It’s no coincidence that the next installment of the Classic WoW timeline, Cataclysm, is launching during the same week as the long-awaited Mists of Pandaria Remix event on retail servers. Rather, it’s a piece of careful calendar planning from the dev team.
The two launches will celebrate WoW’s third and fourth expansions, with Cataclysm Classic bringing players back to 2010 and the MoP Remix event allowing retail WoW enthusiasts to go back to Mists of Pandaria’s quests, dungeons, and raids through a modern lens.
In Mists Remix, you’ll be able to use all of Dragonflight’s mechanics and race/class combinations in content from over a decade ago, marking a unique yet ambitious development in the way Blizzard handles WoW’s “Timewalking” content.
The announcement of MoP Remix initially tempered the expectations of some WoW fans, who believed that it could be a negative trend when hoping for the eventual re-release of Mists of Pandaria Classic. But in a group interview earlier this week, the WoW devs alluded to the idea of that launch still being in development and that the upcoming MoP Remix event on Dragonflight servers would not have a negative impact on the Classic team’s development plans.
If we were to move forward with something like a MoP Classic, our MoP Classic would very much be a longer experience than something like a MoP Remix,” WoW associate production director Clayton Stone told Dot Esports. “We’d have the original classes and talent trees from the original MoP in the game, and it should evoke a lot more nostalgia of exactly what it was like to play MoP way back in 2012.”
Despite Cataclysm being historically viewed as a relative downturn for WoW in the context of its overall timeline, Mists of Pandaria is easily one of the most favorable expansions among the nostalgia crowd. Those who have been playing WoW for decades should easily be able to recant tales of the fanbase tempering its expectations for what was originally dubbed as the “Kung Fu Panda” expansion, but an equally high number of fans should be able to tell you just how satisfied they were when MoP wrapped up in 2014.
With the launch of MoP Remix later this week, we fully expect that crowd of WoW old-schoolers to go back and play not only the new Classic installment, but the modern version of one of WoW’s strongest expansions.
Traditionally, retail WoW players have spent a decent amount of time on Classic servers, but Classic loyalists will rarely make the pilgrimage over to WoW. We expect that mold to get broken later this week when both MoP Remix and Cataclysm Classic are in full swing.
The Classic devs expect the same, and they’re keeping one eye on the MoP Remix event just in case they need to guage retail player interest on what works and what doesn’t work in a potential revisiting to Pandaria on Classic servers, especially in the context of the mid-2020s as opposed to the early 2010s.
“Will it have an impact on where we go after Cataclysm? It’s possible,” Stone said. If we were to approach something like a MoP Classic, we might be informed by what modern players respond to in a MoP Remix, but we think that the content of MoP as it originally existed back in 2012 is incredibly strong, so if we were to move forward with it, I’m not sure how much of an impact it would have.”
The wait-and-see game on Blizzard’s part is almost entirely due to the company’s long-standing hush-hush internal policy on upcoming releases, but it feels like all but a given that Mists of Pandaria will be in line to receive the next Classic release. Mists is a textbook fan favorite, and for Blizzard to stop short at Cataclysm would be, honestly, foolish.
Plus, Cataclysm Classic is getting an expedited patch release schedule, which is something that Blizzard learned a decade-and-a-half ago when the final patch of Cataclysm lingered on for over 10 months. With the re-released content set to come out at a faster rate through just into the beginning of 2025, it’s likely that the Classic devs are looking to push their way out of Cataclysm and into the expansion that they’ve already set their sights on by experimenting with a soft re-launch in the modern version of the game.
WoW’s Mists of Pandaria Remix event will go live tomorrow, May 16, while Cataclysm Classic will launch in full on May 20. An active WoW subscription is required for both games.
