When World of Warcraft Classic was first announced, Blizzard president J. Allen Black made it clear that it was all a big gamble. For years, Blizzard had hummed back at players who begged to play the same version of WoW as it was when it was first released; not only was it a tremendous challenge to make a 15-year-old MMO actually work on a modern computer, but Brack also made it clear that back in 2004 infamously suggested that WoW might be much less fun than people remembered. But when WoW Classic launched in 2019 and WoW subscriptions more than doubled a few months later, one thing became clear.

And now Blizzard has announced that WoW Classic will not end with its original vanilla experience. At BlizzCon today, TK TK announced that WoW's first expansion, Burning Crusade, will get its own Classic treatment later this year. Players will soon be able to explore the Outlands continent beyond the Dark Portal and level up to 70 while taking on some of WoW's toughest endgame raids and dungeons, just as they did in 2007.

But there remains a very large elec in the room: prior to BlizzCon, I spoke with production director Patrick Dawson and lead producer Holly Longdale about their approach to Burning Crusade Classic, the They told me all about their approach to Burning Crusade Classic, how it deviates from the Burning Crusade you remember, and how it allows players without max-level characters to jump right in and play. Naturally, we also had to ask about what's next for Burning Crusade.

"Right now I'm focused on Burning Crusade," Dawson said. 'And Dawson said. I think you have a vote on what we're going to do in the future, and I'm going to listen to you and others as we move forward through here." [Especially considering that Burning Crusade Classic has not yet been released and will be the focus of players' attention for the next two years or more. But I wanted to know if the unexpected success of WoW Classic, which led Blizzard to pursue the creation of Burning Crusade Classic in the first place, was making the development team think long-term. Dawson hinted that the answer is yes, but said there are "still a lot of problems to solve," including the biggest: how to run multiple versions of the same MMO simultaneously.

When Burning Crusade Classic launches later this year, it will not be an expansion of WoW Classic in the traditional sense, but a completely separate game; Longdale explained that players who are currently level 60 in Classic can have their characters Players who choose to join Burning Crusade will continue to play on the same servers, while those who choose to play vanilla WoW Classic will have access to the same servers. players who choose to play vanilla WoW Classic will have their characters copied to a different server that requires a completely different WoW client to access. So, in essence, WoW Classic, WoW: Burning Crusade Classic, and the modern version of WoW: Shadowlands would all run simultaneously. If Blizzard treats further expansions as Classic, it is easy to imagine how complicated this system could become. Even if you run Burning Crusade, Classic, and Modern as three big MMOs in parallel, there are still a lot of problems to solve," Dawson said.

"Once you get into it, it's easy to imagine it being complicated.

"Once that works out, there will be other possibilities in the future. But we need to build that muscle a bit too and make sure we stay focused on the key priorities of the day. "

Still, despite the difficulties of reviving a 15-year-old MMO and making it play well on modern computers and modern server infrastructure, as Blizzard truncates WoW Classic just short of its most beloved expansion to date The world is not hard to imagine; Wrath of the Lich King is the pinnacle of WoW's long history and has transformed WoW into a mainstream game with over 12 million subscribers.

At the beginning of the interview, Dawson explained that development of "Burning Crusade Classic" began shortly after "WoW Classic" was released in 2019. He explained that almost immediately players started asking Blizzard to include 'Burning Crusade' as well." That's what people want, he said." We've listened to the community and the community has been very vocal about their interest in 'Burning Crusade.' Let's make it happen."

That desire to give players what they want is at the core of WoW Classic. And while Dawson says he's only thinking about Burning Crusade at the moment, the development of Wrath of the Lich King Classic will be entirely up to the players.