Did you play The Burning Crusade when the World fo Warcraft expansion launched back in January 2007? I did. I remember the queues, the slow grind to level 70 and the soul-destroying progression. But I also remember the first time I walked through the Dark Portal to Outland. It was a wondrous moment and it looked a bit like this.

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Over time, Blizzard moved on from The Burning Crusade, smoothing out the World of Warcraft playing experience, adding expansions, new features and mechanics along the way. The Burning Crusade as it was a decade ago became a distant memory, a special moment in time never again to be repeated - until now.

Felmyst is a new fan World of Warcraft server that aims to recreate the vanilla The Burning Crusade experience - and it launches this Friday, 21st July.

Development has gone on for some time as the people behind the project worked to get their private server up to Blizzard's retail standards. The video, below, from developer "Gummy", goes into great detail on the work done to make Felmyst as accurate a representation of The Burning Crusade as possible. This involved everything from painstakingly recreating environments to tweaking AI behaviour and boss battles.

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There is a loud and clear clamour from World of Warcraft players to play the gargantuan MMO as it was 10 years ago, but Blizzard has so far resisted the urge to offer legacy servers. Felmyst isn't the first private server hoping to fill the void, either. Nostalrius, a fan server that recreated vanilla World of Warcraft, hit the headlines in 2016 when it went live and gained an impressive 800,000 registrations to play - but Blizzard's legal team swooped in to shut the whole thing down. Perhaps Blizzard's lawyers are circling Felmyst as we speak.

For now, Felmyst offers a chance to relive the magic of The Burning Crusade as it was a decade ago.