Blizzard might very well have posted the first WoW Classic footage to celebrate World of Warcraft’s 13th anniversary.

“13 years ago today, World of Warcraft launched in Europe!”, a new tweet from Blizzard reads. “When did you create your first character?”

Twitter post

Brings back memories, doesn’t it? Well, there might be more to this video if eagle-eyed users on the World of Warcraft subreddit are to be believed. Compared to the original footage from 2004, it appears that the freshly shared video contains new shadows which were introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. So this is footage from the WOTLK expansion then? Well, not exactly as the spawning positions for new characters and NPC’s were changed in Wrath of the Lich King. In addition, a new ! mark can be seen above the NPC’s, which was only introduced through the Burning Crusade expansion.

Further reasoning would also rule out the Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria expansions because of the new starting areas introduced.

Warlords of Dreanor, Legion, and Battle for Azeroth are ruled out as well due to the use of new character models, spawns, and old zones. We’ve included the findings from Reddit user ‘Tinfoil AF’ down below:

"I might be completely wrong, you’re free to call me a retard because honestly this is stupid as fuck, but here it goes.

Blizzard posted a 45secs clip on their world of warcraft twitter account with footage from vanilla world of warcraft to celebrate the 13 year anniversary launch of WoW in europe. clip in question (https://twitter.com/Warcraft/status/962642383492988930)

In the clip you can clearly see it’s not the current wow engine/build because of the models, and draw distance, gnome different starting zone (in retail it’s inside gnomeragan) and undead different starting zone (in retail it’s outside of the crypt), but I also noticed 2 weird detail, there are high definition shadows in the clip not introduced until wotlk, and the undead starting position (relative to the torch) is different, in private servers, the character starts in front of the torch, but in a clip from original wow posted in 2007 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIrtv1DH1IY) the character starts in the same position as the one showed in the twitter clip aka the original correct position?

So how did blizzard get this footage?

Well the most obvious answer is, they already had it and just dug it up and used it. but again this footage had the original starting intro videos and the original quest npc’s positions, but with shadows, these shadows didn’t get implemented until Wotlk, but in wotlk they changed the position all the starting quest npc’s to be right next to the spawn of the player character, and that’s not what we see in the clip, what we see in the clip is the original intros / original vanilla zones / original quest NPC location but with shadows so is this the footage from a classic build they have up and running with some graphical tweaks (high definition shadows)?

Tinfoil hat as fuck I know, but possible."

What are your thoughts on this matter? Could this be the first footage of Blizzard’s upcoming vanilla server option for World of Warcraft? As covered last week, World of Warcraft’s production director said that the game’s original visuals would be the starting point for Wow Classic, but it really depends on the WoW Community.

Blizzard announced WoW Classic during last year’s Blizzcon event. The game is still very early in development.