I think they do have a skeleton of a plan for further Classic releases at present. (TBC, Wrath, etc) but they haven’t committed to them yet.
I think Classic+(or variants thereof) is something that may be getting discussed, but no decisions have been made, and those discussions have likely “punted” the time for making such a decision to some point further down the road. Such as after they establish whether or not “Classic has legs” to stand upon.
Throw in the whole legal angle involving abandon ware on top of it, and somebody Specifically asking about plans for “Adding new content to Classic” and you just the door wide open for Ion to reply “Absolutely not.”
Because Classic is intended to be a museum piece. That isn’t to say they can’t create a fork that branches away from it. It just won’t be under the Classic Label. Ion gets to be 100% truthful multiple ways. Classic isn’t getting new content. So “Absolutely not” is correct.
Also, they haven’t made a decision as to whether or not it is “worth their time” to create such a “fork in the road” for that kind of content, so no plans exist at present except for the intention to evaluate things later. So once again “Absolutely not” is a demonstrably valid response for him to give at the time the interview was given.
It doesn’t mean he ruled out the possibility of such a thing happening in the future. He was simply making clear such a thing was not happening right now.
Classic isn’t out yet and already the requests for content beyond classic start. No, there should NOT be any because then they’d be running two full games side by side. If they’re going to do anything they should totally revamp the current retail and return it to a more classic state. That would make sense, trying to run two versions of the game does not.
I would actually like to see them take wow classic and now take it into another direction with future addons. Make it essentially wow alternate timeline, basically wow 2.0. Use the art and assets from expansions but keep them to strict vanilla design guidelines.
I don’t recall them ever saying that. There was never a definitive ‘no chance.’ It was always ‘no current plans’ or something like that.
But to change Classic and abandon their promise of delivering an authentic Vanilla recreation would mean they lied to us about their intentions. Look, I understand the desire. Honestly I’ve thought about the possibilities of adding new content (dungeons, raids) and how that might be interesting. But then I read long posts by players about adding this feature, that feature, balance changes, homogenization, convenience elements, etc, etc. And you see how it can (and will) go horribly, horribly wrong. Much safer to just release TBC and perhaps Wrath servers. Capture those pieces if history as well.
And then perhaps work on another new mmorpg. I never thought Blizz would do that again…and still don’t. But perhaps if Classic is a huge success it’ll show them that the genre can still be very profitable and worth the investment.
It’s really not. For example, my latest suggestion, the Hunter Pet Un-Homogenization Idea, captures the design aesthethic and feel of classic WoW perfectly.
This proves my point. This is precisely why it’s not possible.
You’re talking about mechanics and spirit like they’re just plug-and-play formulas they have kicking around. They’re not. There’s an attitude…an ethos…a mindset…a particular time and place. There are thousands of thoughts and feelings that fed into the decision-making process that ended up creating Vanilla WoW that are simply not things that can be felt or thought again, even if you took the same exact people who made Vanilla WoW and had them do it all again. Those people think and feel things differently now than they did 15-18 years ago. Whatever they produced could be amazing to engage with but any feeling like “Oh this captures the spirit of the old days” would be purely anecdotal and a whole host of people might just disagree with you.
He very clearly laid out his No, it was a hard no from him, it just had an unsaid “not at this time” attached to it in my mind, but he made his case as to why he said No to doing them, good thing it was never just up to one person really, or that they could change their stance.
Because just about every other time since then, for the most part they avoided saying No again, and tried to keep it open more or less.
Yah not his best day by any means, he put his foot in his mouth pretty bad.