World of Warcraft Burning Crusade Classic is the perfect pandemic timesuck

It’s the ultimate game for self-confessed nerds but some of the updates on this 2021 reboot have got loyalists up in arms.

REVIEW

If you’re finding you have a bit of free time on your hands with lockdowns, gloomy winter weather, and working from home, might I make a suggestion? There’s never been a better time to check out World of Warcraft, with the re-release of inarguably the series’ greatest expansions, The Burning Crusade.

“But World of Warcraft is for nerds who spend hours on their computer, wear the same track pants for weeks and never go outside,” I hear you say. You might want to look at yourself in the mirror, friend, because the pandemic has turned us all into gamers, even if you don’t actually play video games.

And whether you’re a total ‘n00b’ (that’s gamer-speak for ‘newbie’) or have been playing since the original came out in 2004, both camps will definitely enjoy The Burning Crusade Classic.

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World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade Classic has been refurbished for 2021.

A bit of background first

Blizzard Entertainment has been spending a lot of time in the past. It began in 2019, when the very first World of Warcraft was refurbished as World of Warcraft: Classic, and now in 2021 the series’ second expansion, The Burning Crusade Classic, the original of which was released in 2007.

Some of the updates have been somewhat controversial: like the option of being able to enter the game with a max-level character rather than starting from the beginning, but the developers argue it’s a chance for loyalists who have fallen out of practice with the game to just jump right in.

It not only provides a fresh opportunity to those wanting to revisit the massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that dominated their youth, but it welcomes in a new generation of gamers like the 20-year-old that buys a Rolling Stones record.

“You’re going to see this really cool magic soup of some of the old timers that are looking forward to meeting new people or reconnecting with their friends from the past,” says John Hight, World of Warcraft executive producer and vice president.

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World of Warcraft says this is for the old timers and newbies.

Getting started

Being relatively new to Warcraft, I took Hight’s advice to begin with a Draenei; a tall, hoofed and horned race of humanoid refugees who crash landed on Azeroth, the world in which most of the Warcraft series is set. Which class? A hunter. Why? Frankly I liked the idea of being able to tame beasts as my pets and summon them to do my battle bidding. And it’s certainly the most fun I’ve had with WoW.

Flow state gaming

The beauty of Burning Crusade Classic is that it’s surprisingly and deeply meditative. The pace is gradual; it gives you lots of time to learn the mechanics of the game and understand how the world works, though admittedly it can test your patience sometimes. I’m so used to just ‘getting it done’ in video games and powering through levels that I can sometimes forget to just stop and take in the serenity. And there’s so much serenity.

Between culling the Ravager population and recovering the communications of a traitor, it pays to just stop for a second to absorb the Zen-like, purple hazed ambience of Azuremyst Isle – the Dranei starting area.

Burning Crusade Classic is serene and slow.

It’s the perfect time-suck

You can see how gamers lose hours, days, even years of their lives to Warcraft. The chip-away-at-it nature of questing and the seemingly endless narrative is what draws players in, but it’s the community and real relationships they forge that keep them coming back. I got stuck trying to defeat a boss and a complete random teamed up with me to help me out and that’s what makes Warcraft so compelling.

Brian Birmingham, lead software engineer at Blizzard says: “It’s not just the hundreds of people on the other side of the portal, it’s knowing that thousands of people are going to be on your realm, and millions of people are going to be playing the game at the same time that you are, it’s this big, shared experience.”

World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic is out now on PC.

Originally published as World of Warcraft Burning Crusade Classic is the perfect pandemic timesuck