World of Warcraft Nostalrius server returns on December 17

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Under a new name: Elysium.

Previously on Behind the Emotes: The Nostalrius Story—fed up of waiting for Blizzard to make good on its apparent willingness to support legacy World of Warcraft servers, the team behind 'vanilla' WoW server Nostalrius have decided to relaunch it under a new name, Elysium. That's a a bit of a simplication: they've shared the code and whatnot with existing legacy project Elysium, which is now set to relaunch but with the Nostalrius database included.

Saturday December 17 at 5pm UK time/12pm EST is when we can expect that to happen, and you've played either Nostalrius or Elysium in the past, your character/s should be there when you log in.

Despite meeting with the Nostalrius team, and seeming open to the idea of legacy servers, remember that Blizzard sent a cease-and-desist letter to the original Nostalrius project, so I can't imagine it'll be too thrilled when it relaunches as Elysium on December 17. (Thanks, Eurogamer.)

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.

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