After World of Warcraft successfully relaunched its original "vanilla" client in 2019, fans began wondering whether the WoW Classic universe would eventually march toward expansion packs—like the unofficial WoW Vanilla community had already done.

Just like with 2019's launch of WoW Classic, anyone who pays for an ongoing WoW subscription will get full access to WoW Burning Crusade at no additional cost.

The default is to pack that character up and move it to a newer Burning Crusade server, thus deleting its pre-expansion state.

You can also lock an existing character so that it is not moved forward to a Burning Crusade server, or you can split the difference and have two versions of a beloved character: one on an older server, trapped forever in a pre-expansion bubble, and one on a newer server, ready to march alongside the ever-moving tides of darkness.

The fact that Burning Crusade is being propped up suggests that the Blizzard Classic team isn't done here; the folks at Blizzard Classic might also one day do the same for 2010's tremendous Cataclysm expansion (which, honestly, is where I hope they stop).

Unfortunately, the May 18 pre-patch launch also leaves a certain class of player crunched for time: those who are eager to roll a new Burning Crusade character, particularly in the Blood Elf and Draenei races, and want to grind that character up to level 60 in time for the formal June 1 launch.