Dear Atlantiss Community,

With Kil'jaeden recently defeated, the Sunwell Offensive has reached an end, concluding the TBC expansion on Karazhan. We are extremely proud to reach this stage with two realms now, and we're delighted to see so many players stay and play until the very end despite TBC Classic being available at the same time. We hope you all enjoyed you time spent on both Netherwing and Karazhan with awesome memories to remember. We're definitely open to launching yet another TBC realm sometime in the future, but we're focusing on something else for now.

THE NEXT STEP

As we said countless times, the next step in the Atlantiss journey is Wrath of the Lich King. It's something we wanted to do for years and it's a natural progression after TBC. We know that perhaps some people may feel oversaturated with the expansion after playing it over the years, but we believe we can offer a level of scripting quality that will make the experience fresh and enjoyable once again. Additionally, the core we're developing now will serve as the base for any future expansions as well, so even if our plan was to go straight to Cataclysm, we would still be working on the exact same things as we are right now.

DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS

We've been really quiet about the development of Wrath for a reason – it's an absurd amount of work and we prefer to avoid distractions. We don't want to give out any potential release dates or plans for the time being. We know that it's probably not what everyone would like to hear but WoW development isn't all fun and games. There were some estimations posted a while ago and it resulted in unhealthy amount of pressure being put on the dev team as some things tend to take more time than originally planned. Our goal is to deliver a great experience that both us and the community will cherish and enjoy. We don't want to feel pressured to release a half-baked project that will be criticised and forgotten quickly as many projects have been in the not-so-distant past. We're very ambitious and after our Cataclysm and TBC realms we want to go even further beyond. Sadly we're still a very small team development-wise and there's a lot of time-consuming work. For TBC we remade all 25 dungeons and raids of the expansion (as well as three vanilla raids) entirely from scratch. That means deleting all existing spawns and scripts from each instance and starting from there – readding the spawns using packet data, remaking waypoints, formations, adding emotes, RP events, spells, texts, scripting all the instance, boss and any unusual trash mechanics, making sure it works both when players first enter the instance as well as when they return a few days later, making sure it doesn't get stuck due to restarts or crashes and more. For Wrath, we not only need to rework some core systems in a futureproof way, but also port all the stuff we already did and make it compatible. On top of that, we need to redo the Wrath dungeons, raids and zones the same way and these tend to be more complex than the TBC ones.

As you might imagine, it's an absurd amount of work for a small team such as ours and it might feel overwhelming at times but we're determined to make it work just like we did with Netherwing and we hope that everyone will be patient and understanding throughout the development process. We intend to make some videos and dev updates later on so stay tuned!

REALM DETAILS

There's been a lot of discussion in the community regarding how the Wrath project should look like and we also presented some plans in the past, but for now nothing is set in stone. As a lot of our concepts and ideas changed since we first announced it, we're putting the Frozen Throne brand away for now as we're working towards a more concentrated vision for WotLK. We have a variety of options and plans but the everchanging landscape of private servers makes it unreasonable to decide on things months in advance. Years ago, private servers used to be centered around custom content, leveling to 255, fun GM events. Then it shifted to purely x1 blizzlike servers. Now, with Classic going on and general exhaustion with leveling the community is once again gravitating towards mid and high rate servers. It's impossible to tell what will be popular in the future therefore we don't want to announce things that we would have to backtrack from or go through with despite knowing they're a suboptimal choice. We'll decide on everything when the time is right. The only thing that's for certain is that we will provide at least one high quality Wrath of the Lich King realm for people to enjoy.

We know that a number of players is concerned with the future of PTE. As we said before, we want to let everyone continue the journey with their Netherwing and Karazhan characters in Wrath in some capacity. We would obviously like to just run a separate realm primarily for those characters but with the fresh mentality being dominant on private servers, ongoing classic as well as still some time remaining till Wrath is ready, it's difficult to tell whether the number of remaining players interested in that will be enough for such realm to support itself in terms of player count. If the numbers are decent – great, nothing to be concerned of. If not, we will have to figure out a different solution to make use of those characters.

A SMALL TEASE

We would also want to be a bit cryptic for a moment and say we've been working on something incredibly cool in the background and we hope to present that relatively soon. Nothing more we can say about it for the moment, but it's going to be very significant for the future of Atlantiss and possibly private servers in general. Stay tuned!