Blizzard’s keeping the pressure up this week with another new World of Warcraft release, though this one’s about the live game, not WoW Classic: It’s a brand-new cinematic called Safe Haven, and Horde folks will be pleased to see a familiar face return to the fray as Saurfang embarks on a quest to thwart assassins and bring Thrall back to the fight. In fact, the assassins might be the coolest part, at least if you’re tired of Horde or orcs and always wondered how Rogue stealth was supposed to work in reality.
Meanwhile, Forbes has an interview out featuring Blizzard president J. Allen Brack, and though he apparently dodged all questions relating to the layoffs and Activision, he does touch on Mike Morhaime’s exit, Blizzard’s priorities, different platforms beyond PC, the NetEase partnership, and new IPs. He also talks a bit about WoW Classic itself, specifically what other types of WoW Classics might be on the table.
“What I’m more excited about, with what we do have, what we are able to do, is thinking about different versions of WoW that we now can support,” he says. “Right, we’ve kind of got this modern WoW, and we’ve got this other version of WoW called WoW: Classic. What does that enable us to do, going forward?” Then when the interviewer suggests a Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King progression server, he says it’s possible.
“I don’t want to trivialize the amount of work that’s required to do that, or the amount of time. It’s not something we can just dial up and dial down at any moment. But assuming a wildly successful Classic, we’ll see what the future brings. […] If it is wildly successful, and there are huge numbers of people who are in it and are interested, and it becomes this call for the next thing, then I think that could be something that we talk about then. We certainly now have the ability to do it in a way that we never did before. It’s something that now has become possible. Whether or not we will do it, I think will really depend on the fans’ interest and the fans’ reaction.”
