Fans have eagerly anticipated the release of World of Warcraft Classic, which finally launched today. Player excitement has caused Twitch's numbers for the game to soar over one million concurrent viewers.
WoW Classic marks a return to the vanilla days of the game which emulates the experience that players remember from its launch in 2004. The hype around the launch led to such a high number of players reserving their names on a specific server that Blizzard asked them to switch realms. Now that the game has released, it looks like a lot of people want to experience the nostalgia of the old days.
As soon as the servers opened their doors, streamers took to Twitch to start playing World of Warcraft Classic in order to see how it stacked up to their memories. The Twitch page for WoW Classic currently has hundreds of accounts live trying the game out, with the top accounts receiving upwards of 275 thousand viewers at their peaks. At one point in the middle of the afternoon, World of Warcraft hit 1.1 million concurrent viewers.
Popular streamers, like Asmongold, Shroud, and sodapoppin have been playing all day for tens of thousands of viewers. Despite the fact that Blizzard opened more realms for the launch, the overcrowding has caused some issues. Many streamers have seen enemies popping in and out of existence and huge groups of people gathered around NPC quest givers. Fortunately, besides the hoards of players and some small issues here and there, reports of total crashes or folks getting booted completely have remained minimal. Blizzard must have some incredible servers built up for the game at this point.
That said, there have been some incredibly long wait queues to get into the game, which probably accounts for a lot of the stability issues. Luckily, as folks continue to play over the next couple of days, the server stress should wane. Once player's levels begin to spread out, and they finish reconnecting with old WoW friends, fewer folks will all crowd around the same areas. Still, the launch is exciting. It serves as a reminder for how much of a cultural phenomenon WoW has become over the past 15 years.
WoW Classic aims to feed off of the nostalgia of long-time players who pine for the days when things felt more simple. The game never had this many players during its launch, which means that a lot of people who have jumped in along the way also want to see what the popular MMO looked like at launch. But things change for a reason. Many of the ways WoW has grown over the last few years serve as time-savers, quality-of-life enhancements, and endgame tweaks. Not to mention the story expansions. For now, it seems like Blizzard's effort in bringing this edition to life has paid off. It will be interesting to see if this version of the game has legs, and if the company ends up adding back in a few of the early WoW quality of life enhancements.
World of Warcraft Classic is now available for PC.