World of Warcraft Classic recently announced Hardcore realms are coming to the game very soon. In this high-challenge mode, a character cannot resurrect after they die, trapping them as a ghost in the afterlife. They can still explore the world and communicate with friends, but their journey on the Hardcore server otherwise comes to an end. To ensure tragedy does not strike unfairly, World of Warcraft is making a few changes to PvP and enemy behavior in the Hardcore realms, but will otherwise be preserving these new Classic Era servers like their normal counterparts.
Game ZXC spoke to lead software engineer Ana Resendez and senior technical designer Tim Jones about what players can expect in World of Warcraft's new challenge mode. Hardcore Classic is all about the journey, both in and out of the game world. The developers talked about how the project came into existence, how it will work, and how players can continue their journey if they die in the Hardcore realms. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Please introduce yourselves and your role at Blizzard.
Resendez: Hello, hi! I am Ana Resendez, lead software engineer with the World of Warcraft Classic team, and we’re here today to talk about Hardcore.
Jones: Hey there, I’m Tim Jones, I’m the senior technical designer on the World of Warcraft Classic team, and it’s awesome to be with you today.
Q: What did the personal journeys you took towards creating Hardcore realms for World of Warcraft Classic look like?
Resendez: From the engineering perspective, and from my personal point of view, this has been a thing that has been going on from the community for some time, right? There’s certain people in the team that were following it really closely, and they started talking to the team of like “Hey, there’s this thing going on right now in the Era servers.” I feel like the team was focused on getting Wrath out of the gate, but then we kept the servers open for the original Classic experience with no expansions. We started to see some trends in the community, and there started to be more action going on, and more people logging on every day. We were like “What’s going on?”
Then, we started to hear about the community and the push for the Hardcore servers and how they were really excited about that. It started coming up that this is something the community enjoys, so we started looking at it and saw it becoming such a big hit. We asked, “what is it about Hardcore that is really the essence of it?” That’s where it started to evolve into, “what would it take for the team to provide this experience for the players?” And that’s where, from the engineering point of view, we started to take a look at like, what makes it Hardcore? What kind of changes would we need to do in the code to make it so the players cannot resurrect?
Believe me, you would think there would just be like one place in the code where it was like “Okay, don’t rez or anything like that,” but it actually took a while to go and look at all the different places and all the logic and stuff that might kill the character, or that might allow you to rez, so it was quite a complex story going on there in the engineering side of things. We decided this is something we really wanted players to experience, and we want everybody in the same server to go through the same rules of the Hardcore experience, so we decided “Hey, let’s go in and try giving this experience to the players.”
Jones: It’s worthwhile mentioning that Classic itself has been a response to the passion of the community. It was the community that banded together saying to Blizzard, “We want official Classic servers!” Eventually, we delivered on that, and so, we’re always trying to listen to what excites the Classic community. That excitement coincided with our desire to build new and exciting things on Classic. We create our progression servers, but there’s always a desire to do a little bit more. So when we were starting to work on Season of Mastery a few years back, there was the community effort to do the Road to Ragnaros on Hardcore challenges. We wanted to support that. That excited us, people trying to kill Ragnaros without dying? That sounded like a crazy challenge, but people rose to it.
We provided cosmetic ways for people to keep track of whether they had died on the Season of Mastery servers, and as Ana said, the excitement and energy around the Hardcore community in building their add-ons on the Era servers has only grown in popularity. Even if you aren’t participating, we love watching videos of people dying in the craziest of circumstances! Again, it was a desire of the community to make this an official playstyle, so that’s where we come in. We want to support the community and that’s where official Hardcore realms have taken form from that excitement.
Q: When you die in Hardcore realms, you get to still log in and interact with other players, but you’re stuck as a ghost. Can you talk a bit about how that works, and why you chose to implement that system?
Resendez: It’s an interesting dilemma because we had to look at it from the two points of view. There are parts of the game that expect you to die to complete certain quests, so for all of those specific scenarios, we didn’t really want you to start your journey as a ghost from there, so we’re definitely taking a look at all of those quests that require you to die in order to talk to a spirit. We’re upgrading them so you don’t have to do that.
But then, on the other side of things, potentially, you’re going to be in a situation where you spend a lot of time into a character, and they come into a very tragic death, or maybe some silly death like you were not looking, and suddenly you’re in the lava! That happens. So, it’s going to happen, and people get attached to their characters. I am attached to all the characters I have created over the years! We didn’t want the journey to end there if that’s not what you want.
