World of Warcraft players decide to bring the shut down Legacy server back online after Blizzard offers no update on official Legacy servers during BlizzCon.
Over a decade after its intial launch, World of Warcraft is still dominating the MMO realm. The game's sixth expansion, Legion, launched to very positive reviews a few months ago and Blizzard has a stream of incoming content planned for the rest of the year to keep subscribers busy. Despite all of that fresh Legion content, there are still many players who would prefer to relive 2004 with a nostalgic return to vanilla World of Warcraft.
Legacy servers offer the opportunity for players to play WoW as it was at launch, without any expansion content or major patch updates. That means original skill trees, giant raids, no flying mounts, and no new races or classes. Unfortunately for nostalgic fans, Blizzard doesn't currently offer an official Legacy server and the company shut down the most popular fan run realm, Nostalrius, for legal reasons.
Weeks before BlizzCon 2016 kicked off Blizzard made it clear that the topic of Legacy WoW servers wasn't on the docket. Despite that, many fans got their hopes up for a surprise announcement. When the weekend came and went without any Legacy news, the community took the matter into its own hands and announced that the team behind World of Warcraft: Nostalrius has handed its core and player database over to Elysium, another WoW Legacy project.
"Elysium will now proudly revive and continue what began a year and half ago. We will be gratefully accepting the core and player database of Nostalrius. This means that Nostalrius, exactly as you know it, will be returning."
The obvious question here is, how long will it take before Blizzard just shuts the project down again? Fans were hopeful for Blizzard support when the Nostalrius team had a meeting with Blizzard a few months ago, but since then the company has stayed silent on the topic and, as far as we know, has not reached out to the Nostalrius team again.
Although it does make sense for nostalgic fans to have a place to explore Azeroth the way they want to, Blizzard has the legal right to continue shutting down those servers. It would be great for the company to support official Legacy servers, but for now creating and managing new Legion content seems to be priority number one.
What do you think of the community taking over the legacy server production and maintenance? Do you have a desire to continue playing vanilla WoW? Let us know in the comments.
World of Warcraft is available now on PC.
Source: Reddit