Summary
- World of Warcraft Classic is introducing official Hardcore realms where players can attempt to play with one life only, making death permanent.
- The official Hardcore rules codify the one-life-only rule, ensuring a level playing field for all players.
- Dungeons in Hardcore realms can only be completed once every 24 hours, promoting exploration and discouraging dungeon grinding.
After months and years of players creating their own homebrew rule sets, World of Warcraft Classic is introducing official Hardcore realms for players to attempt to play with one life only, where death is forever. Survival is key in a WoW Classic Hardcore experience, as any character death, for any reason, will be permanent in that realm and includes losing all gear, progress, and more. Naturally, this change required a bit of fine-tuning and adjustments from developers in order to see what changes needed to happen and how this can be fairly instituted so that anyone can chase the thrills that come from knowing there is no resurrecting here.
Hardcore realms will follow a similar pattern to Diablo 4's Hardcore rules, combined with from the community regarding the player-made mods and add-ons which originally created the Hardcore phenomenon within World of Warcraft Classic. To understand more about the unique rules and changes in these special realms, Screen Rant was able to talk to two of the developers behind the project at Blizzard. Nora Valetta, the Lead Software Engineer, and Josh Greenfield, the Senior Game Producer, graciously answered some of the questions that can help anyone looking to attempt a Hardcore run in WoW Classic.
Screen Rant: We are talking about the new WoW Classic Hardcore that's coming. I know there's been a popular trend for quite a while now of community-made addons, mods, and rules for running Hardcore. How is this official Hardcore Classic going to differ from what players have already kind of been doing?
Nora Valetta, Lead Software Engineer: So, the official servers have sort of codified the one-life-only rule. It makes sure everybody is on the same playing field, it's, you know, if you choose to engage with other players, you know, that they're basically playing by that same rule of they only have one life. If they're alive, that is their life, you know, they haven't died yet. And so, really, it's just making sure that folks are all competing, sort of, on the same playing field.
Josh Greenfield, Senior Game Producer: Yeah, to kind of build on that too, the original unofficial challenge, you know, I think different people kind of approach it different ways. But, you know, a lot of the kind of rules and guidelines that they set up were sort of born out of necessity of being on an environment with other players that weren't playing by the same rule set. You know, we spent a lot of time talking to a lot of the people who sort of started the challenge, and kind of getting their takes on why they set it up that way and what did they think worked? What did they think didn't work? And ultimately, we think that just sticking to the you have one life, sort of you know, that's the main rule. That's the key rule. And then everyone else can sort of layer on their own challenge on top of that. We felt like that was the perfect kind of compromise for a community that's actually very large, and it's probably larger than we even know, there's a lot of people that we think want to try this, but may have been intimidated by like, oh, I can't trade, or I can only do a dungeon once. So, we sort of tactically looked at each one of those things and picked what we thought would be the best for kind of the most amount of people to be able to get in and enjoy the way they want to enjoy it.
Screen Rant: Oh, that's really cool that you actually met with the people who started the system. I didn't realize that. Okay, well, and you mentioned dungeons, how are dungeons going to be handled for Hardcore? Are there restrictions set up?
Nora Valetta: Yes. So, players will be able to do a dungeon once in a 24-hour period. So, if I find a group for the Dees, and I go run the Dees. That's it, I'm locked out for that 24-hour period. It's going to work similar to Wrath of the Lich King heroic dungeons, where it resets basically the same time every day.
Josh Greenfield: Yeah. And that's per dungeon per day. So, I could go do Dees, and I could go do Wailing Caverns. And again, this was sort of a compromise and we looked at what the restrictions were on the unofficial challenge of doing only each one dungeon once. And really, the reason for that was born out of just not wanting to have people, spam dungeons, essentially, in an organized group to level. They wanted people to be out in the outside world, which we totally agree with. You think that's one of the best parts of original World of Warcraft, and it makes Hardcore feel very, very alive.
Screen Rant: Okay, so with that, will Hardcore also have any of the solo self found options, or how is the economy in the auction house and everything going to work?
Josh Greenfield: So initially, really, the only rule is that you have one life and then your journey is over. A lot of those self found options, like I said before, those were kind of born out of a sort of desire to keep the challenge pristine, and in an environment where you're playing with other people that aren't necessarily doing the same challenge. That said, you know, it's a pretty common request for a mode like that. And that's the kind of thing we've been talking about internally for probably a post launch kind of thing. It wasn't quite in scope for our original launch and we wanted to kind of put it out with the barest of sort of prescriptive changes and prescriptive restrictions at first. And then over time, we can turn the knobs a little bit and add in additional things to spice it up to keep it fresh.
