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World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

World of Warcraft is the pinnacle of PC gaming today with over 8 million active players around the world. This seems fairly odd if you just look at the screenshots or read the back of the game box. What the box or the unimpressive pictures don't tell you is that World of Warcraft is unlike any other game out there today - and with Burning Crusade, the best just got better.

What Blizzard did with the original World of Warcraft is impressive - essentially, they jumped into a pack of massively multiplayer games made with small budgets, designed for the hardcore crowd, and schooled everyone by setting whole new standards in the amount of gameplay, polish and accessibility (and the amount of money you spend on developing a game).

The massively multiplayer online (MMOG) genre did not start with World of Warcraft. In fact, one could argue that World of Warcraft is just a good copy of Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call and the rest of the first and second generation MMOs, repackaged and polished up for the uninitiated newbie. And while this argument would be essentially true, in reality what Blizzard has done with their title is simple - they redefined the genre by publishing the first truly well designed and polished MMO. World of Warcraft is not popular simply because it's a MMO, or because it has a huge amount of content. It's popular because it easy to pick up and play, it's polished and it's tuned to be fun, and at the same time it contains massive and challenging "endgame" for the hardcore crowd. None of the competition gets all these things right at the same time.

We are going to expand the game a bit...

With Burning Crusade, many things get shaken up in the world of Azeroth. Medivh's tower of Karazhan and Caverns of Time in the deserts of Tanaris are now open for brave adventurers, and Doom Lord Kazzak has managed to reopen the Dark Portal, and enable access to the Outland. Unlike the two old continents on the world of Azeroth, Outland is a fragmented piece of the old Orc homeworld of Draenor, floating in space. The whole area is essentially a warzone where the Horde, Alliance and numerous new factions clash. Or in other words - a new level 60-70 area, consisting of seven massive zones filled with new things to bash for fun, loot and experience points.

In addition to the new dungeons and the Outland areas, there are two new "newbie" zones for the two new races - Blood Elves and Draenei - for levels 1-20. You can also now create Draenei Shamans for the Alliance side and Blood Elf Paladins for the Horde side. This fixes the age-old problem of each side accusing Blizzard of favoritism towards the opposing faction when creating hard boss encounters. Players from each side constantly complained how specific encounters were "easy mode" for the other side due to unique abilities of Shamans and Paladins that were accessible only to one faction. This is now history and both factions have same character classes accessible to them.

The only major shortcoming is that beyond the inclusion of a few new items available via the new Jewelcrafting profession, the expansion offers nothing new for level 20-60 play.

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