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. Original Classic. Classic Classic? (Blizzard is calling them Classic Era servers.)