Project Ascension will close for good on 4-5 September after agreement with Blizzard

Project Ascension will permanently shut down all of its World of Warcraft realms on 4 September at 7pm PT / 10pm ET, which is 3am BST / 4am CEST on 5 September. The team announced the closure on 29 August 2026 and described it as a "mutual agreement" with Blizzard Entertainment. The decision follows the cease-and-desist and lawsuit filed in June 2026.

Ascension launched in 2016 as a classless take on World of Warcraft, letting players mix abilities and talents from any class. It grew to include Vanilla, TBC and Wrath-based realms and the Conquest of Azeroth project with 21 custom classes. Tracking sites ranked it the most populated private server in 2026, with tens of thousands of concurrent players and a community of nearly 300,000. Its closure caps a year-long wave of enforcement that began with the Turtle WoW lawsuit in August 2025 and also took down Stormforge.

The team is using the final week to release its remaining planned content, and after that it will remove all WoW material. It thanked players and said all development will shift to something new, unrelated to WoW or any Blizzard game. Player accounts and the launcher will be kept for that project.

Update: on 31 August, two days after the announcement, the team revealed that its next game is an original MMO simply called Ascension.