World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic to get paid character cloning and boosts - and "pre-nerf" raid bosses - Eurogamer.net

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.

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.

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.

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.

"It is the class abilities, the class balance and everything that existed for the final version of Burning Crusade...

Longdale gave a few examples of changes that will be made in Burning Crusade Classic.

In Classic, players got later versions of raid bosses that had been tuned down (wisely so in the case of a fight like C'Thun, the pre-nerf version of which, Dawson said, was proven to be "mathematically impossible").

With Burning Crusade Classic, however, the community will get the chance to test themselves against bosses in their terrifying pre-nerf forms?

"We're taking a look at that raiding community and it is extremely vibrant, they're extremely talented raiders, and they know a lot more today than they did 15 years ago," Dawson said.

"So we want to give them that pre-nerf version of those fights." (Well, mostly. Some poor game design choices, like spell pushback on the original version of M'uru from Sunwell Plateau, will be left out, but "that hit point nerf and damage nerf that we got a few weeks in - let's not do that right away," Dawson said, with a glint of mischief in his eye.).

The WOW Classic team has learned that returning the game to its exact state at an earlier point in time is not really what the community wants - and nor does it take into account how things have moved on.

It was a very different world - the community sites, the guilds weren't as savvy and robust as they are today." Dawson said.

"One thing that we always have had both for Classic and for Burning Crusade is a reference client, so we can actually go back and look at how things actually were," Dawson said.

"It's about keeping the nostalgia, the spirit of Burning Crusade and Classic for that nostalgic experience.

More about World of Warcraft Classic.