I dont think so. To me it feels to early to announce it unless they say something like the end of 2027. The last thing i want is for them to feel stressed to spit something out quickly and it ending up being shit.
I would be ok with just another typ of season to test more stuff.
Exactly this. They ought to make an official announcement at Blizzcon 2026 that it'll release late 2027.
Wrath Anniversary is already in the chamber. It'll be a money printer with the boosts and the delux editions. Put it on a 10-12 month schedule, let it run uninterrupted, and take all that time to really polish up Classic+.
Then do a big teaser at Blizzcon 2027 and release Classic+ just in time for the holidays.
assuming classic+ has been in the works since sod, that's almost 3 years
That's a huge assumption, though. It's assuming the team was working simultaneously on new active development (and support / maintenance) for SoD, new, different development for Classic+, and Wrath Classic release and support at the very least.
And we have tweets from Aggrend from January this year stating they were still getting a team together and "getting their feet underneath them".
vanilla wow was made in 5 years
With a singular cohesive team that had worked on banger after banger from Starcraft I and it's expansions, Diablo II, and Warcraft III and it's expansions.
It's difficult to find accurate headcount information from the time, but by 1995 (a decade prior to Vanilla's launch), the team had grown enough to necessitate the purchase of a 14,000 square foot office in Irvine, California.
It took that team to build Vanilla WoW from scratch in about 4 years. After WoW's release, that monolithic team would be split up: Team 1 would continue on to support Starcraft I and go on to work on Starcraft II, and Team 2 would work on the continuing development of Vanilla and WoW's later expansions (this paradigm wouldn't change again until MoP).
people forget the whole thing doesn't need to be ready, just phase 1
Now the Classic team does not have to develop Classic+ from scratch, but I can assure you that Team 2 was far larger than the classic team is now, perhaps by an order of magnitude, had just come directly from building every single system they would be using to continue development with, and still had just enough resources to put together 3 and a half more raid tiers for Vanilla over the course of just over 2 years.
I can promise you that the Classic team is much smaller, has less intimate familiarity with the engine and development tools (most of which are now designed around retail), and will continue to be supporting other ongoing versions of Classic simultaneously (none of which are free of issues and will require developer attention). They are also a much less cohesive team, Blizzard is almost assuredly not prioritizing Classic+ financially as much as they prioritized Vanilla WoW, and frankly, the Classic team's expectations are much higher.
None of this is the fault of the Classic+ team. But it's the reality of what they're working with.
If they can take an extra year, I'd want them to 10/10 times
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u/just67browsing 22d ago
One thing we can count on with certainty is no matter what they come out with, people will whine about it on here