World of Warcraft Classic: The Burning Crusade Interview

With The Burning Crusade Classic now live as an additional way to play World of Warcraft, you might want to check out this GameSpot interview with Blizzard’s lead software engineer Brian Birmingham and executive producer John Hight. In it, they reminisce about TBC’s original launch and talk about their vision for the expansion’s Classic version.

Here’s a sample question to get you started:

With WoW Classic, you’re aiming to replicate the WoW experience as it was all those years ago. Was it tempting to want to change or add things now to reflect the way in which modern MMO games operate?

Brian Birmingham: There’s the obvious one where we did introduce the boost, which we think is important for players to be able to come together and play alongside each other as we did this launch. We know that there are players who did not play through Classic and now want to come back and play with their friends who did. We want to give them that opportunity to play together, but at the same time, still recognize the accomplishments of players who did play through it and make sure they still feel they have a leg up for all of their hard work doing that the old-fashioned way. So that’s something that we definitely felt we made a reasonable choice to kind of strike that balance.

John Hight: The achievement that we’ve done on the server-side is just the stability and increasing the number of people that can play and it’s no small feat. Because even to this day, what makes World of Warcraft unique is the hundreds of people that you’re going to see any time you turn around in that world and the thousands of people that are going to play on the realm with you and the millions of people that are going to be part of this experience and very few games do anything like that. We have continued to try and increase the number of folks that we can get on a realm, the number of people that we can have on the screen. And that technology is part of Burning Crusade Classic. It’s the same content, but I think it’s going to feel even more alive because we’ve almost quadrupled the number of people we can get on realm, right Brian?

Brian Birmingham: Yes, that’s true. We can actually get more than four times the number of people on an individual realm now.

John Hight: There’s still going to be queues, probably when we launch, and hopefully they’ll be shorter, but it’s well worth it.

Brian Birmingham: Yeah certainly. We still have upper bounds on what we can support, but it’s higher than it used to be for sure. We’re always looking to improve that.