It was leaked yesterday, but Blizzard has now made it official: World of Warcraft Classic, the retro version of the huge online game, will be extended to include first expansion The Burning Crusade this year.
That means an increased level cap of 70 (Classic players will actually outlevel players on the modern game, which has had the cap squished to 60); an inter-dimensional adventure through the Dark Portal to the trippy, broken world of Outland; the addition of the Blood Elf and Draenei races; arena player-versus-player, flying mounts and more.
WoW Classic: Burning Crusade Announce Trailer Watch on YouTube
As before, World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic (it’s dropped the “the”, for some reason) will be included for free in a WOW subscription. Players whose dedication is really to the original version of the game won’t be forced to upgrade; you can choose whether to progress your character onto the Burning Crusade expansion along with the rest of your server, or move to a server that will stay forever on the current version of the game – which I guess we now have to call Vanilla Classic. Original Classic. Classic Classic? (Blizzard is calling them Classic Era servers.)
Serving a retro community as it splits into camps who want to experience the game as it was in different eras is a potential minefield, but Blizzard does seem to have thought through all the options. Lead producer Holly Longdale and production director Patrick Dawson told me over Zoom that players who don’t want to choose between the two versions of the game will be offered a paid service to clone their character across Classic Era and Burning Crusade servers. Furthermore, diehard Burning Crusade fans who haven’t been playing Classic and can’t face the long grind up to the level requirement for the expansion can pay for a boost to level 58. This option is strictly one-time-only, because “we don’t want to minimise the accomplishments of those who have worked so hard in Classic to get their characters ready,” Dawson said.
Blizzard now finds itself maintaining three versions of its flagship MMO simultaneously; potentially more, if this model continues through to subsequent WOW expansions. That sounds like a headache, although the Classic community is clearly big enough for the effort to be worth it – Activsion Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has spoken approvingly of the effect Classic has had on WOW subscription numbers. “Yeah, it is more complicated to run multiple products in this environment,” Dawson said. “But we have a world class lab operations team that is up for this challenge. Even going from one mega game to two mega games when we [launched WOW Classic] was a big change for that group as well. So the good news is, we’ve done that before, we know what it’s like to add a new game to World of Warcraft.”
As with WOW Classic, content from the original game will be rolled out in phases over time, so the raiding community can look forward to the Black Temple, Zul’Aman and the Sunwell opening up over the next year or so. But systemically, Burning Crusade Classic will actually start from the expansion’s endpoint. “Our starting template is that final patch,” Dawson said. “It is the class abilities, the class balance and everything that existed for the final version of Burning Crusade… and then we’re going to go ahead and take a look at what else makes sense to change on top of that.”