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| Classic WoW will release August 27th, 2019 |
The
release date of Classic World of Warcraft has finally been announced, along
with the release of the beta the day following the announcement. So I figured
now would be an appropriate time to write about a rather new concept for the
MMO genre, legacy servers.
Legacy
servers for MMOs are servers that host an earlier version of said game. This
can come to be as a result of high player demand or developer obligation when
transferring their game to a significantly updated version. Usually the
likelihood of a legacy server coming into existence by the original creators is
slim, but does increase with age. For this reason private servers, illegally
hosted versions, are made to help quench this demand.
And who can blame them? When you buy a game
you buy it for what it is, that iteration, and arguably changes to said game is
a valid reasoning to be dissatisfied with the product. However MMOs are a bit
different, well, their nature is anyways. Massive MULTIPLAYER Online games do
not have their players in a vacuum, rather they play with hundreds of thousands
of other players, and satisfying a single individual is not on the table, and
usually is not even realistically possible. Creating servers for every version
of an MMO AND keeping the same “feel” of the game cannot be done, after all
other players are part of the experience and splitting them up would be less
than ideal. So for years an MMO will be updated pushing away and bringing in
players, until a significant demand for a particular version is reached, at
which point the team behind the game may consider re-releasing an older
iteration as its own entity.
