The March to Burning Crusade Classic Begins

Blizzard announced this week that the anticipated beta for Burning Crusade Classic has begun.

Beta is now a thing

Of course, it was anticipated… there was a whole panel about it at BlizzCon Online… but while there is information out there, an actual timeline towards launch is just speculation and rumors at this point.  I don’t think we’re on track for that May 3rd/4th rumor from the beginning of the year, but early-to-mid summer still seems like a very viable window for launch.

Meanwhile, I haven’t said much about WoW or WoW Classic around here for a while.

Our group finished up Blackrock Depths back around mid-February and, since then, we have been wrapped up with Valheim, with WoW mostly falling by the wayside as we explored the viking afterlife.

I don’t think that means we’re done with WoW Classic.  But, after a year and a half of slowly working our way through the original content, I think a bit of a break to do something else might have been in order.  Valheim won’t go on forever… or at least not at the level of play time some of us have been putting into it.  We’re about ready for Moder, the fourth boss, and then it will be out into the plains to explore and gear ourselves up for the final challenge.

I suspect that we will wrap that up and still have a bit of time to do a couple more instance runs and get all our mains, and maybe an alt or two, up to level 60 before the Burning Crusade Classic pre-launch events kick-in.

When it does arrive, I think we’re all on board to move forward with the expansion.  I have enjoyed our time in WoW Classic, but I don’t think I need to leave any characters behind just to bum around in the old world.  The old world still exists after the portal to Outland opens, it is just the character classes that get a revamp.  And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

For us Burning Crusade Classic will mean a whole series of dungeons to run.  Both it and Wrath of the Lich King were something of a high point for single group content, which is our focus.  The raiding doesn’t mean much to me and the overland quest content doesn’t bring back a ton of fond memories.  Blizz decided to be more forthcoming with quests… so many critical quests in vanilla were on an easily missed NPC or required a drop to activate… by going all-in on the quest hub idea.

But a lot of the quests, especially in the first couple of zones, are just “kill x, collect x, or click on x” that are repeated over and over, simply substituting a new value for x with every iteration.  If it wasn’t for that early bombing run quest… which was so fresh and new at the time, though they have re-used it since multiple times per expansion… and some of the quirky Blizz quests later on, I might despair of the whole thing.  But I can get through Hellfire Peninsula and Zangarmarsh one more time.  I’ll be interested to see how much I remember.

As for the beta, I opted in… I was on their site opting in for the Diablo II remaster and it was just another click… but I am content to hang on until they get to the load tests and such.

Anyway, we have some time before the coming of Burning Crusade Classic.  But with beta going live, the reality of it is getting closer.