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[AV]

Tired of seeing videos where modders have "recreated" games in Unreal Engine 5, except it's just a three minute video of some horribly over-processed monstrosity? Me too. Fortunately, this is the real deal - the Turtle WoW developers have recreated their extension of the original WoW in UE5, and it's coming next year. This is not an advert, I don't belong to the Turtle development team, I've simply played there on-and-off for years and love the server and what they're about to pull off. A few layman Q+As before we get to the good stuff.

Scroll down if you just want to see the juicy video.

What is "turtle" WoW?

Put simply, Turtle is a private WoW server that took the 2006 version of the game and added a whole bunch of new stuff over time, without ever following the original expansion path Blizzard did. All content stays in Azeroth (the original "map") but adds new races such as High Elves, new zones, dungeons, raids, items, professions, modes, etc. The level cap remains the same and the point is that all content remains relevant, without a level jump that renders the old world moot.

Aren't private servers illegal / don't they get shut down?

The legality of running servers is certainly a grey area, especially depending on where you live in the world, but playing on one is not illegal. Turtle is hosted in the the EU, and Blizzard have never really tried to take it down. Turtle has been running for almost 6 years and there are plenty of private servers that have been running much longer - the myth that Blizzard will come and take out private servers at any second has been perpetuated wrongly for a long time. Servers are free to play and take donations, usually in exchange for varying rewards, to keep afloat. The question of recreating an old game in UE5 is certainly an interesting one, and I'm not a lawyer, but Turtle aren't the sort of team to just spend 18 months doing this without investigating that first.

Why not just play Blizzard's official legacy servers?

This is certainly what many, many people do - but I shouldn't have to tell GAF how incompetent modern Blizzard are. Their version of a "Classic Plus" is incredibly simplistic and barely adds anything to the base game considering how much funding they have. They only offer access to limited versions of the game at their discretion, whereas various private servers offer ways to play different expansions as they were at the time, or add new custom content.

So then, what is Turtle WoW 2.0?

To play Turtle, you need to use a modified version of the 2006 game client. This feels incredibly dated, not only from a graphics point of view, but the way it feels. The framerate can fly all over the place, it can feel stuttery and jarring, there's a lack of QoL that was added to newer versions of the client that's missing here. It's fine and it's worth putting up with to play a server as good as Turtle's, but it's not ideal.

Enter 2.0: the whole game recreated in Unreal Engine 5. For real this time - no clickbait trailer for something that doesn't exist, they've been working on this for 18+ month and it's due to release next year. Not only does it bring in a new graphics mode (and an option to switch to legacy graphics for those who want it to look the same way), recreating the client means things like proprietary anti-botting and cheating tech, widescreen support and FOV sliders, performances, support for DLSS and FidelityFX, action queing anti-latency, legacy addon support, Android mobile device support and more. It gives the team far greater control over their version of the game. But seriously - the graphics. This is the sort of recreation of old games we deserve, not just slapping an old database into a modern client and calling it a day.

So then, the good stuff - here's the trailer for 2.0.



A Q+A can be found in a forum post here:

Turtle WoW 2.0 — Powered by Unreal Engine 5

Greetings! Many players have expressed that Mysteries of Azeroth and Vanilla WoW are becoming difficult to play as the old 1.12 client can struggle on newer har

forum.turtle-wow.org

Personally I'm already going to be invested in another private WoW project by the time this comes out, but I will absolutely be checking it out. This could be an incredibly transformative experience for anyone looking to recapture that old WoW magic, without having to tolerate old WoW burdens.

 

[TVexperto]

c+d incoming?

 

[AV]

c+d incoming?

The server itself will be fine as always.

The UE5 client is an interesting one. You would think they've not spent 18 months on this already without being confident that they're not doing anything Activision can come after them for in the EU - perhaps to do with the way that the WoW client isn't a game without access to a server, it's a client that's always been free to download and Blizzard charge you to play on their servers, where Turtle is free. Really the UE5 client isn't offering any more "game" than they previously did.

 

[RJMacready73]

That looked incredible, I'd definitely be up for checking that out on release just to get those nostalgic feels, especially if I can run it on my phone, how many players can the server support?

 

[AV]

That looked incredible, I'd definitely be up for checking that out on release just to get those nostalgic feels, especially if I can run it on my phone, how many players can the server support?

The server averages 5-6k online right now which is very healthy. It's a PVE server (they launched a PVP alternate and it's practically dead) and you can dungeon/raid with the opposing faction which makes groups far easier to get together. They also launched a Chinese server which moved most of that base over there, as not long ago the server was reaching 10k+ and queues had to be implemented.

