First released back in 2007, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade is considered by many to be one of the best periods in World of Warcraft's storied history. With the introduction of Arena PvP, Heroic Dungeons, Flying Mounts and more, The Burning Crusade added many important features while still maintaining the original World of Warcraft's charm. After the success of World of Warcraft Classic, expectations are sky high for Burning Crusade Classic.
Now over a month into World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic's beta, fans are eagerly awaiting news regarding when Blizzard will launch both pre-patch as well as the game itself. That wait is finally over, as the release date, along with additional information about the character cloning service and deluxe edition, have finally been revealed.
Screen Rant had the chance to sit down with Holly Longdale, lead producer for World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic as well as Brian Birmingham, one of the lead software engineers for World of Warcraft. The pair of developers were excited to share some details regarding the release of Burning Crusade Classic along with some insight regarding the development of the game thus far.
We're now over a month into the Burning Crusade Classic Beta, what updates can you provide at the moment?
Holly Longdale: It's been amazing. The population is extraordinarily high on beta. So we're getting a lot of really incredible feedback that's helping us make decisions and make it the best experience we can. We're coming up on May 18. And starting May 18 is when pre-patch goes out. At that point, players will be able to make the choice between Burning Crusade Classic or Classic Era. If they want to play both, we'll have a service for a fee where you can clone your character and play in both. Blood Elves and Draenei will be available. Jewelcrafting as well up to skill level 300. The level 58 boost will be available as of the week of May 18. The boost is one per account and can't be applied to Blood Elf and Draenei. We'll also have a deluxe edition for the game. We want everybody to get ready for June 1st. The Dark Portal will unlock on June 1st and everyone will be able to jump through who's level 58 and get into Outland. A couple weeks later, our first arena season will start. So we're super excited. The help on beta has been incredible. We wouldn't we wouldn't be this far ahead without all the support from the community.
Brian Birmingham: Yeah, honestly, a lot of the challenge is just keeping up with all the great feedback and things coming in from the community to make sure that we can address all their concerns and make sure we get to everything. And it's just really exciting to see how passionate our fans are and how thorough they are in going through and testing everything for us. I really appreciate it.
Can you talk a little bit about arena testing so far and what you've seen in the beta?
Brian Birmingham: Right now it's still early, and bringing back arena teams is actually a fairly big project. As you probably know, modern WoW does not have arena teams anymore. And it's interesting that they touch all kinds of different places throughout the code. It's actually a big project to bring them back. But we're excited to be able to do that. Because we feel like it's an important part of the character of PvP in Burning Crusade was that you had a established team of regular players that you always played with. One of the things that we're doing to try to make it feel a little bit more modern is make sure that we use the latest version of arena teams from Burning Crusade. So the version where you could have alternates on your team. So if your five vs five team has exactly five players and one of them sick, well, you can't play. That's terrible. But if your five vs five team has a backlog of like a larger roster of five alternates, you have 10 people on the team, and five of them play at a time, then you have the opportunity to say like oh, yeah, okay, if he's sick, then this guy who can fill in. Another thing that's important that we wanted to add this time through with Burning Crusade is region-wide matchmaking. We didn't think like it made sense to have such limited matchmaking pools when we don't have to. The technology has evolved a lot since then and we can do cross-realm play if we want to. And so we feel like matchmaking is the place where that makes sense that we can have queue times go down.
Can you talk about some of the other decisions you had to make of whether to keep or to get rid of something in Burning Crusade Classic?