We also got inspiration from other game modes, more common for example in Battle Royales where you die and you can continue to see who was a winner. We want to give that experience. There’s a similar experience in Arenas in Burning Crusade and Wrath where you die and you can still spectate what happens and see the rest of the fight. I’m super curious to see what’s going to happen with all of those ghost communities all of a sudden. I wouldn’t be surprised if suddenly there are “ghost guilds” that you would die on purpose to join!
One caveat I want to add is that your journey doesn’t just end there in the ghost world if that’s not what you want. We’re going to enable free character transfers for players to go into the other Era realms. So if, for example, you died and you were a part of the ghost community, and you want to go back into the action, you’re still going to be able to do that and continue that character if you wish to, but it’s going to have to be in the environment where everyone can die at any point and resurrect in the normal Era servers we currently have.
Q: I imagine people having “ghost parties” with a bunch of dead characters forming a raid or something.
Resendez: And then have the Night Elves be the little dots, just floating around!
Q: The Hardcore realms are going to be PvE, and PvP flagging is going to work differently in these servers. Can you talk about how it will work in these realms, and why you decided to change it?
Jones: One of the things we want to do a better job with on the Hardcore realms is to fix up quests, avenues, and abilities people have used to force non-consensual PvP on other players. The servers are about the leveling experience, and that’s why we’re making them primarily PvE. The journey and the challenge is about leveling, all the intricacies of combat. You could die, and that’s it for your character, so you have to approach how you path around a zone, or be selective about the people you do a dungeon group with because there’s danger around every corner.
We’re taking extra care to identify problem quests, like escort quests, for example. A lot of the time, the escort quest NPC had a neutral faction or something where someone from the opposite faction could engage your escort NPC in combat, and that would ruin your experience of trying to quest. Or, someone can pull a high-level creature from the Blasted Lands and bring it into Elwynn Forest and trick people into attacking the creature, or the creature had some attack that could randomly target characters and kill them. There’s no counterplay in that. People in those low-level zones didn’t opt into that experience. So, we are doing our best to ensure people can’t do those things, so we can preserve the PvE challenge as much as possible.
Resendez: The whole idea is that PvP is something that should be very conscientious. Think about it as like, if you flagged yourself for PvP, that’s the only reason that we would like for you to engage in PvP because it’s something that you are looking for. But also, we don’t want to completely remove the whole experience of PvP, right? At the end of the day, we’re going to be with other players, and players really enjoy the PvP experience.
That’s why we are also working on the duel to the death feature. If you want to engage into PvP, you better be ready for it! You can still do normal duels without the stakes of dying at the end, but if you really want to battle for your honor and finish one of those discussions in the ultimate challenge of a duel to the death, you’re welcome to do that. Something cool is that if you win a duel to the death, you’re going to start having something cosmetic; you’ll get a buff that has a count of how many people you have actually defeated during your journey. It’s something really cool.
We really want PvP to be something you are looking to do. We saw some experiences from players where they will go to a Flight Master, want to right-click on it, and surprise, there’s a rogue there! We want to disable those kinds of behaviors where players were clearly not wanting to engage in PvP.
We’re also disabling random Battlegrounds, but that said, you have the ability to, if you want to really go in and form groups and go battle in Warsong Gulch and get the flags and all of that, you are still going to be able to by challenging another raid group. You’re going to have to challenge them through War Games, which is basically like a duel, but for a Battleground. You’re still going to be able to do all the PvP stuff you want – as long as both players want to engage in it.
Q: You mentioned the radius where some enemies leash back to their spawn is being adjusted on the Hardcore realms. How big will this adjustment be, and do you think it might impact classes that depend on kiting to survive?
Resendez: This is going to be one of those ongoing circumstances. Right now, we’re going to go out with a certain distance we think will work. We are always keeping in mind these kinds of behaviors. We don’t want to remove the ability for Mages or Hunters to be able to kite and slowly kill their prey. But, at the same time, it’s something we need to be looking at, and that’s something we are going to be looking at the PTR, to see like, does this distance make sense both ways? Are we still enabling players to take these NPCs into places where it is not the best behavior? Those are really long distances between the different leveling zones, so that’s going to be a very big one.
But we still want people to have the ability to kite their NPCs and be able to kill them. We’re going to keep an eye on it, and if we decide it is too short a distance and it’s not creating a great experience for the Hunters or the Mages or other classes, we’re still going to take a look into that and might make some adjustments if needed.
