Nostalrius is coming back, courtesy of the Elysium Project, allowing World of Warcraft fans to experience the vanilla version of the MMO on December 17th. This will include both PvE and PvP activities and will also allow players to start new characters (account data from the original server is still retained though).

Nostalrius was shut down earlier this year by Blizzard Entertainment, thus leading to community-wide frustration. Though the Nostalrius team met with Blizzard to bring legacy servers online in some form, the publisher never really issued a response on the same. This caused the original team to hand things off to the Elysium Project and here we are now.

There’s already been a stress test which more than 10,000 players took part in so it’s likely that Nostalrius sees plenty of support. The question is: Will Blizzard step in again to shut it all down? Stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks to find out.

When Nostalrius, the legacy servers for Vanilla World of Warcraft that was actively managed and handled by a team of fans, had shut down in April it triggered a wave of support that Blizzard hadn’t seen before. Having met with senior executives of Blizzard, the Nostalrius team revealed that the company is open to legacy servers.

“These guys WANT to have legacy WOW servers, that is for sure. They DO have the source code for Vanilla WOW“.

It’s not easy as it sounds though. Plenty of other information – like models, data, maps – is still required and they may need to be recreated. “Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process.” This isn’t including the polish that Blizzard wants to bring to the end product.

Regardless, the meeting was a strong step forward. “To sum up: the good surprise of the meeting was the level of engagement of all these Blizzard people toward making legacy servers a reality. The downside is the technical difficulty it will take to reach our objective. Blizzard is now well aware of the amount of players willing to play legacy servers, something which wasn’t the case until Nostalrius shutdown.”

So while it not may happen tomorrow, legacy server fans can at least take heart that some efforts are being made.