On the Classic Version of WoW: The Burning Crusade

Illidan Stormrage would likely take one look at me and quickly surmise that I am not prepared and in a way, he would be right. I am not prepared to actually play WoW Classic: Burning Crusade once it releases sometime this year, but I am most certainly prepared to provide you with at least a few of the currently-known details about it. The rumors are true, my friends. The Dark Portal shall soon open once again. Let us waste no time and get directly to the details I’ve promised you.

First things first, at the time of writing, the actual release date for The Burning Crusade Classic has not yet been announced. Blizzard has stated that it will become playable at some point this year. They’ve made miscalculations about the releases of their games in the past, however, as they did with Warcraft III: Reforged. If I may speculate for a moment, I suspect that Blizzard may presently be more concerned with developing and polishing the upcoming major patch for World of Warcraft: Shadowlands than they are with WoW Classic.

Secondly, it seems that no one, not even Blizzard, has officially agreed upon a naming convention for The Burning Crusade Classic. That rather confusing point leads me to the detail which dictates that players don’t necessarily have to take their characters into the upcoming version of TBC if they don’t want to. Players may instead choose to have their characters remain on what Blizzard is calling “Classic Era” servers, which exist so that players can continue to enjoy the emulated version of Azeroth as it was before the game’s first expansion release.

However, if I’m correctly understanding everything I’ve read on this subject so far, it appears that players who want to both keep their current Classic characters as they are and take them into Burning Crusade Classic once it goes live will apparently have the option to clone their existing characters onto Burning Crusade servers. If that is indeed the case, it seems that Classic players will be able to have their proverbial cake and eat it too, at least in a sense.

Additionally, there will be the option to purchase boosts which will elevate any character to level 58. This mechanic exists so that any World of Warcraft Classic characters who are not prepared to enter Burning Crusade content can do so as soon as TBC Classic is fully rolled out. It is worth noting that Eurogamer reports that these boosts are “strictly one-time-only.” I would imagine this means players may only purchase one such boost per account. There has been no word as of yet concerning how much these boosts will cost, though I would hope they cost less than a level 50 character boost in Shadowlands.

On a final note (at least for now), the announcement of The Burning Crusade Classic has led a few outlets to wonder whether the success of the revival of WoW’s first expansion will eventually lead to the same thing being done for other expansions. Considering that Blizzard has said they’ll be doing things fairly differently with TBC Classic compared to its predecessor in terms of class and raid balancing, players may well find that they more thoroughly enjoy the changes that Blizzard plans to make to this new-ish version of the expansion. Either way, if TBC Classic leads to Wrath of the Lich King Classic and so on, just remember that I kind of called it.