The World of Warcraft community waited years – more than a decade, by some counts – to play World of Warcraft: Classic. After years and years of fans begging Blizzard to release some way to play Vanilla, relying on unsanctioned private servers instead.
Last year, Blizzard finally gave the crowds what they wanted with the release of Classic. The community was pleased, the game enjoyed a relatively-smooth release, and fans started counting down the days until the next core features were added in.
But now we’re a good amount of time out from the launch, and some players have pretty much exhausted everything that Classic has to offer. The endgame Molten Core and Blackwing Lair are thoroughly cleared out, Onyxia has been killed countless times, and the PvP system continues to bloom. Fans are now wondering, what next?
In normal Vanilla back in the early 2000’s, fans new that there was more coming down the pipeline eventually. Even before The Burning Crusade was announced, players of the title knew that they would have more content to play through at some point and that Vanilla WoW wasn’t all there was to the game.
But Classic doesn’t have that same feel, it seems. Blizzard created Classic specifically to feel like Vanilla WoW, and that mission was accomplished. The question now is what would be the best move going forward?
Blizzard sent out a character creation survey to the Classic player base to gauge community interest, asking how they would like future Burning Crusade content to possibly be inserted into the title. Would it be best if you could continue your characters forward into the “new” expansion? What if the servers for both versions of the game were separate so that Classic wasn’t killed when The Burning Crusade released, starting the cycle all over again?
The WoW community seems torn on what they would prefer to have. On one hand, we all waited more than a decade for Classic, and having it die – whether by replacement or loss of player base – by the addition of The Burning Crusade seems like a nightmare. On the other hand, the game can’t exist permanently in its current state with all endgame content exhausted, or the player base will leave anyway.
There hasn’t been any sort of announcement from Blizzard’s end, either confirming that they’re making Burning Crusade content or denying it, but the likelihood seems more certain than not. We’ll just have to wait to see how things progress to know what Blizzard intends to do.
