In a new interview with Kotaku today, Blizzard game chief Tom Chilton expanded on comments by a Nostalrius server manager on the challenges of running official World of Warcraft legacy servers.
“We certainly hold onto hope that some day we’ll be able to do that,” says Chilton. “We would have to go back and try to reverse-engineer [lost assets] ourselves… I also think there would be challenges with getting people to be able to connect through Battle.net to their stuff, which is completely different.”
Asked how the administrators of Nostalrius recreated assets from old versions of World of Warcraft for its “progressive vanilla” server, Chilton explained that it was a combination of research and guesswork, resulting in a workflow that, unfortunately, is incompatible with how Blizzard’s internal team approaches things.
They spent countless hours researching on YouTube, looking at, ‘OK how many hit points do you think that monster has, I think I saw a video that showed it with, you know, 2,152 hit points, so that’s the number of hit points we’re gonna give it.’ And they’re just kinda guessing and approximating on a lot of stuff. Which is cool, and they did an amazing job of making it feel like a very authentic experience. But ultimately the way they implement their data is in no way similar to the way we do it. So it’s not like we can even take that data and put it in the game, because they actually aren’t even really compatible – they have a completely different approach to creating content.
Kotaku’s interviewer proceeds to ask the obvious question that’s been on a lot of fans’ minds: why don’t they just hire the team behind Nostalrius to do the job for them? Here, Chilton’s response is a little less precise, in part because the question is also a legal issue — Blizzard is an American game company, while many of Nostalrius’s key people are based in Europe.
“There are definitely challenges with being able to do that,” Chilton says. “These are cool ideas, but they are actually hard to execute.”
Despite this, Chilton says “we certainly hold onto hope that some day we’ll be able” to run legacy servers, which reinforces what Nostalrius manager Viper was quoted saying yesterday. This isn’t just paying lip service to a fan issue, but something that several of World of Warcraft‘s key people are personally invested in. Chilton adds that he and other members of Blizzard even spent some time in Nostalrius themselves.
“It was kind of a moving experience to get to re-experience classic WoW,” he says.
The interview covers much more than the legacy server issue, including how expansions are designed and Blizzard’s plan to push more frequent content updates in the future.
(h/t Kotaku.)
