When Blizzard had a popular World of Warcraft legacy server, Nostalrius, shut down over copyright claims earlier this year, more than a few fans were upset. The server ran a version of the original World of Warcraft, free of the expansions and updates Blizzard has introduced over more than a decade.
Outcry from fans over the server's shutdown showed Blizzard that the demand for an original, or vanilla, World of Warcraft server was very real, and if Nostalrius wasn't going to be allowed to continue operating, Blizzard should offer an official alternative. Turns out that's much more difficult than fans realize.
Key members of the Nostalrius team recently sat down with key members of the World of Warcraft development team, including Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, to discuss the future of legacy servers. During the meeting, Blizzard employees dove into the nitty gritty of why making official legacy servers proves to be such a challenge for the company.
"First, they DO have the source code for Vanilla WoW," Nostalrius project manager Viper writes on the project's forums. "Code version control systems are not something new, as it has been a standard in the industry for a long time. With these systems, they can retrieve the code at any given previous backup date.
"However, in order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build system is being used. It is not just about generating the 'WoW.exe' and 'Server.exe' files. The build process takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and also generates client and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the information that it needs.
"This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to be gathered in one place with the code. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process."
A recent Kotaku interview with World of Warcraft game director Tom Chilton shines some additional light on the subject of just how much of vanilla World of Warcraft had to be manually recreated by the Nostalrius team, something that doesn't work with Blizzard's current methods.
"So what they [Nostalrius] did is went back and reverse-engineered it," Chilton says. "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."
Blizzard says in addition to recreating much of original World of Warcraft, the server would need to provide the same kind of polished game experience for which the company is known. With all that being said, it doesn't sound like legacy servers are coming anytime soon, even if Blizzard would love to create them. The amount of work involved seems simply too steep for Blizzard to invest signficant resources in it for little return, but perhaps fans will get to relive the game's golden days sometime in the future.