 

[Ceadeus]

I read that first like Turok WoW 2.0

I was like god damn what type cross over is thit?!?

 

[Beechos]

I wonder how much work/time goes into doing something like this.

 

[Kaachan]

Tired of seeing videos where modders have "recreated" games in Unreal Engine 5, except it's just a three minute video of some horribly over-processed monstrosity? Me too.

Yes, yes and yes!!
Holy shit this looks great. Day one for me

 

[The Cockatrice]

Tired of seeing videos where modders have "recreated" games in Unreal Engine 5, except it's just a three minute video of some horribly over-processed monstrosity?

I am tired yes, but nothing in the video shows me that this project is the opposite. No gameplay nothing and this coming from an average private server out of all places makes me doubt this will ever see the light of day.

 

[AV]

I am tired yes, but nothing in the video shows me that this project is the opposite. No gameplay nothing and this coming from an average private server out of all places makes me doubt this will ever see the light of day.

Understandable - but they've been hammering at it for a long time, it's a while off, it's perfectly technically feasible, and the Turtle team is bar-none the best in the scene.

This said, I have no doubt it will release eventually, and work... with issues. And issues can be fixed over time. But the core problem is going to lie in people loading it up, immediately saying "this doesn't feel like WoW" and going back to the old client. It's gonna be near impossible to replicate the feeling perfectly from scratch, so it will boil down to just how close they can get it and whether that slightly off feeling is worth all the upgrades that come with it. I just hope they continue to make it optional, at least for as long as possible.

 

[Vyse]

That’s really cool. Been a very long time since I played WoW. Had a great group of people I played with back in the day. Very fond memories.

 

[RJMacready73]

I'm looking forward most to trying this out ln my phone, that would make this a killer app to have

 

[nkarafo]

So it's like Wow but with traversal and shader cache stutters?

 

[Griffon]

Why tho...

It doesn't look that much better. For the herculean effort it must've been.

 

[diffusionx]

YO MICROSOFT
HIRE
THIS
MAN

 

[Sojiro]

Oh damn this is really cool, I may have to check this out. Are there any class rebalancing? Vanilla WoW is unfortunately fairly imbalanced between the classes and the builds within each class. Even still, this looks great and expanding off of OG WoW is something I would definitely be interested in.

 

[Nihilum]

So it's like Wow but with traversal and shader cache stutters?

And most of the quests are broken.

 

[ManaByte]

Why tho...

It doesn't look that much better. For the herculean effort it must've been.

Because there are still a couple of thousand people who only want to play Vanilla WoW.

Hell even Blizzard has moved on with Classic when it was proven people really didn't want that. They wanted a quick jolt of nostalgia and moved on, which is why "Classic" WoW is now up to Cataclysm.

 

[AV]

Because there are still a couple of thousand people who only want to play Vanilla WoW.

Hell even Blizzard has moved on with Classic when it was proven people really didn't want that. They wanted a quick jolt of nostalgia and moved on, which is why "Classic" WoW is now up to Cataclysm.

Vanilla is actually the only one they haven't shut down, there's still a community on there going endlessly. No TBC or WOTLK servers, the latter of which seems super weird when WOTLK has always been the most popular private scene. There's a good 40k+ playing Season of Discovery (their limp Vanilla+) too. It's not much, but it's easy money for them.

Oh damn this is really cool, I may have to check this out. Are there any class rebalancing? Vanilla WoW is unfortunately fairly imbalanced between the classes and the builds within each class.

To a point. It's probably Turtle's biggest downside but it does make some specs more viable and interesting - when I played 0-Naxx earlier this year our raid guild was bursting with hunters because they gave them an extra ability to spam which really helped. DPS shamans, rets etc. also taking up plenty of spaces. They also have further class changes on the roadmap for this year.

 

[nkarafo]

Theoretically this doesn't need to be a private server in order to change the graphics, no? All the assets are stored locally, it's the game logic and scripts that are taken from the servers. I mean, there are already some graphics mods for this that work on the official game, it's just that they only affect your copy, everyone else sees what's stored in their local drives.

And most of the quests are broken.

Yeah, that's a given for every private server.

 

[AV]

Theoretically this doesn't need to be a private server in order to change the graphics, no? All the assets are stored locally, it's the game logic and scripts that are taken from the servers. I mean, there are already some graphics mods for this that work on the official game, it's just that they only affect your copy, everyone else sees what's stored in their local drives.

Yeah, that's a given for every private server.