Q: Everyone will play by the basic Hardcore rules in these servers, but “player-driven restrictions” have also been mentioned alongside the announcement. Could you talk more about these?
Jones: With the unofficial Hardcore add-on that people have been using on Era realms, in order to enforce the challenge, they turn off different UI elements in order to prevent people from accessing their Mailbox, the Auction House, or trading with other players, as well as monitoring different elements of activity on the account itself.
Now, a lot of that is to ensure people are only interacting with other Hardcore players because on Era realms, you have a mix. You have people who’ve been playing there since 2019, you have some people who were playing Season of Mastery that transferred from there onto Era realms, so you don’t have exclusively Hardcore players, and so the add-on focuses on a playstyle called Solo Self-Found, which is all about not interacting with anyone until you get to level 60, outside of dungeons.
We’re not going to be as strict with those rules because we’re in an official Hardcore realm. Everyone you’re playing with is undertaking the same challenge. We’re interested in seeing what a 1-59 economy looks like with just Hardcore players who lose all their items and everything that was in their bank when they die! It will have drastic effects if someone had a rare recipe or something like that. If players want to add extra challenges to leveling, then they are free to do so with the Hardcore add-on and use that on the official Hardcore realms. We’re excited to see people do the Hardcore challenge normally, as well as with whatever additional levels of difficulty people want to impose on themselves. We think it will be exciting to see all of that.
Q: You mentioned there will be free character transfers for dead Hardcore characters onto other realms. Will any other in-game services be available on these realms?
Resendez: We’re not going to allow players to transfer into the Hardcore servers because that would defeat the purpose, right? Right now, basically, any other service available in the Era servers will be available there. We currently don’t have any plans on adding any other service in the Era environment, but definitely a big no on the transferring in that way, even for money. It will just be on the way out.
Q: If Hardcore kicks off for the Classic Era, is there a chance we could see Hardcore realms for Wrath of the Lich King Classic?
Jones: There are no plans at this time for there to be official Hardcore realms for Wrath of the Lich King Classic or modern World of Warcraft, but you know, just like Classic Hardcore was born from the outpouring of support and enthusiasm from the community, we’re always listening. If people want there to be an official Hardcore version of a different type of World of Warcraft, we’re listening to people.
Q: During the Hardcore Allstars Classic WoW event, Aggrend teased the team was working on something new besides Hardcore Classic, and that it wasn’t just another Season of Mastery. Can you give us any hints as to what that might be yet?
Resendez: What I am going to say is that the team is very busy! That’s as far as I can say. We’re really excited about all the plans we have currently in the Classic universe, but we cannot talk about any more details, but we can say the team is very excited and very busy.
Jones: In Wrath Classic, we just released Trial of the Grand Crusader, which is super exciting. Loved watching the race to world first. People are enjoying that raid. We also have Icecrown Citadel coming out later on, but as Ana said, we have huge aspirations on the Classic team, and we’re very busy right now. We’ll share more when we’re ready to share more.
Q: Any final thoughts on Hardcore World of Warcraft Classic?
Resendez: I think the thing I’m most curious about is what classes people are playing the most. I don’t know if there’s a way to do a poll, but I would love to do a poll of what classes people are hoping to play in Hardcore. For me, I usually main Priest, but I don’t know. I’m thinking when Hardcore comes out, I’m not really sure if I want to embark into being a Priest in Hardcore. I might just go into a little bit of a safer route and play a Mage or something like that. I’m really curious if people are like “I’m going to stick to my main, or I’m going to try something new,” or go all the way around and be like “I want to do the hardest one!” and maybe go into some territory like a Warrior or something like that. I’m curious!
Jones: Honestly, I’m just excited. I got a Warrior to level 28, and I died in a Shadowfang Keep run. But the community is so supportive. It’s almost surprising. It takes you back. Everyone is dying and losing an immense amount of progress on their character, but it’s so much about the journey and the support people give each other and the encouragement to “Go again, go again!”
It’s intoxicating in a way, to just be in a guild and encourage that person who keeps dying at level 10 to just push a little further, and give people advice on what the unique creatures do in certain zones. Hardcore allows players to play the game at a slower pace. That’s so much more different than the modern compulsion people have to get through to the end of the game as fast as possible. It’s okay to take your time. So, just taking my time, enjoying the struggle with a bunch of exciting people, it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Resendez: And I can’t wait to see all the new media compilations!
Jones: Oh yeah! Seeing who gets to kill the raid bosses first is going to be a treat. That’s going to be exciting to watch.
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World of Warcraft is available now for PC.