World Of Warcraft Classic's Burning Crusade pre-expansion patch is live

World Of Warcraft Classic has had aughties Azeroth lovers back in the original days of Blizzard's mega MMO for a while now. If the nostalgia of early WoW has worn off, don't you worry. You can now load up the nostalgia of awaiting its first expansion. The Burning Crusade Classic pre-expansion patch is live now, after a bit of extended downtime last night, so you can hop in and start working on your level 1 Blood Elf ahead of next month's crusade if you'd like.

Blizzard say that the Burning Crusade Classic pre-expansion patch is live now, introducing some of the features and changes that are coming with the full expansion in just a couple weeks. For starters, you've now got three WoWs to choose from. There's modern day WoW, Classic Wow, and Burning Crusade Classic too. For each of your WoW Classic characters you'll be able to choose whether to stick around in the original-est version of the game or head on forward into Burning Crusade territory.

After that, there's some other pre-expansion activities for you to get into. "For a limited time, players can also take part in the pre-launch event, Battle for the Dark Portal, which unleashes Highlord Kruul and a host of demonic invaders upon Azeroth," Blizzard say.

Now that the pre-expansion patch is out, Blizzard explain that all current Classic realms are moving on to the Burning Crusade while characters that stick behind will instead download a different version of the game.

"As of the pre-expansion patch, all current World of Warcraft Classic servers will progress to Burning Crusade Classic content. When you first log in, you’ll then make a choice on each existing character whether to advance that character into Burning Crusade Classic or choose to play on a World of Warcraft Classic Era realm available as a new game download on the Battle.net Desktop App."

Blizzard explain the rest of the fine print on choosing which version of the game to play and how to clone characters in their announcement from earlier this month.

The big pre-expanion patch didn't quite go off without a hitch, it seems. Over on the Burning Crusade Classic forums, the WoW team explain that they had to work through some extended downtime for WoW realms last night. It was unprecedented for the game, in fact, according to a community manager keeping players updated about the situation:

"No one on the WoW team that I’ve talked to this afternoon can remember a maintenance that took this long. It looks like that’s because we’ve never done anything like this in World of Warcraft, where we’re basically turning one game into two games and we need every player-character in both games to be perfectly playable as they all were just before maintenance started."

All systems appear nominal now though, according to Blizzard's realm status tracker.

The pre-patch is available now, so you're free to hop in and start creating those new Blood Elves and Draenei that you first got hands on back in 2007. Burning Crusade Classic launches in full on June 1st.