World of Warcraft’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, is cited by many long-term WoW fans as the series’ height, expanding on WoW with new races, raids, and locations, without undermining the core principles of Vanilla. With World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic set to take players back to Outland later this year, many veteran WoW fans will be excited to return to the expansion, while many newer players will be curious to see what all the hype is about.
The Burning Crusade was a far from flawless expansion, however, and even Blizzard has indicated that some changes will be made in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic. Classic’s first expansion could take WoW back to some of its best years, but in doing so will likely be forced to repeat some of the game’s biggest mistakes.
Flying Mounts
Flying mounts were one of the most exciting aspects of The Burning Crusade when they were first announced. The original Azeroth of Vanilla WoW couldn’t accommodate free flying. Too many of its mountains and set pieces were facades which, ever seen from the wrong angle, would reveal hidden holes in the game’s world. Outland, however, provided an opportunity for Blizzard to create a world built for flying. As such, The Burning Crusade saw the introduction of flying mounts which could only be used in Outland. Both the mounts and the training necessary to use them was expensive at the time, and only high-level players who put the work in were able to take flight.
Despite how exciting flying mounts first were, however, they would cause big problems for WoW going forward which were immediately encountered at the start of the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard quickly realized that players with flying mounts would miss huge amounts of the new content in Northrend, which would also feel far smaller for players able to travel as the crow flies. To overcome this Blizzard introduced "Cold Weather Flying", a new training tier which locked players out of flying again until they’d reached a higher level.
WoW: Cataclysm saw flying come to the revamped Vanilla world, and since its introduction in Burning Crusade has made the World of Warcraft feel far smaller than it once did. Dynamic world PvP became far less common, and each expansion necessarily came with another tier of flying training to force players to quest through the content from the ground level.
Item Scaling
One of the big shocks for many players as they entered the Dark Portal for the first time was how quickly their raid gear became irrelevant. Players who had worked together to conquer tough raids like Naxxramas quickly found that the epic gear they’d earned was immediately outmatched by some of the lowest level quest rewards in Outland.
Not only did this wipe out the progress of players who had worked through all of the original game’s raids, but, like the introduction of flying mounts, it set an awkward precedent for the start of each new expansion, which erased the last expansion’s raid rewards in favor of moving content forward. As a result, it ultimately made raiding less exciting - players knew that any gear they’d be able to get would eventually be made redundant by the next expansion.
The Lore
The story of the original World of Warcraft was dispersed over the entire world, and there was no clear single villain. The Burning Crusade brought back a bunch of important lore characters from Warcraft 3, however, but wasn’t exactly sure what to do with them.
The morally ambiguous Illidan Stormrage was turned into the expansion’s unambiguous villain, as were other morally ambiguous characters like Blood Elf prince Kael’thas Sunstrider. In Warcraft 3, Kael’thas joined Illidan’s forces to rescue the Blood Elves from death at the hands of a xenophobic human commander after their kingdom was nearly annihilated by the Scourge. In The Burning Crusade, he simply becomes another raid boss, who then went on to serve the Burning Legion directly in the “Fury of the Sunwell” patch, having gone mad in his pursuit of power.
Though it has been claimed that Illidan’s return in Legion was planned from the get-go, his depiction in The Burning Crusade makes this seem unlikely, at least from the perspective of most of the game’s developers. Not only was Illidan made far more one-dimensional in The Burning Crusade, but his downfall came almost immediately in the expansion’s lifecycle, with Patch 1.1 introducing The Black Temple raid.
In retail WoW’s current expansion, Blizzard included an entire plotline dedicated to the redemption of Kael’thas Sunstrider’s soul. This is another hint that the studio regrets its treatment of some of its more morally ambiguous characters in The Burning Crusade. Simply put, The Burning Crusade Classic players shouldn’t expect the expansion to have a tight, compelling story like Wrath of the Lich King, or the more open storytelling style of Vanilla.
The Faction Conflict
The Burning Crusade also set a precedent which would ultimately see WoW’s faction conflict fall to the wayside of its story and gameplay in a way the Horde and Alliance have never really recovered from. The expansion introduced Shattrath, a neutral city where Horde and Alliance players would come together to fight the Legion and Outland’s other villains.
By the next expansion, the Alliance-Horde conflict was almost irrelevant in the story. The factions shared the expansion’s capital city Dalaran, they had a mutual enemy - the Lich King - and they cooperated at the Wrathgate, its fallout, and partially during the raid of Icecrown itself. It wasn’t until Battle for Azeroth that WoW brought its faction conflict briefly back to the forefront, and by then the game’s world was so different that the dynamic world PvP experiences seen in Vanilla were almost impossible to recreate.
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic releases 2021.