When Blizzard abruptly announced last November that it was launching the 20th anniversary servers — WoW Classic Classic — the studio gave many assurances that these fresh realms would be progressing into The Burning Crusade. This was an important piece of information, as otherwise we’d be left wondering whether these servers were more Classic Era realms or not.
And while it’s nice to have some notion of future plans, this announcement created two specific problems for the community. First, it didn’t expound upon any further expansion progression (i.e., will these servers be going through Wrath, Cataclysm, and beyond?). Second, what about the players who were only going to show up for the content, classes, and races of Burning Crusade? What do they do for this year?
The first problem is a standard Blizzard move, which is to leave things as open-ended as possible to allow for decisions down the road based on development, resources, and community demands down the road. The odds are greatly in favor of the 20th anniversary servers going the expansion distance, perhaps all the way to retail some day, but there are possibilities that it’ll stop with Burning Crusade, stop with Wrath, or maybe branch out into some sort of Classic Plus material. We probably won’t know the answer to this for some time to come.
But what I wanted to look at more today was this second issue: These servers are fast becoming what’s been nicknamed “The Burning Crusade waiting rooms.” If you wanted to roll a Draenei or Blood Elf on the new shards, well, you’re going to wait for later this year. If you wanted to be a Horde Paladin or an Alliance Shaman, the same. If you hate vanilla endgame but get excited about Outland’s offerings, you’ve got months to go before satisfying that desire.
So there is a sizable chunk of players hanging back and waiting for the game to revert to a version that they actually want to play, which isn’t good for several reasons. You don’t want to disgruntle people this early in a server’s run, and there’s always the chance that they get bored and wander away before the waiting period is over. And even when it is over, there’s going to be some serious catching up to do for those rolling up one of the unlocked races or class combos.
There’s another danger here for the greater lifespan of this server, which is that Classic is at serious risk of being overshadowed by Retail in 2025. We can debate whether there’s some “Classic fatigue” happening (I do believe there is), but the facts are that Retail is pumping out a lot of new content and heading into an expansion with housing. There may even be a Legion remix by the end of the year.
So what does Classic have to offer? A few things, to be fair. Season of Discovery is injecting fresh fun into its shards with some brand-new endgame vanilla content like Karazhan Crypts. Pandaria Classic will have its day in the sun, although I predict that it will be a very short day thanks to Panda fatigue from last year. And the 20th anniversary realms are going to get their phases and Outland over the course of 2025.
But without a massive Classic Plus-style announcement, most of this is more of the same that we’ve been playing and replaying since 2019. Some drop off in engagement is to be expected, especially if Blizzard is making us wait a full year to play the desired version of the game on the improved servers.
If I were in charge, I’d throw the lever to warp through the remainder of the 20th anniversary phases and get to Burning Crusade this spring — not by winter. It’s what people showed up to play, thanks to the studio heavily name-dropping the first expansion around its launch, so the best way to serve the entire community on these servers would be to unlock it soon and let people enjoy what they want to do.
Or we can keep waiting… and waiting… and waiting… and we’ll see who’s left when it actually happens.
Stepping back into the MMO time machine of WoW Classic, Justin Olivetti offers up observations and ground-level analysis as a Gnome with a view. Casually Classic is a more laid-back look at this legacy ruleset for those of us who’ve never stepped into a raid or seen more than 200 gold to our names.