It's more than just a graphical upgrade, there's a bunch of goodies that come with a complete rewrite like this - as you say, there are mods that can do straight swaps, but you're still running the horrible 1.12 client from 2006. If anything it's kinda surprising that they aren't just migrating to the WotLK client which has been the "more than fine" standard for a long time in this scene. That said there's a couple other projects doing Vanilla-in-Wrath so perhaps they were looking to hit a bigger goal and this is certainly it. Very ambitious, maybe too much so.

Also, quests work fine on regular Turtle, I think the guy was saying they're going to break when they drop this... which they certainly will for a while.

 

[nkarafo]

Also, quests work fine on regular Turtle, I think the guy was saying they're going to break when they drop this... which they certainly will for a while.

It's been a long time since i played on a private server (a few of them) and i remember most regular quests and dungeons were fine (with a few bugs here and there). But some raids were either not working at all or not entirely scripted. Most of the heavily scripted stuff in the WotLK map was also not working at all.

 

[AV]

It's been a long time i played on a private server (a few of them) and i remember most regular quests and dungeons were fine (with a few bugs here and there). But some raids were either not working at all or not entirely scripted. Most of the heavily scripted stuff in the WotLK was also not working.

They're come a long way in that time, it's rare you encounter any serious raid bugs on servers spanning all the way to MoP (and possibly beyond) now. On Turtle specifically you can do every raid (and a new 10, new 40 with more coming) perfectly fine, I took a warrior from level 1 to killing KT this year and had a blast.

But yeah, I remember the old wild west of privates where even levelling felt wonky. It's insane some of the dedication these teams have, another one releasing this year is doing monthly developer deep dives on some real nerd shit behind the scenes and how they're polishing everything and fixing thousands of bugs.

 

[ManaByte]

I don't get why people want to keep playing Vanilla over and over. Retail is coming off one of the best expansions in a decade and starting a trilogy of Metzen-led expansions next month.

 

[AV]

I don't get why people want to keep playing Vanilla over and over. Retail is coming off one of the best expansions in a decade and starting a trilogy of Metzen-led expansions next month.

The short answer: brain damage (I am one of those people)

The longer answer: Two very different games. I actually had a good time with Dragonflight for about a month, did some M+, did the raid, bounced, it was fun. But it's nothing like Vanilla, the one huge map everyone inhabits, that long long journey to 60, doing chill dungeons with the boys for prebis items you can actually identify, doing multiple raids a week because all of them stay relevant. Actually journeying through what feels like a world rather than sitting in the capital waiting for queues to pop, getting into scrapes if you're on a PVP server. Feeling more powerful from a 6-slot linen bag drop at level 1-6 than anything that happened to me in DF. Instances of this exist in the modern game, but it just ain't the same.

It's got numerous flaws and anyone who tells you otherwise is silly, but in 2024 we can play versions of Vanilla that help address some of those flaws while maintaining the spirit of the core game we love. Turtle's very very good at that. Addendum: there is absolutely the nostalgia factor for a lot of people, especially for a lot who didn't play privates and checked out Classic, but at a certain point of replaying the same thing on-and-off for 18 years, it evolves beyond nostalgia.

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

As a private server they will probably do fine but the moment they try to launch on Android I expect Activision to come after them.

 

[Bert Big Balls]

Who's up for getting together and playing this day 1. Looks great. I've played wow and classic wow and would definitely be up for playing this.

 

[RJMacready73]

Are they fully intending for this to run on Android smart phones? So I could theoretically pop the phone out in work, do a few quests etc, sitting in bed run about the place etc? How in the hell do they get the interface to work?? Are they writing a complete touchscreen type UI??

 

[PSYGN]

Activision/Blizzard will probably close this down as it continues to grow in popularity.

 

[Hero_Select]

They're come a long way in that time, it's rare you encounter any serious raid bugs on servers spanning all the way to MoP (and possibly beyond) now. On Turtle specifically you can do every raid (and a new 10, new 40 with more coming) perfectly fine, I took a warrior from level 1 to killing KT this year and had a blast.

But yeah, I remember the old wild west of privates where even levelling felt wonky. It's insane some of the dedication these teams have, another one releasing this year is doing monthly developer deep dives on some real nerd shit behind the scenes and how they're polishing everything and fixing thousands of bugs.

How populated is that server? Enough to group up for quests and things whilst leveling?

 

[Gameplay Gods Bless]

Tired of seeing videos where modders have "recreated" games in Unreal Engine 5, except it's just a three minute video of some horribly over-processed monstrosity? Me too. Fortunately, this is the real deal - the Turtle WoW developers have recreated their extension of the original WoW in UE5, and it's coming next year. This is not an advert, I don't belong to the Turtle development team, I've simply played there on-and-off for years and love the server and what they're about to pull off. A few layman Q+As before we get to the good stuff.

