World of Warcraft Classic has proven to be a success for developer Blizzard, so it's only natural the company would want to continue that forward momentum by introducing a "classic" version of the game's first expansion with WoW: Burning Crusade Classic. Some players may enjoy the original version of the game so much that they don't want to carry on to Burning Crusade, however, and Blizzard is introducing an option for those who want their characters to stay in regular WoW Classic.
While existing WoW Classic servers will be automatically converted to their Burning Crusade forms, complete with new races, class updates, and a whole new region of the Warcraft universe to explore, players don't have to journey through the Dark Portal and into the broken world of Outland if they don't want to. Whether it's to stay in the current form of WoW Classic forever or move into the future, Blizzard says the decision players make will be permanent to a point, though there is technically an option for players who want to have their cake and eat it too.
It's a tough decision for those who have spent hundreds of hours acquiring the best gear and items in WoW Classic, only for a new expansion to come and make the majority of that hard-earned loot obsolete. For those looking to stay in "vanilla" WoW and remain on Azeroth, here's what is known about the Burning Crusade's rollout and the options players have.
How To Stay In WoW's Classic-Era Servers When Burning Crusade Comes
According to Blizzard, players will be able to decide the future of their characters when the Burning Crusade Classic pre-patch arrives on a yet-undetermined date. Once that happens, players will find two different clients of WoW Classic: one for the original version of the game, which contains "Classic Era" servers, and another for Burning Crusade Classic, which contains "Progression" servers. All of a given player's characters will appear in both of the clients. However, logging in to a character on a given client will ask the player if they want to "activate" that character on that particular version of the game. If a player activates a character on the Burning Crusade Classic game client, it will be unplayable on the original WoW Classic client (and vice versa).
The good news is players don't have to decide immediately on pre-patch day. The option will persist until a choice is made (or, presumably, until another expansion releases years from now). Players do technically have a way to take all difficulty out of the decision and choose both options, too: When the pre-patch arrives, Blizzard will be taking a virtual "snapshot" of each character in the game, including all that character's gear, gold, and items. For a fee, players will be able to "clone" their character snapshots. The original version of the character can move on to Burning Crusade Classic, while the cloned version can stay in the original WoW Classic, keeping all of their gold and items as snapshotted on the day of the pre-patch. Cloning, however, will cost real-world money, though Blizzard has not yet revealed the price.
It all sounds a little complicated, but in reality, it's actually fairly simple. To not progress to WoW: Burning Crusade Classic, players simply choose which characters they want to progress and which they don't, then log in to the corresponding client. Just keep in mind that the clone will only have the gold, gear, and items that existed on that character on the date of the pre-patch, so if a player continues to play original WoW Classic after pre-patch, none of that progress will carry over for the cloned character.
It remains to be seen how running two different classic versions of World of Warcraft Classic will work in the long run. But for those who want to keep on keeping on in Azeroth and never step into Outland, Blizzard seems to have come up with a solution that should please most players.