I was hoping to watch the livestream of the BlizzCon opening ceremony only briefly to catch the WoW news but soon realised that they were doing their usual thing of starting with the smaller games, to leave Warcraft and the biggest announcements until the end. I knew we were in for something major for Classic when they actually did the retail bit first... and then had to watch the rest on my second monitor, being very distracted in the process.
Not gonna lie, that trailer nearly made me cry.
To start with the classic shot of the dwarf hunter and his bear, but then having them go in a different direction, through beautiful fields.
Dalaran in the bubble that then opens up.
An undead paladin! I don't even care about playing one, but it was like an in-universe way of saying that there'll be new class/race combos.
The beauty of classic Mount Hyjal, with the music swelling...
... and then, sky elves? Okay, that was a bit weird. There had been some datamining related to this months ago, but I thought it was going to be a retail thing. Either way, not a deal breaker.
There was also a features trailer:
New zones, new dungeons, new raids, a new battleground. New race/class combos, new talents. A toggle for whether you want to see the old models and animations or the new ones.
Other important bits were mentioned during the presentation, but I'm not sure I even caught everything. The level cap will be 60 and we'll stay in Azeroth. Transmog will exist but you decide/toggle whether you want to see it or prefer to see everyone in what they're actually wearing. Any future direction will be influenced by community feedback. Launch will be on November 4th.
Will it be perfect? Probably not, but what is? This is way closer to my personal idea of what I wanted out of a Classic+ than I ever dared to hope (I wasn't really on board with the idea until I tried out Turtle WoW and saw how lovely it was). I haven't been this excited about anything WoW-related in a long time.
