While Blizzard continues to drag its feet over the idea of World of Warcraft Legacy Servers, it seems the fans are once again happy to take matters into their own hands.
The upshot of this? The return of the super popular Nostalrius server, which was shut down by Blizzard back in April, much to the disgust of fans who just want somewhere to play ‘classic’ WoW – something Blizzard ain’t delivering.
So how has this miracle been allowed to happen? Well, the team behind Nostalrius has handed over its core and player database over to Elysium, another World of Warcraft Legacy project.
In an announcement posted on Reddit, one of the Elysium team confirmed that ‘Nostalrius, exactly as you know it, will be returning’.
Blizzard’s continued silence on the matter of a Legacy Server is especially disappointing given the fact that the Nostalrius crew actually met with the company back in June to talk things out.
This is what the Nostalrius team had to say back then:
The good surprise of the meeting was the level of engagement of all these Blizzard people toward making legacy servers a reality. The downside is the technical difficulty it will take to reach our objective. Blizzard is now well aware of the amount of players willing to play legacy servers, something which wasn’t the case until Nostalrius shutdown.
More recently, a detailed post on the Nostalrius forums explains the fan’s (and their own) frustrations that we still don’t have an official Legacy Server.
Hell, Blizzard even came out prior to BlizzCon to assure everyone that there would be no news on anything related to Legacy Servers, which didn’t go down well.
So, clearly exasperated with the whole affair, Nostalrius decided to release its source code to the World of Warcraft community.
They said of Elysium:
The source code will be first given to an existing Legacy project which we believe to be the most in line with our core values, named Elysium. This server shares the volunteer spirit and passion for the game we had. Furthermore, an important part of Nostalrius volunteers are already working there, some under different names. We wish them all the best, and hope that they will become a new home for the reunited Vanilla community. We will continue collaborating closely with them.
Elysium will be put on hold while Nostalrius is brought back online, but I can’t help but think Blizzard will just shut it down again and the whole sordid affair will begin anew.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.