Earlier today a Press Release from Blizzard Entertainment was sent out to all media outlets announcing their newest and last expansion pack for their mega hit MMORPG World of Warcraft, which will embrace the things that made the game such a global hit to begin with. The name of the next expansion is ‘Legacy‘
“When we were coming up with ideas for the next expansion we decided to look over what the players wanted and the general feeling was that the remaining player base was wanting a return to the very first World of Warcraft experience, otherwise called ‘Vanilla‘. So we thought it would be great, seeing as this will be the final World of Warcraft expansion, to go back and let the players relive their glory days before things grind to a close.”
When we here at The Outerhaven reached out to Activision-Blizzard for further explanation as to why they decided to go with an expansion rather than a legacy server, a PR representative said “Where’s the money in that? People have been playing World of Warcraft for decades and frankly if they bought into that drunken idea we called Mist of Pandaria, then they’ll pay for the minimal work we’d need to do for this.”
We then questioned if this was the reason that Blizzard went so hard after the Nostalrius legacy style servers since even after the shutdown, Nostalrius released their code into the wild allowing others to use their databases before pulling support from some of those servers a few months later.
“Actually, we have brought most of the Nostalrius coders on board to Blizzard to work on cleaning up code from the Vanilla version of World of Warcraft since that’s what they did for free anyway. This way it looks like we’re helping the community when really we’re just wanting to make a quick buck.”
So what exactly will World of Warcraft: Legacy contain?
“We decided to remove just about every improvement, both positive and negative, out of the game. Heirlooms, gone. Looking for Dungeon & Raids, gone. Reductions in experience points, gone. Addons and helpful modifications, gone. Achievements, gone. We’ve brought back 40 man raids, attunements for higher end raiding, class gear sets that drop once in a blue moon, long chain quests for mounts, and finally unbalanced the classes so that Hunters and Warlocks are now back to their overpowered state. We hope that going back to all that will make the general forum shut up for once.”
So what about the story of World of Warcraft: Legacy? Why do we have to go back to the old style of the game? Is this another time travel thing like Warlords of Dreanor when Garrosh went back in time and changed the events of Manaroth’s blood corrupting the Orcs. We weren’t given anything in terms of story as the PR representative did not have that information handy at the time as the Blizzard writing crew was “still figuring it out after a long night drinking, which is normal around here”.
However we were told that a big part of the game will see the races for Pandas, Goblins, Worgen, Blood Elves & Dreanei wiped out of existance, returning the game to it’s basic 8 race selection. We were given a preview of that new selection screen, which also saw the return of class and race abilities to the fold.
“We here at Blizzard thought that having all these extra races around that really served no purposes at all was just taking up server space that we could use to add in a bunch of worthless new grey level items to the game. Plus nobody liked the Pandarin race at all and never played them. That was a waste of time and effort.” The Representative continued.
Finally, when asked about why they didn’t go the usual route of announcing the World of Warcraft: Legacy expansion at their annual Blizzcon event, The Outerhaven was told “Well we really needed the floor space for Overwatch. That game is were the real money is. People are spending thousands of dollars on random loot boxes which we keep turning down the drop rate of the good items every week.”
Speaking of Overwatch and their loot boxes, we were informed that Blizzard is going to introduce a new way of obtaining loot in World of Warcraft: Legacy. While the normal style of looting dead characters or mobs will result in gear in the grey, white, green and blue levels; the more well sort after Purple (Epic) and Orange (Legendary) gear items will only be available from Loot Boxes that will be obtained on the Blizzard store for a minimum of $49.99 for 20 boxes. While this might be a controversial move for the game, Blizzard believes that with this being the end of World of Warcraft, they will get a lot of people spending up big before servers go offline for World of Warcraft 2… maybe?
World of Warcraft: Legacy looks to be set for launch on April 1, 2018 Blizzard Time, which means sometime between now and the far distant future time where Starcraft is set in.
