How did Blizzard make Classic?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I remember many posts over the years by people asking for the return of “Vanilla Wow” and the answer always was “we can’t do it because the early software was overwritten” or similar answers. It wasn’t so much ‘we don’t want to’ as "we can’t’.

So…suddenly they could? This has always sort of puzzled me. If indeed it was no longer in existence, how could they have so perfectly recreated it, down to things such as the minutae of environment detail, the little off-the-beaten-track areas and mobs, etc? Every quest, every little bit of story, every item. Was it somehow located??

:upside_down_face:

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I don’t know, so this is pure speculation on my part with no point of reference related to Blizzard whatsoever.

I’m not sure exactly when work started on WoW, but I can imagine it was several years prior to its initial release, perhaps in the late 90s.

Today, with modern software development, source version control tools are extremely common. If you are unfamiliar with them, perhaps you have edited a Google Doc, and shared it with someone else, who also edited it. At some point, you found a feature to view all edits by all authors, including the ability to revert the document to a particular point in time.

Source version control is a way to keep track of changes to software code, and also to have multiple people contribute to the same code base, while keeping track of changes.

Today, what seems like the most common (certainly for open source, I am not sure what is common for game companies), is Git. Prior to Git, SVN was quite popular (and other based off it). It was introduced originally in 2000. My guess is that if Blizzard was using a source version control tool for WoW, it was not SVN, but something that existed prior.

I would be skeptical of claims that they did not use any source version control, though truth be told, I do not have any idea how common it was in software at the time. I could not imagine any significant software being worked on today, especially among multiple developers without using some form of source version control.

In addition to this, they likely downloaded and had access to some of the clients being used on private servers; which I imagine they mean whenever I hear or read reference client, though it’s quite possible (probably even) that they have every single release (and even releases which were never released) archived, on CD, DVD, hard disks, tape, you name it.

So, to conclude… I don’t know, and I don’t really have any idea.

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I searched google for how blizzard created wow classic and the 2nd result is a blizzard article titled Restoring History: Creating WoW Classic Panel Recap.

I have a hard time believing that they “lost the source code”. But alright, we’ll pretend CVS wasnt a thing since the 90s. I’m made to understand that some folks created “free” servers using assets from old game CDs so… maybe they just had to think harder.

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put 1.12. in a blender and call it classic. with retail tunin

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Basically they found a backup of the data in a repository somewhere in some data storage service that they forgot about. You would be surprised how often this happens in the IT world. Granted the only reason they didn’t find it sooner is because they didn’t look hard enough for it.

Once they found the actual data, they started integrating the old data into the new client.

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It’s fortunate that most of the stuff in WoW isn’t hard coded. WoW is heavily “data driven”.

As aforementioned by Khazgruk, they managed to dig out all the vanilla data then they modify the retail client/server a bit to run it.

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Perforce is the de facto standard for games. Version control has been around for a long, long time, long before WoW started development. But storage was much more expensive in the past.

Judging by the raw data, where item names are prefixed with “OLD” and suffixed with “[UNUSED],” and observations by addon developers who deal with data and porting addons to work on Classic, I don’t think they rolled back so much as they handcrafted a Vanilla-like version of the game.

Classic is not Vanilla. It’s not a museum piece. It’s not an artifact frozen in time. It’s a stripped down version of Retail made to look and feel like Vanilla. It’s essentially an entirely new game, and it may have an entirely different future than Vanilla did.

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Neato!

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Interesting!

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I think they randomly found a copy of the 1.12 code/data in an old backup somewhere.

Then, they figured out how to get the 1.12 stuff working on the modern server/client.

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They lied about it because they couldn’t swallow their pride realising that a 15 y/o game is better than the turd burger single player game that retail wow has become.

Now we get some reverse engineered retail client with TBC prepatch that does not emulate the actual vanilla wow experience very well.

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Nice try with your tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, but 2.0.1 was TBC prepatch

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If you don’t like what modern-day Blizzard did with Retail, what made you think you’d like what modern-day Blizzard would do with Classic? :rofl:

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A while back I looked into it, and I can’t actually find the statement from Blizzard saying they didn’t have the old code.

I know it was very commonly repeated by the fanbase, but I can’t find the actual Blizzard quote saying that. It seems more like it’s just something that got attached to the wall of no and then repeated until everybody assumed it was true.

Official Blizzard statements were more along the lines of “you think you do, but you don’t”.

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c’mon man…

some people really like turd burgers.

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I am almost 100% certain the whole “lost the original” code is a line to feed it’s customer base so that they can make it seem like more effort was put into this than what really went down.

Why? Who knows. They are going to make a to of money on keeping/ new subscribers based on this “reissue” so it might look better if they actually had to do work on it :slight_smile:

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Let’s say WoW average 5 million players over the last 15 years. That’s $15/month, times 12 months per year, times 15 years, times 5 million… = $13.5 BILLION in revenue. That’s more money than most people can even conceptualize. I find it hard to believe that they couldn’t afford to save copies of each version of the code on some hard drives somewhere.

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I’m sure they keep unique backup copies of all their game versions.

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When a mommy game and a daddy game love each other veeeeery much…

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They weren’t making that kind of money 15 years ago, and I highly doubt they’d go through all the effort for such an elaborate lie

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The short answer: yes. The found a complete 1.12 backup in their archives. Then they came up with a plan to port the old database data to their new format and port the old source code into their modern engine.

The backup they found had 100% of the Source Code, Database data, and Art assets. The foundation for Classic is 1.12 of the original game.