- Author: Luxrah
- Date: March 1, 2025
- Updated: March 1, 2025
- Expansion: WoW Classic
In a comment on a YouTube video by hammerdance, Senior Game Producer for WoW Classic Josh Greenfield, AKA Aggrend, has responded to some pressing questions about the direction of Season of Discovery. The video is titled A Message To The WoW Classic Dev Team, and Aggrend’s comment has been pinned to the top of the comment section. You can also read it in its entirety at the bottom of this article.
Aggrend says that while Phase 7 was originally planned to be Season of Discovery’s final phase, as they mentioned in November’s Warcraft Direct, they have since decided that they will be adding a “robust” Phase 8 with the new Scarlet Enclave raid at its center. We should expect to hear more about this additional content phase soon™.
He also says that there are “many many many months of content” remaining in Season of Discovery, and players should not hesitate to jump in because they think it’s going to end soon or abruptly. Active development for SoD will end at some point, but not for a while yet, and they do not plan to close servers anytime soon. Instead, it sounds like the plan is to leave these seasonal realms open in the same way that the original Classic Era servers still exist.
His comment also mentions Classic+, which sounds like it is definitely on the table. The development team now has a design department – “people who can build truly new content” – which certainly sounds like they have plans for more than just one more new raid. Their experimentation in Season of Discovery will inform any future Classic content they implement, with some ideas having more potential to return than others.
I don’t usually get too into replying to stuff like this in Youtube comments, but I hear you. It’s hard get into super specifics for a few reasons.
1) It’s sometimes tricky to talk about the future when we don’t always know exactly what we are going to do in a year, two years, etc. One of the nice things about our team is that we can kind of adjust our plans quickly. Huge dev teams with hundreds of developers have extremely deep pipelines that really struggle to change quickly once they are moving in a certain direction. We are smaller, so we can pivot and that’s one of the things I love about working on Classic. So we’ve been following our nose and making those pivots as the train is moving down the tracks. A good example of what can go slightly awry when you speak too soon is the Warcraft Direct. It was mentioned that Naxx was the “final phase” in our presentation for that. At the time, it was our intention for Naxx to be the final “full” phase and that whatever else we wanted to tackle would be sort of phase 7.1 or 7.5 but not phase 8. Since then, the team came together and between how much fun we had and are having with building Karazhan Crypts and Scarlet Enclave we are all-in on a really great, really robust phase 8. So yes, the Scarlet Enclave raid is real. I wish I could tell you more because it to me (as a developer on the classic team since day 1) is the most exciting thing I’ve gotten to work on yet.
2) Giving too much info too early can be harmful because of the TLDR nature of communications and info sharing these days and the reality is that the question of “when does SoD end” is a question with a lot of nuance. We could say “Phase 8 is the final phase” and all of those hundreds of people you mention who are saying “well i’d start now but it’s about to end” would just hear “its over” and then they’d never think about it again. The reality is, we think there are many many many months of content in SoD left and trying to put a pin on a definite end date really just harms the experience of people that could still have months if not years of fun with the content that already exists and is coming. SoD will end in the sense that we will stop actively developing new large amounts of new content, but it won’t be a hard “it ends today” date and we have no intention of closing SoD servers. I can’t say never because I don’t know the future, but I can say that much like era, we have no plans at all to close them, and I do expect that some amount of the population will continue on when active development slows, just as we see in Era today. I think that once people see what’s in the next phase, this will be even more likely.
The last thing I’ll say is that everything we’ve done in SoD is for a reason. We have big aspirations as a team but we have had to learn some hard lessons about what is and isn’t appropriate, even in a very “aggressively progressive” version of vanilla. I’ve said in interviews in the past that if we try and take on something like a so-called “classic+”, we want to be confident going into it that we can deliver something that most people who want that sort of thing will like. I don’t think SoD is what I’d call an ideal classic+, even if it is hands-down my favorite version of wow I’ve ever played in 21 years of playing WoW, 15 years working on WoW, and 7 years working on Classic. There are some things we did in SoD that we will never do again, and there are many more things in SoD that we want to keep developing and carry forward. To put a pin in that, our team is also growing as well specifically in the department of design (i.e. people who can build truly new content). That alone is very exciting.
So yeah, we aren’t going to go out and be disingenuous about SoD. SoD has the word “season” in the title and that means that at some point we will shift more focus on to other things, but just because that will happen eventually doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy it now if is something you enjoy or think you might enjoy. It’s never too late to start and the more eyes and feedback and lessons we get from what we put out in SoD, the better the next thing we work on will be.
We’ll have more info out about Scarlet Enclave and what’s next pretty soon, so sit tight for that!
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