Interview: Talking World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore Ahead Of PTR Launch

mmorpg.com:

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, and Classic Hardcore is on the way! In fact, the PTR for this should be spinning up on June 29thso Blizzard can test out everything about how their plans for this new server type will work, with a goal of Hardcore servers going live later this summer. In prep for the PTR starting, I had the opportunity to discuss these plans with Lead Software Engineer Nora Valletta and Senior Game Producer Josh Greenfield. We covered a ton of topics regarding how all of this will work, so let’s get to it.

For some, doing hardcore servers might seem like an odd choice as it’s a niche playstyle, so it could be seen as catering to very few players. Greenfield explained that some of this was born out of the Soul of Iron challenge, which was part of the season of mastery, but he also specifically mentioned the Road to Ragnaros event as being something that also inspired them to do more to support this type of gameplay. He clarified that although they’ve had many talks about doing something like this it was “around December 2022 is when we started really thinking about it and talking about it. But yea we’ve been part of the community playing, like I leveled a hardcore character on the season of mastery realm, I think a lot of us did, so it’s been something we’ve been in touch with for a while.”

There’s also something to be said for since this is an official mode completely cut off from the rest of WoW’s servers, players who wouldn’t normally participate in something like this might be interested now. It will be interesting to see how all of this progresses and if it does truly end up being a popular way to play.

The first thing to know about the Hardcore experience is that it will be the Classic era 1-60