Brian Birmingham: One of the things that was kind of an interesting wrinkle in Burning Crusade was that some profession specific perks that were supposed to be perks only if you kept the profession didn't actually work that way. For jewelcrafting and enchanting, you could craft the special gems that were bind on pickup gems and slot them into your gear, and then drop jewelcrafting. And then you still have the gem slotted. We didn't have the technology to make that stop working until later. And same thing with enchantments that you would put on your ring. We felt like that didn't didn't fit the theme of the time. Burning Crusade was intending those to be profession specific perks for people who kept that profession, but we just didn't have the technology to make them stop working when you dropped the profession. So we made those stop working when you drop the profession. Another similar thing in the profession space is late in the expansion cycle, like around 2.3, things like the crafted weapons became "one-handed," as opposed to "main-hand" only, which meant you could only have one of these on. We didn't want to create this explosive power gain in the early part of the game where "Oh, yeah, I'm dual wielding these crafted weapons that are better than other things." We want to make sure those stay as a main-hand only. This is similar to the reason why we used the classic mounting system during classic Era, as opposed to the Burning Crusade mounting system that was introduced in 1.12. but we left out of Classic era, even though we were broadly targeting 1.12.
On the topic of professions, I know leatherworking and drums have been a concern for a lot of raiders. Can you talk about what decisions you've made with drums?
Brian Birmingham: Absolutely. One of the things that we were really concerned here was, we didn't want to feel like everybody had to go leatherworking. We knew that this was something that was a concern at the time, since the drums were actually increased in power. I think it was patch 2.3. Around that time, players were realizing that "oh my gosh, it's actually really good if we get everybody to go leatherworking." Then we can get in this drum rotation where everybody's casting drums in a rotation so that we always have like full uptime on the haste buff. And while that was kind of a cool thing for people to figure out, we were trying to avoid people forcing each other to go leatherworking. When it's like, oh, everybody has to do the same thing, no matter what class they are, what their interests are, that felt bad. And so we were experimenting with that, we did bring in the pre 2.3 version of drums. And then after that we still wanted there to be a debuff that when you apply the drums, you can't benefit from drums again for until like the same amount of time as the drum cool down. Hopefully that makes it so players who want to do leatherworking, or they really don't care and they're happy to re-spec, are the people who are doing leatherworking instead of people who really wanted to do blacksmithing and engineering or something.
You have said that during the pre-patch players will be able to make Draenei and Blood Elf characters and level them before the Dark Portal opens. Can you talk about that decision?
Holly Longdale: I think historically, if they could have done it in 2007, they would have and we've had that discussion a few times. Both Brian and I agree that yeah, absolutely, we would have given them head start earlier. And to be frank, it will help us too because we'll be able to split up the population a little bit. We're seeing a lot of momentum with what we're doing with Burning Crusade Classic and Classic Era, so we hope that we'll be able to adjust population a little easier and make sure that everybody who wants to play can instead of you know, the historical deluge on day one. We'll be able to split it up a little bit and get involved in this excitement with the community so that we can start getting the feel for Burning Crusade. With Paladin Blood Elves and Shaman Draenei, its important to have them be part of the story when the Dark Portal opens.
So in reference to Holly's "historical deluge," there's the expectation of a lot of people in Hellfire Peninsula and Silvermoon and Exodar. How are you guys preparing for that?
Brian Birmingham: I think one of the things that's important to realize is this problem is a mathematic problem. When you have 1000 players somewhere and you add one more to it, it's not adding one more message, it's adding 1000 more messages. We really can't solve the problem by throwing hardware at it. So at that point, you have to do something to split things up. And that's why we originally, in modern WoW, developed the sharding system. We adapted that to what we call layers for Burning Crusade Classic and WoW Classic. That's where we'd make an entire copy of the world to split players across so that when we really have too many people in one place, we still let people play. Even though it's not an optimal experience, at least you can still do your quests and get out there and see lots of people around you. We try to make sure that if you are invited to a party by somebody on the other layer, it transfers you to them. So you can see each other and quest together and things like that. At the same time, We did have a number of changes that we made to that to try to prevent abuses of it that came the original release of Classic. We're pretty happy with the way layers are right now.
Holly Longdale: We're guided by the principle that anybody who wants to be able to play should be able to play and so we're tackling everything we can possibly think of to make that the reality in both pre-patch and at the Dark Portal.
But you do you feel like you're in a better place to prevent players from manipulating the layers?
