World of Warcraft: Classic Phase 2 coming later this year

Despite long server queues on release, World of Warcraft: Classic set a launch record for Twitch concurrent viewers when it landed in August, proving very popular with the MMO community with its return to its origins, and now it seems we'll be getting a second phase before the year is done.

This was revealed by game director Ion Hazzikostas, who told PC Gamer about the plans for the future.

"I think it's a matter of later this year, I think we can say definitively," Hazzikostas said. "Within that timeframe? It's going to depend on a few factors."

One of these factors is called "layering", and this is a system to deal with the large number of players rushing to get involved. This lets servers handle a lot more players at a time by making copies of the same world, and "without layering, we simply would not have been able to accommodate anywhere close to the number of players we have on our servers."

"And with some of the natural attrition that we've seen, we would've had a number of servers right now that are underpopulated. Instead we had servers that were, due to layering, effectively massively overpopulated even with login queues, during the first couple of weeks, that have now stabilized at large, healthy populations that can endure for the months and years to come."

With Phase 2 we'll also be getting bosses like Azuregos and Kazzak, with only one version at a time available. With layering, this wouldn't be possible, so layering is only a short-term measure for now.

"When Kazzak is up, we only want one Kazzak," Hazzikostas adds. "That's kind of a central dynamic of how that needs to play out in the outdoor world."

Layering is ending in "a matter of weeks", with the need for the feature dying down as the launch hype also calms down a bit. When layering finishes, Phase 2 will get a lot closer, including the Dire Maul dungeon as well.

Are you ready to get stuck in with Phase 2?