World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment’s long-running MMO, has had many eras. Nine expansions, dozens of major content updates, and almost twenty years of life means players have a time that they think most nostalgically about. No era or expansion has had a greater impact on the game than Cataclysm, WoW’s 2010 update. Completely changing the original Azeroth while introducing new zones for leveling is a lot to undertake. So much change over time also means divisiveness among players. Now, fourteen years later, Cataclysm is returning under the Classic umbrella with World of Warcraft Cataclysm Classic.
How does this differ from before? How has the Classic team approached this divisive release? We got to sit down with the Classic team’s Associate Production Director Clayton Stone and Game Producer Linny Cooke Saverline to talk about what players can expect when they revisit the Azeroth changed by Deathwing’s emergence.
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Cataclysm, at its original reveal at BlizzCon 2009, showed off content that never made it to the game. Some of that content included dungeons and raids that would eventually tie up stories that were left on cliffhangers at launch. Stories like potentially saving Neptulon in the unreleased dungeon, The Abyssal Maw. With the return of Cataclysm, we asked the team if there was any potential for cut content to potentially return and complete those stories from all those years ago with the new team.
While denying that we wouldn’t see unreleased content, Stone gave a peek into how the Classic experiences are made: “Every time we start one of these classic expansion projects, we do a little bit of brainstorming and we think ‘okay, what can we bring to it? What new systems [or] new features would players want to see?’ I think there was even something about the dance studio for Wrath of the Lich King, which was the back-of-the-box feature that never ended up shipping for Wrath.”
Stone continued, “More so, more often than not, even though we’ll have those discussions, typically, we don’t end up moving forward with them. Partly for technological reasons. So I’m not saying that we would never be able to do something like that. But certainly, the place that we start from is the expansion as it originally existed back in the day, and then kind of looking from there.”
Those technological reasons include the data conversion process, which takes the original version of an expansion and translates it to modern code. Clayton detailed this process and how it affects the developer’s work on the new release: “It starts from a place of taking on expansion as it originally existed at the very end of it. And then converting all of that data to run on modern code. So you have access to things like all the Battle.net services or other account-based bells and whistles that would fit a modern player and get it to run on that code.”
Clayton continues, “And a lot of the time, what happens is when we do that data conversion process, it limits our ability to be able to bring in all new things. Season of Discovery has really started to push the boundaries of that. Being able to find new ways to bring in things from later expansions, and even rework them and put them into what is a recreation of a past expansion. But when it comes to doing something that was basically never done something like the Abyssal Maw, that almost goes too far outside of our technical capabilities. Now that being said, I will say that our ambitions certainly lean into stuff like that.”
As for end-game content, Cataclysm pushed the envelope on difficulty in dungeons and pushed raiders in new ways. Particularly with bosses and phases exclusive to the hardest raid difficulty at the time, Heroic Mode. Fights like Ragnaros, who jumped out of a lava bath for forty percent of the fight, where before he sulked away at low health on normal mode. With raids being more accessible now than ever, we asked if there is any change to these fights that very few players got to experience back in the day.
Stone confirmed that a big part of Classic is how it makes experiences more accessible to a wider player base. Not only can players experience them like new content, but they’ve also been improved from a technological standpoint. “When looking at specifically our instance contents for Cataclysm things like our raids and our dungeons, the original difficulty level at the launch of the original Cataclysm was extremely challenging. Players were struggling to make it through the most basic of dungeons, which was a massive, massive step up in complexity over where they had just left off in Wrath of Lich King.”
“One of the other benefits of starting with our final balance patches, we are also bringing the balance back to these instance experiences for our dungeons for our raids. So we are launching with the balance as it existed at the end of the expansion, which was actually easier or tuned to be easier than it was at the beginning as Cataclysm originally launched.”
“We expect that more players, particularly these modern players who are able to min-max everything and absolutely stomp our content, should provide more accessibility for more casual players just jumping into it now and playing with other people and with friends. But since we’re starting with the level of difficulty as it existed at the end of the expansion, which was easier, we’re hoping to see that the progression rates are reflective of that. But if we need to make further changes, that’s absolutely something that we can do.”
In addition to Cataclysm Classic, World of Warcraft players have so many other experiences to play under that umbrella, such as Season of Discovery phase 3, Dragonflight patch 10.2.7, Season 4 of Dragonflight, and Pandaria Remix. That’s a lot of content that can be overwhelming when giving players a choice of what to hop in to when booting up Battle.net, particularly with many of those experiences releasing so close together. So I asked Stone and Saverline about how decisions like releasing Cataclysm Classic so close to other WoW updates are decided internally and how they combat FOMO within the player base.
Stone boiled it down to the player base being so large and diverse, with those coming to play for all different types of experiences, “We try to watch where players are spending their time so that we know what to build for them in the future. There is something to be said about timing. We want everything to have its time in the spotlight, certainly. But we also build experiences that are that are deep and are not meant to be played in just single sessions. So it’s it’s definitely a challenge.”
“But it’s one that, from a scheduling perspective, we work together with the various teams responsible for each of these games really, really closely to make sure that certain things are landing with enough time for them to have their time to shine and be in the spotlight. We’ve also found that by and large, our classic audience for our classic experiences tend not to spend too much time in the modern version of the game and vice versa.”
However, that’s not to say that the World of Warcraft team discourages players from switching between the experiences. Quite the opposite. Stone continued, “We acknowledge that there’s a lot of exciting stuff going on all at the same time. But we think that there’s value in that we’re able to build more bespoke experiences for each of these different players and in their interests based upon what they gravitate to best. I hope that there’s not too much FOMO out there.”
“We want everybody to check out everything, whatever looks interesting to them. And it so it is certainly a challenge also from our team support perspective to be able to find the right time slot for each of these. But it’s a challenge that that we’re up to, and is just one that we’re going to continue to get better and better out over time.”
While the original launch of Cataclysm back in 2010 was divisive, the new return to a shattered Azeroth aims to re-tell the story of Deathwing’s attack in a better light. One without ten months between patch releases weighing over its head. Even while some things, like Vashj’ir, won’t be redone, the entire experience will feel modern with new features and the beginning of the expansion where tuning classes, dungeons, and raids left off. The better question is: Where does the Classic team go next, now that they’ve reached the expansion that was almost the point of the original Classic’s existence?
World of Warcraft Cataclysm Classic releases on May 20th, 2024 worldwide on PC.