Brian Birmingham: Absolutely. There's a cooldown on layer switching that we're pretty happy with at this point. Even in the early days, it wasn't as bad as some people speculated. But there was a concern that you could jump to layers, and mine a mineral load and then jump to another layer and mine another one. Mostly, the problem with that was that there was all this chat spam of people asking "invite me to another layer, invite me so I get a layer hop." It was so irritating if you were just trying to play the game to have people yelling about this. The big change we made there is that there's a cooldown and it rapidly gets longer when you switch layers too frequently. So if you keep doing that over and over again, you're rapidly going to find that you're not actually switching layers.
Can you talk about some of the unexpected issues that have come up during the beta?
Holly Longdale: One of my favorite ones was the emitter point for particles on some of the NPCs. It was just like coming out of the bellies of a lot of NPCs. It wasn't all of them, It was a particular joyful set of NPCs. And there's a lot, you know, some races where the helms are sitting on top of their heads, you know, like there's all kinds of random little stuff that isn't necessarily consistent.
Brian Birmingham: We're bringing back these old art assets. And sometimes we have to run them through some of our modern conversion processes to get them into the state that they need to be in for the modern code understand. We had this problem with classic era where the hunter tier three home didn't look right there, like there's like four little glowing red eyes on them and they weren't displaying correctly from most angles. We fixed that in 1.13.7. And we were trying to apply the same fix in Burning Crusade Classic. And when we did that, we missed one of the other fixes that we had made to that process. It caused the helmets to appear above the head instead of on the head. These are the kinds of things that are fun about a beta is you get to see all these kinds of things that are wacky and aren't quite right.
What is your number one focus in development right now?
Brian Birmingham: I would say our number one focus is really just preparing for all the new things about the clone transition. This is a new service that we have never before done where we are allowing people to choose whether they want to go on to the expansion or stay in classic era. We're actually have basically two launches simultaneously, where we're going to launch the Classic Era Realms at the same time that we're upgrading Classic to Burning Crusade, and then deploy a new service to let you fork your character to both places. This is an enormous undertaking.
Holly Longdale: It's all hands on deck testing and polishing, you know, and making sure we're getting everything right for the community. Era would not have existed unless the players asked for it. We're very focused on making sure we deliver on their expectations and what they were asking for. It's not easy. This is such a fantastic and broad game that there's so many moving parts. We want to make sure we get it all right. It's a lot of all day on Slack with Brian and the whole team, making sure we don't forget anything and writing lots of lists and you know, making sure we're coordinating with the giant WoW team and Blizzard team at large to make sure we're not forgetting anything. This is a time of our lives kind of moment. This is huge to go from classic to now releasing our first expansion and Classic forever, you know, with era realms around so we're excited. It's it's a labor of love.
What is the feeling of knowing, as a game developer, that you're not inventing something new, but instead you're restoring something for so many people?
Holly Longdale: We were all fans of Burning Crusade and Classic the first time and Brian has been with Classic on the ground floor when it was just like a notion with no idea it was going to explode into what it's become today.
Brian Birmingham: I kind of knew!
Holly Longdale: You were quiet to yourself that you knew! But I came from outside last year because I've been a fan of WoW since it launched and it's just incredible to see the upswell in the community and the the sentiments of players who can't wait to see it again, as it was, you know, with all the original talents, mechanics, etc. But, but some change is better.
Brian Birmingham: We were really excited with our no changes philosophy in those early days. We were excited about it because we knew that this is a product everybody loved back in 2004 and so many of us loved internally too and wanted to see restored. There were a number of things that we wouldn't necessarily have thought of as a good things at the time that actually distinguish it from modern WoW. Little things like if you run into like a group while you're out questing, and you're alone, and you try to send one of the group members an invite. Does it suggest to them that they invite you or offer yourself? Or does it just say, No, you can't invite them, they're already in a party. And you might think, Oh, it's an obvious choice, you should obviously just pass on that invite suggestion. But no, we wanted them to then have a text conversation, like, "Hey, can you guys invite me," and little things like that change a little bit of the character and make things more about talking to people
Holly Longdale: Since Classic launch, we've learned so much about how players have advanced since 2004. So there's been a lot of effort spent on doing pre-nerf dungeons to make sure the challenge is there and that it's not going to be completed too quickly. I mean, we know it will.
