Blizzard has announced that Hardcore is officially coming to World of Warcraft Classic. And is Season of Mastery going to happen again?
On Sarthe’s Hardcore All-Stars stream over the weekend, Senior Game Producer Josh Greenfield, better known to many as Aggrend, made the official announcement. He confirmed that Hardcore is coming to World of Warcraft Classic. There will be a PTR test first, with a launch set for sometime over the summer.
Later, CM Kaivax posted a confirmation with the following:
“As Senior Game Producer Aggrend just confirmed on the Hardcore All-Stars stream, we’ve been working to bring official Hardcore Classic gameplay to WoW Classic. We’ve been very energized by the community’s enthusiasm for Hardcore, watching along with you, and doing a lot of Hardcore play ourselves.
We’ll let you know much more about it soon!”
With the confirmation, Aggrend said that the PTR should be turning up sometime over the next few weeks with the full ruleset. He also gave a few other details, in addition to the most basic one which is that if you die on the Hardcore server, your journey ends. But you can still enter the server as a ghost to finalize some unfinished business or for social reasons. One example he gave is if you are a guild leader, you might want to log in and transfer ownership or handle other matters as a ghost.
When it comes to rules, he also notes that some of the aspects of the challenges might be optional, considering the high stakes, and others might work a little differently, with some flexibility, in order to not make everything punishing. The essence is they want to create a hardcore mode that is fun and will “gel well with the underlying social structures on which Vanilla WoW is at the end of the day”.
There are some new things coming, including a new feature that they are now calling “Duel to the Death”. Since this will be a Hardcore server, if you are brave enough to take on this challenge, you could be risking your entire future on the server (except your ghostly future).
One other thing that Aggrend added was to confirm that the Classic team is “working on a season”. Whether this will be an all-new Season of Mastery is not confirmed just yet, but he did acknowledge the community’s call for more season content, and that Hardcore is a separate thing, and decidedly not a season.
