The people behind Nostalrius, the World of Warcraft legacy server that was recently shut down by Blizzard, announced that it is teaming up with Elysium, another legacy server project for the game, for the revival of Nostalrius.
Nostalrius, run by a dedicated team of volunteers, received a cease and desist order from Blizzard lawyers for copyright infringement. The team behind the legacy server was forced to schedule the April shutdown of Nostalrius, which has 800,000 registered players, 150,000 players of which are active.
Nostalrius And Legacy Servers For World of Warcraft
The legacy server allowed gamers to play on a reverse-engineered version of World of Warcraft before expansions were added, with Nostalrius receiving constant content updates and patches from its team. It looked to recreate World of Warcraft's initial build 10 years ago, aimed at nostalgic gamers.
The demand for a legacy server such as Nostalrius could not be ignored, and so key members of the team were invited to a meeting with the development team of World of Warcraft, including Blizzard's CEO Mike Morhaime. Ultimately, the meeting only revealed that it would be very difficult for Blizzard to create a legacy server, dashing hopes that the company will launch an official one any time soon.
If Blizzard was making progress in launching a legacy server, it was not evident at BlizzCon 2016. There was no mention of such a project in the annual event, and in an interview with IGN, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas said that Blizzard is still in an internal discussion over the matter.
Hazzikostas said that Blizzard wants to have an official legacy server, but the delay in getting to work on the project is because the company has not yet figured out how to revive the pre-expansion World of Warcraft universe without having to go through a similar process as launching an entirely new game.
Nostalrius Is Coming Back
It seems that the team behind Nostalrius is tired of waiting. In its announcement of the planned revival of the legacy server with Elysium, it was said that the source code for Nostalrius would be given to Elysium. As the project will look to revive all the characters that players had on the shutdown legacy server, it will need to freeze the current Elysium database and transfer the characters into Nostalrius once it is revived.
The big question, however, is what would prevent Blizzard from issuing another cease and desist order against the revived Nostalrius? In addition, would the company take further action if the team behind the legacy server keeps trying to bring it back?
However the Nostalrius saga unfolds, one thing is for certain: the absence of Nostalrius was felt at BlizzCon 2016.
