Even with Gamescom and the Midnight reveal taking up a lot of the recent World of Warcraft spotlight in the news this past week, some of the biggest recent developments and passionate discussions were over in a completely different part of the game. Blizzard may not have said word one about WoW Classic in Germany, but it’s all the community seems to be talking about these days.

Something’s happening, friends. Something significant and mostly outside of Blizzard’s hands. What was once a daydream of optimistic players is now causing real forces to shift and shake. What was once a whisper is now a resounding roar. WoW Classic Plus. Classic Plus.

It’s hard to say when the “Classic Plus” discussion exactly started, but my memory puts it toward the midpoint of the 2019 WoW Classic run through vanilla. Before Burning Crusade Classic was announced, there was a lot of debate and discussion over what the studio should do with this second version of the MMO: Keep it locked in vanilla, go on to the first expansion, or invest resources into building up the vanilla Azeroth with new, divergent zones and systems.

Perhaps some people and even the studio thought that such silly discussion might fade away when Classic progressed through fan-favorite expansions, but it never has. Such talk was called unproductive, illogical, and delusional. Yet it persisted.

Players couldn’t agree on what a “Classic Plus” might be, but they loved to talk about it. Instead of going away, such discussion has intensified over the past few years, especially as Classic players started to lose the taste for repeating the same rollout treadmill again and again.

Talk is all well and good, but Blizzard is a pro at ignoring fan wishes for very long stretches of time until desperation and/or pressure pushes the studio into going to a place that it long resisted. Hey, how long did Blizz hold out on housing? And now it’s coming?

“Desperation” and “pressure” are the two big forces that are moving the Classic Plus concept past talk and into reality. As I see it, there are three sectors that are contributing to this, and Blizzard can no longer ignore all of it combined.

First is the studio’s own experiment with a, shall we say, “Classic Plus Lite” run with Season of Discovery. For the first time, an official Classic server got significant brand-new content with dungeons, raid bosses, and class abilities. Fans loved this, and the strong response prompted the team to continue the server’s run — and active development — well beyond its original end point.

Season of Discovery is widely seen as a testbed for a much larger effort that Blizzard is cooking up behind the scenes. The devs keep winking and nodding in the direction of Classic Plus without a full announcement of it. What’s really encouraging here is reading the devs enthusiastically embracing the idea of more content for original-flavor WoW, saying, “We think about how it helped prove something that a lot of us already knew: There is an enormous appetite for new experiences set against the backdrop of original World of Warcraft.”

Pressure is mounting elsewhere, too. There’s a real movement of players and especially WoW Classic content creators who’ve migrated to another similar MMORPG project: Old School RuneScape.

At first glance, this might seem really odd as these two titles are very different in feel and gameplay style. But perhaps it makes more sense when you absorb the fact that this title was also released to satisfy the legacy cravings of its MMO fanbase — only that Jagex’s version started development and evolving independently than its mainline RuneScape, whereas WoW Classic keeps going down the same path over and over again.

People like the old school feel coupled with forward-thinking development in OSRS, and that’s both putting pressure on Blizzard to respond and taking some players away from the long-in-the-tooth Classic scene… causing a touch of desperation, perhaps.

If the big finish for Season of Discovery and the rise in popularity of OSRS this summer hasn’t done enough to propel forward the idea of Classic Plus, there’s an even greater force that’s rising right now that even Blizzard can’t ignore. Of course, I speak of the most forbidden of topics: private servers.

Let’s not forget that private WoW Classic servers in the mid-2010s were a huge factor in convincing Blizzard to change its stance of “you think you do, but you don’t” to “hey, come play on our realms!” And we even saw a smaller version of this happen a year or so ago when the unofficial hardcore scene grew so popular that the studio made that official as well.

Right now, there are massive, truly massive private servers like Project Epoch and Turtle WoW that are being the supply to the player demand for Classic Plus. These projects are some of the most impressive in the rogue server community, with new classes, zones, storylines, music, and more being modded into the old familiar WoW we loved in order to make it something far more.

And we know Blizzard is paying attention because it’s taking legal action already. Just last week, Blizzard put its foot down, perhaps emboldened by a similar move by Daybreak against specific profit-seeking EverQuest emulator operators.

Still, it’s hard to ignore the rising tide of voices — and impressive population numbers — that are emerging from these projects. Content creators are gleefully extoling the virtues of these games while players are looking for friends to convert from the official Classic scene to this growing, unofficial one.

All of this very much feels like it’s coming to a head here in 2025. The pressure is pouring on Blizzard not only to make a product that players clearly want but act quickly so as to not see those players bleed away to unofficial — and non-profitable — realms.

I think we’re going to hear something before the end of this year, perhaps in November, at least confirming that Classic Plus is in active development. If Blizz can do that and give us a timeline of how it’s going to roll this out, it could turn all of that pressure into a great asset as it (finally) answers the call that its community has been sending out for a half-decade now.

Stepping back into the MMO time machine of WoW Classic, Justin Olivetti offers up observations and ground-level analysis as a Gnome with a view. Casually Classic is a more laid-back look at this legacy ruleset for those of us who’ve never stepped into a raid or seen more than 200 gold to our names.