Nora Valetta: It's important to note that like, those additional things are almost for certain going to be opt-in. So that, you know, because we that's the thing, you know, we didn't want to prescribe how players should engage with Hardcore, really the one life only rule is kind of the essence of what we're trying to accomplish.
Screen Rant: With the economy, do you have any idea how that's going to affect things on the Auction House because it's going to be a completely different situation?
Josh Greenfield: Yeah, the funny thing is it's basically a fresh server in of the economy, so it's kind of a clean slate. I expect if you kind of look at, if you've played 2019 Classic, and you've seen sort of what a fresh, original WoW server looks like there's almost like a bell curve of valuable items that have like their day where they're super valuable, like greater magic wands are going to be the hotness for, like, two weeks or whatever, you know, like runecloth bags, there's going to be a point where everyone wants runecloth bags. And that's kind of a fun thing to watch. You know, overall, we kind of suspect that it'll settle the way most servers do, where there's certain things that are valuable, certain things that are less valuable. Black Lotus is going to be a big deal, you know, edgemaster’s handguards are going to be a big deal, whoever gets lucky and finds one of those. But yeah, it should, you know, one of the things that we saw on PTR that we really thought was interesting and fun was there were people in Elwynn Forest, just being like, ‘bring me six linen cloth, and I'll make you bags’ you know, that kind of thing. That's something that we sort of missed from the unofficial challenge that it's kind of wholesome and fun to have back.
Nora Valetta: It's gonna be interesting, too, because like, if you're a player who likes to sort of like max out your gear and items and stuff, if you then go and take on some risk you shouldn't have taken on and die. You're basically removing those items from the economy at that point, because you're dead now and you can't really just turn around and resell it, you know, at least not on the Hardcore server, you could just migrate your Hardcore character after death, or before death if you want to, onto a normal Classic Era realm and then play normally.
Screen Rant: That actually leads into another question: with Hardcore if you die, you're dead. But what happens to a player's character and, like you're saying, if you have really amazing, awesome loot and you want to keep your character, how is that going to work for players?
Nora Valetta: Well, there's a couple of options there. Like if you're being super-duper cautious, you could technically mail any, like BOE items to an alt, or something like that. But if you have some really fancy items equipped, and you maybe feel like you don't want to risk the rest of your leveling experience having that like, you know, shock of ‘Oh, no, I died on a Hardcore realm’ you could migrate your character to a normal Classic Era realm. But you know, there's really, I mean, there's really no harm and just continuing till you do die, and then, you know, choosing to take that option to continue on to a Classic Era realm.
Josh Greenfield: Yeah, ultimately, we know that this challenge isn't necessarily for everybody. So, it was really important to us that, you know, if you want to get in and try it, even if you don't die, we want to give you an out to be like, ‘alright, this is too much stress, I can't do it, I gotta go’. So, you'll be able to move for free to a normal Era realm. But also, if you die, you'll also be able to move for free to a normal Era realm and then once you're there, you can obviously resurrect as normal. So, it's really just your journey on this realm is over, but your journey doesn't necessarily have to be over, over if you want to continue the character.
Screen Rant: I know you can also come back into the game as a ghost or stay in the game as a ghost. What can you do as a ghost, anything?
Josh Greenfield: Not much! I mean, you can talk to people you can hand guild leadership over. Honestly, a big reason for that was logistics. We didn't really want to, you know, a lot of the taglines for the unofficial challenge is death equals Delete. But we didn't want to get into a situation where it's like, ‘oh, no, I'm a guild leader, what do I do?’ you know? So, for logistics, we added that, but we also think it's gonna be fun. It's gonna be cute. People are going to kind of run around and I'm sure there's going to be a few people who are trying to hunt down their guild as ghosts and stuff like that. But yeah, it's really just chat and just sort of light interactions, but rest in peace our fallen friends.
Nora Valetta: I'm almost certain that like, there's going to be ghost guilds that form up they're just like, well, we all died, but we're just going to hang out here as ghosts, you know, basically a chat room at that point.
Screen Rant: Is there any possibility of having something like how Diablo 4 has the Lilith statue for people who actually survive, or you know, any kind of way to either memorialize a character or celebrate someone who makes it to 60 or anything like that?
Nora Valetta: I was really intrigued by that, like I selfishly kind of wanted that myself. But we didn't want to add that kind of reward to, like, encourage players to rush through their journey to 60. So, we don't have any plans of having anything like that, unfortunately. But we do think that really with Hardcore the focus is on that journey. It is on kind of, like, pacing yourself and taking as much or as little risk as you want to on your way to 60.
