The recent 30-year celebration of World of Warcraft had a bit of a bittersweet tone, at least for the WoW Classic community. While many are excited about the remasters of RTS classics and the housing system coming to Midnight, Classic fans got a roadmap as well, and it looks a bit weird. According to it, WoW Season of Discovery won’t get anything else after Phase 7, its final phase. Even if the content coming to it looks great, it’s sad to see one of the best WoW Classic iterations go away.
As you can see, the year is packed for most WoW Classic content, with the exception of Season of Discovery. While I know many are not too keen on this version, many, myself included, believe SoD is a breath of fresh air without removing some of the things that made the MMO so great. However, according to the above roadmap, once we get Phase 7, that’s it, goodbye to Season of Discovery.
Frankly, it is quite shocking. Yes, I love WoW Classic and get that old-school feel every time I play. And yes, the old raids are always great, and seeing servers go from one old expansion to another is fun. Yet, Season of Discovery hooked me in ways I didn’t think it would. Finding runes, looking at new instances, and solving intricate quests were some of my most memorable moments in the game. Heck, I even stopped playing retail for a while just to try and level each class in SoD. So why, then, is Blizzard taking WoW Season of Discovery to the chopping block? It remains unclear, honestly.
What is clear is that WoW Season of Discovery might close its doors soon. Yes, there’s some endgame content coming, but that’s it. Those who were thinking about Classic+ might not feel too hopeful after this. But, hey, Mists of Pandaria Classic is coming, and it seems fresh vanilla servers are returning, too.
In truth, I don’t know what to make of these announcements. I’ll certainly try MoP Classic. PvP was great in that expansion. But I’m not that excited to go through the whole WoW Classic cycle again. If it were another thing like Season of Discovery, then definitely yes. Ultimately, it respected what I loved about the MMO but added a fair amount of new content without modernizing it too much — it was perfect. But now, it seems this journey is about to end.
However, things tend to change. WoW Classic still holds many people with or without Season of Discovery. Furthermore, Blizzard has listened to its fans much more than before. So, in that sense, we might get another version of SoD or even more phases. Hopefully, we are all overreacting to this news. But if not, it was nice to see WoW Classic through different lenses for once.
