Season of Discovery is an odd one. It’s an offshoot of WoW Classic—a recreation of World of Warcraft circa 2006—which soups it up with all sorts of new build options, raids, legendary weapons, and wild PvP events. For fans, it’s been like peering into an alternate reality where WoW stuck to its guns and never reinvented itself with the times.
Well, show’s over, buddy: Blizzard announced this week in a blog post that there’s no more big seasonal updates on the way. While the SoD servers aren’t closing down for the time being, there’s a more substantial project in the works that needs the team’s attention. The blog post from Aggrend reads: “We need to make sure we’re spending our time where it will make the most impact on the long-term future of WoW Classic … we hope to see the game mode continue to operate similar to WoW Classic Era for many months (if not years) to come.”
In the post, Aggrend explained that running Season of Discovery for as long as they did was a huge risk that paid off. It was always intended to be time-limited, and the last raid tier was a “major unrealized dream” the team “couldn’t let go of.”
I always wondered if Season of Discovery would actually end. Back when it was barely a twinkle in anyone’s eye, it had people clamoring for a full-on Classic Plus: an OSRS-style alternate game version which would receive updates parallel with modern World of Warcraft indefinitely. It’s hard to say if that’s exactly what Blizzard’s cooking right now, but Aggrend’s post seems to imply it’s working on something a little more substantial and future-proof.
“We have big plans and big ambitions for this type of ‘found photographs’ content set in the original world of Azeroth,” the post says. “We want to set ourselves up for success by taking the time we need to get in the proverbial kitchen and ‘cook,’ iterate on, and shape our ideas and lessons learned from Season of Discovery into something truly exciting.”
Until that next project “in the original WoW design space” comes to light, Season of Discovery players aren’t being hung out to dry, at least. If you cleared Balnazzar in the last raid tier, you get a free level boost in Mists of Pandaria Classic, which is set to release in July; though on Bluesky, Aggrend did clarify that transferring off of a SoD server to another game version won’t be possible. And if you’re more of a purist, you’re welcome to join me in dying repeatedly on the Hardcore servers.
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