Screen Rant: Okay, so what about PvP? How is PvP going to be handled for Hardcore? And is there going to be the Mak’gora, duel to the death, available in Hardcore?
Josh Greenfield: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was a feature that was tailor-made for Hardcore. I think when we were first sitting down and talking about what PvP would look like in Hardcore, obviously, one of the major things we wanted to do was make PvP a pretty consensual activity. In original World of Warcraft, you know, it's pretty easy to get flagged, if you just right-click a flagged member of the opposite faction or the wrong NPC you can auto-attack them and get flagged and really with this, when it comes to other players, like if you try and right click to take hostile action against another player, you'll get a prompt that says like, you cannot do this unless you type /PvP to flag. And that was a really important thing.
And in of like the honor system and stuff like that, we thought about having it on originally, but we were concerned that that would basically lead to non-participation. People would queue for battlegrounds, and they would just hide in the back, they wouldn't really participate, in order to get the reputation or whatever, to get the rewards and stuff like that. So, we decided to go ahead and suspend the PvP honor system. But that's what kind of got us thinking about like, you know, duels are always a thing, that's always a fun thing to do in Classic. People hanging out in front of Orgrimmar or Ironforge and they challenge each other. It's like, what if we added something that just had a little bit higher stakes. And once we kind of started thinking about a little bit more, it was like, man, this is gonna be really fun. Not everyone's going to participate in it, not everyone has the fortitude for that, you know, but the people who do are going to get such a thrill and the people who watch are going to have such a thrill. And that was probably the most exciting thing for PTR for us was watching everyone do tournaments and stuff where the stakes literally couldn't be higher. And that's super exciting.
Nora Valetta: Even though PvP isn't like the focus of Hardcore, I know that I've heard that there are going to be some players who explicitly are going to opt into choosing to flag themselves for PvP. And that's going to be their entire leveling experience, so there is going to be a little PvP action going on even outside of the Mak’gora, the duels to the death.
Screen Rant: The buff and debuff limit is being removed. What is the reasoning behind removing that?
Josh Greenfield: I think for the most part, the buff and debuff limit has always occupied kind of a funny space in the sort of Classic design space. This is one of those things that we don't have to really guess why that was a thing in original WoW, it was strictly a technical limitation that the game engine basically couldn't handle more than a few and it was eight originally, and then it went to 16, and then later on, it kind of expanded from there. So, it's one of those things that while it's sort of a historical limitation that we've been keen to preserve for normal, Classic Era, it's also something that really limits the ability of some classes to just use their kit. And that's kind of just un-fun, you know, if for your Shadow Priest you can't use Shadow Word: Pain or you can't use Mind Flay. Or Warlocks, you can't use Corruption and Curse of Agony and stuff. It's just a bummer.
So, we looked at it, and you know, it's something that anytime anyone talks about fresh, it's always something that someone asks for. It's like, ‘hey, please just get rid of the debuff limit’ and like, ‘Yeah, sure’. There's no real harm in it for this. So, you know, we are very careful and tactical with any sort of mechanical gameplay changes, especially in original World of Warcraft, or Classic Original, like 2019 Classic Era, I guess. Because it's a touchy subject. There's a lot of people that have a lot of deep-seated emotions and feelings about Original WoW and what it means to them and messing with sort of the combat design and class design is something we take very seriously and are very careful not to do too much of.
Nora Valetta: On that point, like even if something ends up being something, you know, ‘They made this decision back in Original Classic because of technical limitations at the time’ Like, we don't just look at those situations and go, ‘Okay, well, then we can change it now, right?’ Because to Josh's point, like, we don't want to just start go around changing things that might actually change the feel of Classic, which is going against what we're trying to do.
Josh Greenfield: Yeah, that's one of the funny things about working on Classic is you never realize how much you agonize over things that maybe wouldn't matter to some people. But it's like, ‘Oh, it matters, there's somebody who really cares’. Even ‘the color of this UI element isn't quite the same color’, oh, we got to drop everything and fix that. It's just, there's all kinds of things like that.
Screen Rant: You're also changing the distance of how far some enemies will leave their spawn points. Was there a reason for this change for Hardcore?
Nora Valetta: Yeah. Sometimes, you know, players can be really playful with one another, and will try to kind of like, take a mob from one zone to a totally different zone, and kind of have it wreak havoc upon the people leveling in that area. And so, this was kind of one of our measures to make sure that everything's still kind of fair that we're not necessarily allowing players to easily get other players into really risky situations that they didn't opt into. It's kind of a protection or a precaution on our part.
