When WoW: Classic launched back in 2019, I held off. I'd lived through vanilla WoW once already; the nostalgia of revisiting Azeroth's early days didn't feel like it was worth losing the modernizations WoW's gotten in the years since. Eventually, though, I grew more fond of the idea—only to realize that WoW: Classic had moved on through three expansions, meaning Azeroth as it existed at launch was inaccessible all over again.
Luckily, Blizzard's about to reset the WoW: Classic clock once more. Announced during today's Warcraft 30th Anniversary livestream, Blizzard will soon be launching WoW: Classic 20th Anniversary Edition, a set of "all-new, fresh" Classic realms offering players a new start and an even playing field for another run at vanilla WoW's early years.
"We are bringing you the classic Classic experience," said Clayton Stone, WoW: Classic associate production director.
The fresh Classic realms will be opening in just a week on November 21. In addition to the standard PvE and PvP servers, there will also be Hardcore realms available from the jump. Characters online get one life on a Hardcore realm; if you're killed, all you're able to do is chat as a lingering ghost until you take a complimentary character transfer to a standard realm.
The new realms won't have to wait for some of the quality of life enhancements that Blizzard's added to WoW: Classic since its release in 2019. Players will have immediate access to features like the overhauled PvP honor ranking system and the Chronoboon Displacer, which lets you stash away the world buffs you get when someone cashes in a raid completion quest so you can use them when they're most useful.
Raids won't start unlocking on the fresh realms until a few weeks after launch, letting players enjoy their time in old-timey Azeroth without feeling as pressured to powerlevel and gear up. After the Molten Core and Onyxia raids open sometime this winter, a tentative development roadmap has the fresh realms progressing through the entirety of vanilla WoW's raid and activity additions by next spring. At that point, the new realms (minus the Hardcore one) will enter the Burning Crusade expansion. We are, once again, not prepared.
The new WoW: Classic 20th Anniversary realms open on November 21.
