15 years after World of Warcraft‘s initial release, the game has been restored to its original glory with World of Warcraft Classic.
With the servers going live at 12 am CEST (10pm GMT) on Monday, the first hours saw over 1.1 million viewers tuning into World of Warcraft Classic streams on Twitch.
World of Warcraft streamer Asmongold saw his viewer count peaked incredibly at over 280,000 during these hours as he battled through the the first few levels with his Human Warrior. He maintained 100,000 viewers for hours into his stream. At the time of writing, Asmongold’s stream is still on going, now into the 17 hour mark.
Sodapoppin, another dedicated World of Warcraft streamer, welcomed over 100,000 viewers in the first few hours of the game’s launch. 50,000+ viewers stayed with him as he grinded through the lower levels as a Hoard Druid.
Increasing the hype on Twitch, streamers who are usually seen aiming down the barrel of a gun on a first-person shooter were also involved in the action. Shroud, TimTheTatman, and DrLupo were among those who ready on the character selection screen at launch and grinding their new characters throughout the day.
After twelve hours of Classic launching, WoW streams were still viewed 5x more than any other game.
The demand was so high for players to get involved, the first questing areas were crammed full of characters. Players suffered with lag getting past the first few levels. Players who were a little late to join the game, or those who were unfortunate enough to get disconnected, faced long queues to get into servers.
As described by Blizzard, “World of Warcraft Classic is a faithful recreation of the original World of Warcraft.” The slate has been wiped clean after years of expansions and tweaks. Everything has been restored to 2004 Vanilla edition, including classic talent trees, combat mechanics, characters models and raids.
In order to play World of Warcraft Classic players are required to sign up for WoW’s $15 monthly subscription.
It remains to be see how long this huge upsurge in interest in WoW Classic will last for. Shroud, for one, has told his viewers in the weeks leading up to the launch that they should not expect to see him stream anything other than WoW Classic for the first weeks of the games launch. And it is common knowledge how addictive the game can be.
As the Twitch streamers grind their way through the levels towards 60, then take on dungeons, raids and PvP, they wont likely be switching up games any time soon. It is clear that for the next few weeks Twitch is going to be dominated by World of Warcraft Classic streams.