Josh Greenfield: Yeah, it's one thing to come back from being AFK in the Stormwind Auction House and having died to Teremus the Devourer’s flame breath in the Auction House on a normal server where you're like, ‘Oh, that's lame, whatever’, and you just run back and it's not a big deal. But on this server, it has a little bit more impact. So, it's mostly one of those like, yeah, that's funny and cute on normal servers, but for this, there's some higher stakes. We want to kind of protect people from shenanigans like that as much as we can.
Screen Rant: Is the new limit on that going to be severely or drastically changed? How is that going to affect players that like to kite enemies and things like that?
Josh Greenfield: That's a great question. And that's one of the things we're really careful about. Like with Hunters, and Mages, you know, being able to kite mobs is a skill expression. That's an activity that that's a skill cap kind of activity, how well or how effective are you at that, and we don't want to take that away. And the way we designed this system is it's very tunable. Like it's not just like, oh, when you hit a zone boundary, that's it. We can have it to be as long or as short as we want. And currently, I think it's set to something like 1000 yards, which is pretty far. I think, originally in PTR, we had it at 200. We got some that it’s a little too short. So, we went to 500, and I think we landed on 1000. And that feels pretty good for most normal things.
And they're also outliers, like things like the Rhok’delar, or the epic Hunter bow quests from Original WoW. There's demons that you have to do solo as a Hunter, and you have to kite those and sometimes, like the Winterspring one, you have to go all across the zone basically. And so, we set those much higher, we set those at like 10X factor, it's a much further distance that you can drag those before they'll reset.
Nora Valetta: And to be fair to like, on the topic of like players dragging mobs into other players, like there are times where organically that's going to happen. Like if I'm running away from a kobold mine, and I'm, like, trailing four kobolds, and I run past Josh, who then accidentally aggros them all, like, that's something that's going to happen and players are gonna have to be on their toes and watch out for those, those risks.
Josh Greenfield: Have a head on a swivel in Hardcore all the time, always have an escape route.
Screen Rant: And are there going to be any added benefits or achievements playing Hardcore, besides just the thrill of it?
Nora Valetta: We do have our, sort of, you know, bragging rights type rewards like the String of Ears for the duels to the death like every duel to the death you win, you get that increment that counter by one. So, like, we don't have any plans of bringing over the, you know, the achievement system that players know from Wrath of the Lich King and such to Classic Era that's just historically not something that's been a part of Classic Era, and we didn't want to really sort of fundamentally change Classic Era for that reason.
Josh Greenfield: We talk a lot about achievements and sort of the impact they have on the game. And for some people, they're a great way to set goals and have things that you want to accomplish but Original WoW was very much a sandbox. It's kind of like, there's rails in leveling and the level ranges of zones but past that, it's kind of like ‘here, go out in the world and kill stuff, kid’. Get to high level, however you do that, you know. And that's why I kinda felt it a little much or maybe a bridge too far to add actual bespoke achievements or like the actual achievement system.
However, we do have the Soul of Iron system from Season of Mastery, if you are familiar with that, that was kind of a proto-Hardcore version that we put into our first Classic season. And we really liked that system for the delivery of certain achievement-like things. For example, in that system, you have ‘Survivor of the Firelord’, if you kill Ragnaros, and it has its own sort of visual effect to it. It's very cosmetic and, like, you click on someone and like, ‘oh, that person's serious, they got to 60, they raided through Molten Core, they killed the big boss’. And there's one of those for every end boss in 40-player raiding.
That's all we have at launch, but I think that's something that's a good delivery mechanism for things we might want to do in the future that isn't actually the achievement system that's just like, ‘I need to make my achievement number go bigger’. It's more of like, ‘I have bragging rights, and I could show you on my character what I have done’ and we like that kind of thing.
Screen Rant: Aren’t there some quests that require the player character to die? Are those just going to be removed on the hardcore server, or how's that going to work?
Nora Valetta: We've gone through and we've identified the quests that either kill you or cause you to be dead in order to complete the quest, and so we've altered them slightly just to make sure players can complete them without having to actually die.
Josh Greenfield: Yeah, there's a couple of things like the Videre elixir quest, where you have to drink the potion in Tanaris graveyard, and it kills you, so you can talk to the dead person. We've retooled that so it doesn't quite kill you, it like reduces you to low health. So, it's a little dangerous, but it's not a guaranteed death, and you can still progress that. There's a few other situations like that, like the Shadowforge Key in BRD, that's one that we have a kind of cheeky workaround for as well that players can discover.
Screen Rant: Do you know if Hardcore is going to be coming to like the Retail version of World of Warcraft, or even to Wrath Classic?
