup.