FUN WITH PORTALS

WORLD OF WARCRAFT: THE BURNING CRUSADE CLASSIC is still great, but the grind is real

- Steven Messner

It’s uncanny how much World of Warcraft Classic still feels like a wormhole to a bygone era of gaming. I was certain that the magic of its 2019 launch would have dissipated but was wrong. I joined a group of strangers to take on one of the new dungeons and what should’ve been a twenty-minute run turned into a four-hour marathon. When I slumped into bed at 3 am, I didn’t just have some new loot for my undead Warlock, but a whole new guild of friends to play with.

That’s the enduring black magic of Burning Crusade Classic, a free expansion to WoW Classic servers that fully recreates the first expansion, originally released back in 2007. It’s a crucible of soul-crushing grinding and unforgiving combat that smashes players together like atoms, sparking chain reactions that forge new friendships with impressive regularity.

But sustaining those ongoing reactions requires an unfathomable sacrifice of time and energy that makes my heart yearn for the years when I was a teenager with all the time in the world. Burning Crusade Classic is awesome, but you’ll have to give up a significant chunk of your life to experience all of it.

When I first reviewed WoW