Scroll down if you just want to see the juicy video.

What is "turtle" WoW?

Put simply, Turtle is a private WoW server that took the 2006 version of the game and added a whole bunch of new stuff over time, without ever following the original expansion path Blizzard did. All content stays in Azeroth (the original "map") but adds new races such as High Elves, new zones, dungeons, raids, items, professions, modes, etc. The level cap remains the same and the point is that all content remains relevant, without a level jump that renders the old world moot.

Aren't private servers illegal / don't they get shut down?

The legality of running servers is certainly a grey area, especially depending on where you live in the world, but playing on one is not illegal. Turtle is hosted in the the EU, and Blizzard have never really tried to take it down. Turtle has been running for almost 6 years and there are plenty of private servers that have been running much longer - the myth that Blizzard will come and take out private servers at any second has been perpetuated wrongly for a long time. Servers are free to play and take donations, usually in exchange for varying rewards, to keep afloat. The question of recreating an old game in UE5 is certainly an interesting one, and I'm not a lawyer, but Turtle aren't the sort of team to just spend 18 months doing this without investigating that first.

Why not just play Blizzard's official legacy servers?

This is certainly what many, many people do - but I shouldn't have to tell GAF how incompetent modern Blizzard are. Their version of a "Classic Plus" is incredibly simplistic and barely adds anything to the base game considering how much funding they have. They only offer access to limited versions of the game at their discretion, whereas various private servers offer ways to play different expansions as they were at the time, or add new custom content.

So then, what is Turtle WoW 2.0?

To play Turtle, you need to use a modified version of the 2006 game client. This feels incredibly dated, not only from a graphics point of view, but the way it feels. The framerate can fly all over the place, it can feel stuttery and jarring, there's a lack of QoL that was added to newer versions of the client that's missing here. It's fine and it's worth putting up with to play a server as good as Turtle's, but it's not ideal.

Enter 2.0: the whole game recreated in Unreal Engine 5. For real this time - no clickbait trailer for something that doesn't exist, they've been working on this for 18+ month and it's due to release next year. Not only does it bring in a new graphics mode (and an option to switch to legacy graphics for those who want it to look the same way), recreating the client means things like proprietary anti-botting and cheating tech, widescreen support and FOV sliders, performances, support for DLSS and FidelityFX, action queing anti-latency, legacy addon support, Android mobile device support and more. It gives the team far greater control over their version of the game. But seriously - the graphics. This is the sort of recreation of old games we deserve, not just slapping an old database into a modern client and calling it a day.

So then, the good stuff - here's the trailer for 2.0.



A Q+A can be found in a forum post here:

Turtle WoW 2.0 — Powered by Unreal Engine 5

Greetings! Many players have expressed that Mysteries of Azeroth and Vanilla WoW are becoming difficult to play as the old 1.12 client can struggle on newer har

forum.turtle-wow.org

Personally I'm already going to be invested in another private WoW project by the time this comes out, but I will absolutely be checking it out. This could be an incredibly transformative experience for anyone looking to recapture that old WoW magic, without having to tolerate old WoW burdens.

This is insane holy shit. I hope there's hardware lumen support and more.

 

[Boralf]

How populated is that server? Enough to group up for quests and things whilst leveling?

Last time I played: absolutely. Server was even getting a bit (too) crowded.

 

[Hero_Select]

Last time I played: absolutely. Server was even getting a bit (too) crowded.

That's awesome. I'll download it when I get home then, been meaning to jump back into classic and everything I'm seeing about it sounds really fun. Thanks!

 

[AV]

How populated is that server? Enough to group up for quests and things whilst leveling?

As above, yep, plenty populated. Just bear in mind it's Classic+ in the Vanilla client, so things aren't quite the same as you remember them and it's running in a very old game client.

One of the best things about Turtle is if you're finding the original game's levelling a bit too slow, you can enable PVP for a big XP boost (don't complain if you get ganked though!) and also there's a custom profession called survival, which allows people to drop tents. Stand under a tent and your rested XP amount (usually accrued slowly offline) rapidly fills, giving you a temporary double XP from mob kills. People love to put these outside Stormwind and Orgrimmar for others.

Are they fully intending for this to run on Android smart phones? So I could theoretically pop the phone out in work, do a few quests etc, sitting in bed run about the place etc? How in the hell do they get the interface to work?? Are they writing a complete touchscreen type UI??

Seems that way. You can already play WoW on an Android phone if you jump through a whole bunch of hoops, the proof of concept is there. Not something I'd want to do whatsoever personally but it wouldn't be a bad way to do some simple grinding in bed. People are already loving the unofficial Steam Deck stuff.