WoW Classic's Burning Crusade Expansion Now Available In Beta Test

World of Warcraft Classic's first expansion, The Burning Crusade, is one step closer to releasing. Blizzard Entertainment has announced that beta testing has begun.

Access to the beta will be available in phases over the next few weeks so if you don't get in right away, keep checking. You can opt-in for beta access on your Battle.net profile.

The expansion will let you play as a Blood Elf or Draenei in WoW Classic. Content will be released in phases, letting you experience the Burning Crusade progressively over time. That means the community can prep itself for events like the opening of the Black Temple and the Sunwell. It will also reintroduce Arena PvP, jewelcrafting, and flying mounts to the WoW Classic experience.

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."