‘Vanilla’ WoW server Nostalrius returns

The Nostalrius team, the people who ran the well-known unofficial World of Warcraft legacy servers, have handed over their source code and database to another group of legacy server administrators called Elysium. They will resume work.

Nostalrius was a series of unofficial World of Warcraft servers, running the game on version 1.12. That’s how the game was just before the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, came out in January 2007. The content was limited to what could be found in the base game and the servers had a tight and somewhat large community. However, by order of Blizzard, the servers were taken offline in April of this year.

While this was a disappointment to both administrators and players of the server, there was still hope for an official return of ‘vanilla WoW’. Blizzard said it was considering creating a ‘pristine realm’, which would be practically the same as what Nostalrius offered. Because the source code could be valuable to Blizzard and the pristine realm, the Nostalrius team decided not to release it.

Since then, however, the development studio hasn’t said anything about the pristine realms. In fact, before BlizzCon kicked off last week, Blizzard already let it be known that it had nothing to say on the subject. While, according to the Nostalrius team, the servers’ administrators did come up with ideas and proposals to help Blizzard set up the pristine realms. They didn’t charge for this either.

Due to the lack of communication from Blizzard’s side, Nostalrius now decides to release the source code and database of the servers. These will initially be sent to Elysium, a group that ‘shares the same passion and voluntariness as we had’. Part of the former crew of Nostalrius would already be active at Elysium. Probably Nostalrius itself will no longer use the vanilla servers, because Blizzard’s lawyers have put a stop to this before. That is perhaps also the reason why distribution of the source code to different recipients is planned. That way, it becomes more difficult for Blizzard to thwart these activities.

Elysium, in turn, announces on Reddit that the Nostalrius servers as players knew them are coming back in the same condition. However, the group does not want to leave its existing players out in the cold, so it has also been decided to merge the database of its servers with that of Nostalrius. This does mean that those players will have to deal with a progress stop until the transition is completed. In addition, there will be some changes to items and other stats to get everything up to the Nostalrius level. Elysium says it will soon come up with a timeline and release date for the new server. The name of the server or servers is not yet known.

Blizzard has yet to comment on the matter. During an interview last week, an employee said that the development team is currently fully focused on the development of World of Warcraft: Legion.