World of Warcraft Classic release details begin to spill

BlizzCon 2018 is underway, and during the opening ceremony, the company spent a little bit of time talking about World of Warcraft Classic. Those who watched BlizzCon 2017's opening ceremony will know that World of Warcraft Classic is essentially Blizzard's own take on vanilla WoW servers. Today, a year after that initial reveal, we got a better idea of when World of Warcraft Classic will be arriving.

Unfortunately, Blizzard didn't announce a precise release date today. Instead, the company merely said that World of Warcraft Classic will be launching at some point in summer 2019. That narrows things down quite a bit, but it's probably not the release date announcement many fans were hoping for.

World of Warcraft Classic is actually a pretty big topic at BlizzCon this year. Not only did Blizzard give it a summer release date, but it also has a playable demo on the show floor. That demo is available to people who purchase the BlizzCon virtual ticket as well, giving Warcraft fans a way to try out the game without having to go all the way to Anaheim.

This demo is exciting, in part, because Blizzard has been pretty tight-lipped about World of Warcraft Classic thus far. We haven't seen anything in the way of gameplay footage, so this demo will be everyone's first look at the game. Hopefully now that Battle for Azeroth's launch has come and gone and WoW Classic has a summer release window, we'll begin to hear more details about it.

Blizzard also revealed today that everyone with an active World of Warcraft subscription will be able to play WoW Classic when it launches. It isn't a totally surprising move to roll WoW Classic into regular WoW subscriptions, but it's nice to hear that active players aren't going to need to pay anything more to play it. We'll keep an ear to the ground for more on World of Warcraft Classic, so stay tuned.