World of Warcraft recently announced the Wrath of the Lich King expansion is coming to Classic servers WOTLK Classic Gold. Wrath of the Lich King brought players on a journey to Northrend, where they faced off against the Lich King and his undead Scourge on the summit of the world. The expansion was one of the most adored in WoW history and the announcement of its brand-new Dragonflight expansion gathered almost the same amount of excitement.

Game Rant participated in a group interview with World of Warcraft Classic lead software engineer Brian Birmingham and principal system designer Kris Zierhut about Wrath of the Lich King Classic's grand return.

As the founding members of the Wrath of the Lich King team, Birmingham and Zierhut are equally passionate about the evolution of World of Warcraft as they are knowledgeable. The team members discussed some of the most challenging aspects of reviving Wrath of the Lich King, and talked about possible future plans of World of Warcraft Classic.

One of the most difficult challenges that has been faced by Wrath of the Lich King Classic comes from the programming. Consolidating all the information of Classic, Wrath of the Lich King and the selling World of Warcraft into a unique experience is a challenging undertaking. According to Birmingham it is necessary to import the code from Vanilla World of Warcraft, Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King and aligning it to the past and current Classic and retail World of Warcraft versions.

"We're working with six different versions and are trying to make sure the changes that occur in one are appropriately recorded in the right place in the version we will release in the future. That is a challenge we're trying to solve by documenting the changes and considering which versions make the most sense to utilize."

According to Birmingham Birmingham, the game's World of Warcraft maps are among the most challenging components to convert. "[The world mapsystem] has changed dramatically throughout the various patches" he said "We created all of these systems, then changed them later to make them more cohesive buy WOW WOTLK Classic Gold." The data from the maps of various eras from World of Warcraft are all different, and streamlining it was a surprise challenge.