Brian Birmingham: Definitely faster than it was originally.
Since Blizzcon and through the beta, what would you say are some of the main things you've heard from the community?
Brian Birmingham: Fix Drums.
The second main thing!
Brian Birmingham: I think pre-nerf dungeons is actually one of the things that a lot of people have asked for. They really are excited about seeing this. That was before Blizzcon, though. This has been a long standing requests from the community and they keep saying it. And so I think that's something that's important.
Holly Longdale: Same with arena. Part of how we were building on the original arena, that came from the community and our team itself. In 2007, they didn't know it was going to be eSports for World of Warcraft. We kind of want to lean into that and, and provide that as an opportunity if that's how players want to go. That's one of the other amazing things about this whole experience is we have no way we can predict. We've got a lot of feedback, but just like Classic, we don't know exactly what players are gonna do when they get their hands on the game.
Remakes have been a thing in video games for a long time. But these legacy era servers are really something else. Do you see this as a trend going forward for other MMOs or games in general? Or do you think this is something that's unique to WoW?
Brian Birmingham: I definitely think there is a unique character to WoW. One of the things that distinguishes us from other games is that it's not a single player game. It's specifically a massively multiplayer game. So that community input is ongoing and you're always playing with other people. So it's really not like rereading a book for the for the second time, it's more like going to see a second live performance of your favorite band. It's not going to be exactly the same as the last time you saw it. But you're going to be hearing the same thing, it's going to broadly be the same, but with new people around you, the performers are performing it again. It's a whole new experience. And at the same time, the same thing again, so it's really exciting and something I think that is really unique to to World of Warcraft.
Holly Longdale: How we're doing it, we're very much responding to what players are asking for. Classic Era is a great example of that. In my past life, we did nostalgia based servers, but it was just the same cadence of what we would have done historically. I feel like there's a call in the gaming community to relive these experiences, especially as MMOs move on. The mechanics and how classes are treated in modern WoW are completely unique now. All of us who started way back in the day. We long for what WoW was back then. It was such a global phenomenon and a lot of people miss it. We know a lot of people that have families that want to introduce what it was like then to their children. And we don't need to call it an old-school RPG as far as an MMO goes but it does have that element. The pace is very much different than modern WoW for example. I think a lot of us really love the social friction of having to ask questions to other players and ask for help. It's a very different community feeling. I feel like a lot of MMOs are starting to pick up on that, especially some of the, I hate to say older games, more mature games. It's also single player games. Gen Xers, gaming became sort of a phenomenon over our lifetime. And to go back and reexperience it has been amazing for a bunch of titles.
Could you talk about just your most difficult moment developing Burning Crusade Classic and your favorite moment developing the game?
Holly Longdale: It's just getting it done and making sure we respond to the community. I've worked other places, but I have to say, at Blizzard and with the World of Warcraft team, the focus on what the community wants is primary. It drives everything we do, as well as delivering what Burning Crusade Classic means to the community. That, to me, is where the juggling is. Brian can attest to this, the amount of conversations we have about minutiae of details that are going to make a difference to the community. That, to me is one of the most joyful parts and also one of the most difficult because each one of us represents a different player archetype. And we all represent the different points of view of the community. So they're pretty lively discussions about what's going to be best.
Brian Birmingham: I think the hardest thing has been trying to merge in some of the modern infrastructure changes that we've made. These are things that are ongoing all the time on modern WoW. And these are the kinds of things that don't usually affect gameplay directly, like authentication changes, rendering changes, and trying to make sure that we keep our engine up to date with what what's going on in the broader architecture, make sure we can leverage things like cloud services and things like that. All while preserving that old gameplay. Making sure we get the old gameplay on the new architecture is a real ongoing challenge. I would say my favorite thing has actually been working with the team of people that is putting this together, because they are so dedicated and passionate, and are willing to put in long hours or the hard work to try to figure out those difficult problems and make sure that we can deliver the original gameplay experience even though we're doing it with modern code.