Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct Recap: Warcraft Remasters, Classic Pandas, WoW Player Housing, And More

Yes, some of the super secret plans for Warcraft's 30th Anniversary Direct stream may have been slightly spoiled ahead of time, but there was certainly more the team had in store today for the anniversary of both the IP itself, and the 20th anniversary for World of Warcraft specifically.

Let's break down all the announcements by title for you. I'll save the MMORPG itself for last and I'll make sure to link you up to all the full details for each item as we go along, provided the team has completed posting details to the official sites.

I'm typing this while listening to the 21st Century Orchestra (and friends) play music from World of Warcraft and it's kind of amazing. Be sure to check out the concert in the stream's video below after the Direct presentation itself.

Warcraft, Warcraft II, and Warcraft III Reforged

This was the primary thing spoiled ahead of time, but it's still certainly welcome news for fans of the IP's original real-time strategy games. After the debacle that was the launch of Warcraft III Reforged, Blizzard has been working on improvements and updates and today, 2.0 patch is available for free to all players. This patch overhauls the environments, lighting, and user interface. It also adds up-rezzed versions of the game's assets.

The original Warcraft and Warcraft 2 (and all content expansions) now have remastered versions of their own. If you like, you'll even be able to swap on the fly between updated and original graphics. Modern improvements like band box selection, right-click movement, and an increase to game speed have been added among other improvements

(Side note: The concert just started playing Karazhan music...I'm grinning like a damn child.)

The "Battle Chest" is now back and is priced at $39.99. If you own any single version of the three titles included you'll get a price break to upgrade to the Battle Chest.

All of these items are available right now.

Hearthstone

Hearthstone literally just released their The Great Dark Beyond expansion, so if you expected to not hear much from the team, you'd be forgiven. You'd also be wrong. The F2P card game revealed their full 2025 roadmap, complete with 3 expansions starting in the Emerald Dream and culminating with some time travelling adventures with Chromie.

As Hearthstone itself turns 10 and touts over 160 billion games played (not counting Battlegrounds), a few big things will be changing next year.

In a surprising announcement, Hearthstone will be bringing StarCraft into a deck near you soon. Zerg, Protoss, and Terran all get some love here with cards featuring banners from all three of the sci-fi RTS's factions. This will be part of Hearthstone's next mini-set comprised of 49 new cards. This mini-set is coming in January 2025 and will add new hero cards, one for each faction. These heroes can be used by a few different classes each, so plan accordingly.

Sarah Kerrigan will assist Death Knights, Demon Hunters, Hunters, and Warlocks. Artanis has the Protoss teaming up with Druids, Mages, Priests, and Rogues. Finally, Jim Reynor himself lends aid to Paladins, Shamans, and Warriors.

Finally, Arena Mode is getting kind of a huge revamp. The mode will be split into two types of Arenas: Normal and Underground. Normal is what you've come to expect, but things are being sped up a bit to get that match timer down. Underground adds a few new features including the ability to re-draft upon a loss. Both modes will score a rating system, but Underground will actually pair you up with players of any skill level, so things could be a bit more dangerous and matches will be longer. These changes will happen sometime in the first half of 2025.

Warcraft Rumble

We speculated back in March that Warcraft Rumble would be coming to PC and today's stream FINALLY confirmed that. Beta will start on December 10th for the previously-only-mobile, Warcraft-inspired brawler.

Aside from that announcement, there really wasn't much on the Rumble front besides a plugging of the game's 1st anniversary event being live now and a few fun stats like players favoring Team Jaina by 10% and the fact that 900 million bosses have been defeated.

The game is going to get 3 "split leaders", as some characters don't really fit one particular "family" in Rumble. Sylvanus Windrunner will also see a revamp to be able to play both Horde and Alliance.

(Side note: We're now on music from Icecrown Citadel and I'm still a smiling idiot right now.)

World of Warcraft (Classic and Retail)

The World of Warcraft portion of the show started with a recap of the MMO's ongoing 20th Anniversary patch in retail and a fun stat that we've all accumulated over 1 billion total days played. Of course, the next retail patch, Siren Isle, was also recapped.

The "new" portion came in a look at what comes after Siren Isle, and that's the Goblin city of Undermine in the aptly-named "Undermined" patch. This new city will be teaching us a lot about goblins and we'll even have to ally ourselves with one of four particular goblin factions that are feuding.

However, we will get a new goblin-created roadster that can be customized to your liking (including stats like speed or grip) to race around the city faster than normal mounts would run.

Operation Floodgate is the new dungeon and it'll be added right away to the season rotation and we'll see the goblin dungeon The Motherlode from Battle for Azeroth make the rotation, too. The new 8-boss raid, The Liberation of Undermine, will present new challenges, but we'll have to wait to see how Xal'atath fits into things.

PvP players get a new map, too.

In VERY exciting news, World of Warcraft will be getting player housing. It was just shown as a tease and won't be coming until the Midnight expansion. That expansion gets a reveal in Summer 2025, so expect to see more then.

WoW Classic heads got pretty expected news in the official announcement of Classic Mists of Pandaria servers coming in Summer 2025.

However, in bigger news, we'll be getting "WoW Classic Classic" if that makes sense. All that means is that finally we are getting fresh servers for WoW Classic and yes, they'll also run up through the Burning Crusade expansion. These are literally coming next week on the 21st and will feature PvE, PvP, and Hardcore servers. Don't rush, though, the Molten Core raid won't drop at launch, it'll come a few weeks later.

In some weird notable omissions, Heroes of the Storm wasn't even alluded to much less mentioned even though the MOBA has been receiving small updates this year, and no, Game Pass wasn't mentioned at all.

That said, it was a pretty nice show. Straight to the point. I loved it, but what did you think?