World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade 2009-10-24 00:00:00Page 1 of 2.
Page 2: "The Good Soldier"
A few months ago, World of Warcraft's first full expansion pack was finally unleashed upon the game's millions of players. We opted not to review the entire expansion all at once. Instead, we reviewed the parts of the pack which might sway new players for or against a foray into Blizzard's epic moneyspinner - the new races, new professions and new low-level zones. By and large, what we found was good; if you missed our review at the time, you can click here to check out the solid eight-out-of-ten style of that chunk of the expansion.
The reason we chose not to talk about the higher-level content in the game at that time is straightforward enough - we hadn't seen it all. Ten new levels to advance through, a new continent whose size rivals the launch content of entire rival MMOGs, around twenty new instanced dungeons to kick your guild's backside... Not to mention all manner of changes to how the basic game works. New talent trees! Flying mounts! New crafting recipes and ingredients! Equipment with sockets for stat-boosting gems!Prepare to travel through the Dork Portal, brave adventurer!
You certainly can't accuse Blizzard of skimping on the content. The Burning Crusade is enormous, varied and ambitious - which is why we've taken three months to get around to tackling the thorny task of critiquing the high-end content. It's not just that it's taken us three months to feel confident that we've experienced enough of the game to comment. It has also taken three months for The Burning Crusade to bed in.
Three months; for the real impact of the exodus en masse to Outland to be felt across Azeroth. For guilds to develop strategies and routines, for players to learn exploits, tips and tricks. And, of course, for bugs or unfinished features - a temporal, amorphous concept in an MMOG, as opposed to a solid bump in the road in a normal game - to be ironed out or polished up.
Justification over. We're confident that now we can talk about the Burning Crusade as it is, rather than as it promised to be at launch. Of course, if you're a hardcore WoW fan, you're probably one of the two-point-something million people who rushed out to buy the expansion in the first few weeks after launch. You're only reading this for affirmation or outrage; delete as applicable, depending on how you feel about that score you scrolled to the bottom to glance at. However, there are plenty of lapsed WoW players still waiting for Doubting Thomas to stick his fingers in the stigmata and let everyone know if the miracle is for real. We doubted as you do, brothers and sisters. Let's explore the Gospel according t...
World of Warcraft Quests: By The (Insane) Numbers2009-10-14 00:00:00digg_url = 'http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/57891';digg_title = 'this text can not have a quotemark';It wasn't all mistakes and regrets for former World of Warcraft director Jeffery Kaplan during today's "The Cruise Director of Azeroth" panel at GDC.
The jam-packed presentation also saw the release of many World of Warcraft statistics, including the average number of quests completed daily, and the circumstances that led to the extremely popular MMO sporting, at last count, some 7650 different quests.Between 6/30/2007 and 3/5/2009, some 8,570,222,436 quests were completed in the World of Warcraft.Daily average of quests completed: 16,641,209Kaplan, now working on Blizzard's nex...