Nora Valetta: That's not something that we have any plans for ourselves, unfortunately. We're constantly paying attention to what the community is asking for. And, you know, like we said before, Hardcore is completely born of the community pushing for it and making it a thing you know. So, I don't want to say never, never say never, in of like Wrath of the Lich King or anything like that. But at the same time, we do try to pay attention to the biggest asks from the community, and kind of go from there.
Screen Rant: What is going to happen if a player dies because of a technical glitch, being disconnected, their internet goes out… is there going to be any way to restore a character?
Josh Greenfield: No, there will not be. You know, this is sort of the nature of online games. This has been a thing in Diablo, and just like Diablo, you know, you get a little pop-up when you create a character that they says that, you know, be it an act of God or anything like that, a disconnect or your computer explodes, that your character will not be able to be resurrected for any reason. And that's still the truth. It's part of the excitement, you know. But, yeah, that's kind of where we landed there.
Nora Valetta: Yeah, we know that folks have asked for things about like, ‘okay, well, will you do rollbacks?’ You know, where you reset the servers to a previous point in time, and we thought about it, and we were just like, you know, rollbacks are kind of a double edged sword. For every person we save with a rollback, we are costing people in progress and we may actually be putting other players in danger. By resetting them back to a time when I'm running away from those kobolds and dragging them past Josh that's now escaped them. And so, no plans, but we'll keep an eye on the situation and see how it evolves.
Screen Rant: Do you guys have any hints on what you think would be the best class to make it through Hardcore? I'm guessing not a Priest.
Josh Greenfield: No, actually, Priest is secretly or not so secretly, very good in Hardcore. Get yourself a good wand early on. I was playing a Priest on the PTR and it was I felt like I was blasting compared to normally like, I would play like a paladin. Paladins are also very good, very safe. You have a lot of tools to escape bad situations, and depending on the professions you take it can also make you very survivable. But I tried to play Priest on PTR it's very, very, good. And I did a lot of research and everyone's like, no priest is real good. So don't count your dwarf Priest with pigtails out. Like it's always a good time.
Nora Valetta: I do feel like certain classes and specs suit different people's play styles better. Like I've always had great success playing Druids. I know that's not like the most popular, but I do think that, for me personally, the easiest would probably end up being Hunter. Although I know that a lot of players will choose whatever people are saying is the best thing and then get a little bit too spicy with their encounters like pulling too many enemies or getting too bold, and then causing themselves to die because of that.
Josh Greenfield: Yeah, really Warriors are the hard mode, I think. Warriors are one of the hardest ones to level solo, it's very difficult.
Screen Rant: Is there anything that either of you wanted to bring up or talk about that I may have not thought of asking, or anything else that you wanted to say?
Josh Greenfield: Mostly just that we're really excited about the mode, you know. This is something that, as I mentioned earlier, we've been watching the community talk about it, we've been playing it ourselves for a very long time now. And this is something that's sort of a labor of love for our team. We sort of all came together earlier this year when the most recent challenge started to really pick up. And we kind of brought it to leadership and said, ‘Hey, this is a thing that we think is really cool. We think players will like it, we're having a blast with it. And we'd like to do it’. And they were very ive. And, and now here we are. And we're just super excited and super thrilled that it's kind of real at this point.
Then the other thing too, is that the best thing about this mode, we think, is it's very evergreen, and it's going to be a thing that is always sort of there and always sort of on that people can drop in and drop out of at will. And we're very excited. Like, that's awesome. I raid in Wrath of the Lich King and I’m a guild leader there. I spend most of my time there, but I play Hardcore on the weekends. And it feels super good to not really have any pressure of like, ‘Oh, I've gotta get to 60, I've got to farm my pre-raid gear and I've got to farm all these consumables’, it's just like, I just , I drop in, I play when I want to, and I leave when I don't. And I think that's a perfect kind of way to sort of experience this in a chill way. And we're really excited to add stuff later, you know, like, we're gonna look at what people are talking about what they want. And, we can continue to make adjustments to spice things up.
Nora Valetta: Yeah, I mean, personally, I can't wait to jump into Hardcore Official. We're incredibly thankful for the WoW community, like Josh said, for all their , for their ion, their initiative in organizing all these really crazy cool events. Even before Official Hardcore folks were organizing these really cool Hardcore races through these dungeons at one point and then on our PTR we had multiple duel to the death tournaments being televised on Twitch and YouTube. And some players even organized a like Horde versus Alliance raid of levels like one through ten. Like there was a raid in Westfall on the PTR you can find like videos of this on YouTube. It is incredible to see what our players have done with Classic WoW. So, we are incredibly thankful for them, and we can't wait for folks to dive in next week.
World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore realms will go live on August 24, 2023, at 3 pm PDT.
Source: World of Warcraft/YouTube
