WoW Classic Burning Crusade Expansion Release Date Potentially Leaked On Battle.net

It appears that World of Warcraft Classic's first expansion, The Burning Crusade, might be releasing quite soon. Players have reported seeing a new pop-up ad on the Battle.net launcher that mentions a June 1 release date for The Burning Crusade.

WoWhead reports that the images "quickly disappeared" from the launcher, which might suggest that they went live early or were not intended for release in the first place. Officially, Blizzard has not announced a release date for The Burning Crusade.

GameSpot has followed up with the developer regarding these reports.

WoW Classic's Burning Crusade expansion is already available for beta testing, which likely signals that a full release may not be too far off.

Whenever it's released, WoW Classic players will have a choice as to whether they advance to Burning Crusade. You'll be able to keep your characters in the vanilla Classic version of the game, or move to them the Burning Crusade era.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic is included with any WoW subscription, so if you're playing the main game or Classic already, you'll get access to this content for free.

The success of WoW Classic has surprised even Blizzard, which thought the game might only appeal to core fans. Executive producer John Hight told GameSpot: "It certainly surprised us."

He added: "When we put out Classic, we weren't sure, is this going to be a big deal or not? We kind of thought, 'Our core fans are really going to love this, so let's do this for them.' And then, no, it became a whole big community of WoW players. As large as our modern WoW community. That surprised us," Hight said. "We realized, 'Oh gosh we have to support two communities. How do we do that?'"

"Suffice it to say, I believe we probably now hold the record for the two biggest MMOs on the planet Earth. So it's a significant community. Much bigger than we thought it was going to be."