World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Review
Played on:
Windows
MMORPGs have been around for awhile. A genre brought into the mainstream by Everquest, MMORPGs are, to say the least, popular. None, though, have touched the popularity of the current MMO king, World of Warcraft. Boasting over eight million accounts, WoW is the crown jewel of the MMO market. Even the highly popular Asian series, Lineage, isn’t close to the subscriber base for world of Warcraft.
However, Blizzard has take over two years to bring the first expansion for WoW, The Burning Crusade, to market. In the world of the MMO, that’s a long time between the release of the original game and the expansion. For example, Ruins of Kunark came out for the original Everquest just a year after the release of EQ Classic and had many of the same features of World of Warcraft. However, Blizzard isn’t know for rushing games to market and instead coating them in layers of polish and making them shine – could they pull off their magic again with Burning Crusade?
Now, before I go on with this review, I’d like to mention a bit about the perspective of this review. I play a Human Warlock and have a decent amount of raid experience from before the release of the expansion. There are also points in the review where another AtomicGamer writer, Finger, did things I wasn’t able to. His comments on those areas are clearly marked and also be a different color from the rest of the review.
The Burning Crusade takes place primarily in the Outlands. Featuring 7 new world zones, a number of new dungeons and new starting areas for the two new races, there was a significant amount of content added in with Burning Crusade. Each of the new zones feature an insane amount of quests. You’ll have your garden variety kill this many monsters, bring me back this many of their body parts and I’ll give you this shiny new widget. That was a given, those were expected.
However, there are some really interesting quest types that you’ll get to take part in from the beginning of the expansion. One of the early quest lines in Hellfire Peninsula, for example, has you going on bombing runs. You’ll be given a computer-controlled griffin and a stack of bombs. Use the bombs and you’ll get a ground target cursor on your mouse – point it somewhere and bomb the targets you’re given. You can repeat these quests all you want, too, though you won’t get experience the second time around. These quests are just really fun and a nice change of pace from the normal kill or gather type quests.
Something interesting about the quests in the expansion – a lot of them involve taking an item to a certain location and using it. One early quest has you place an item on the ground and kill some orcs near it. Doing this has the item spawn an orc spirit that you then kill for quest credit. There are others that are similar to this but involve using an item then letting an enemy hit you or placing an item back on a bookcase (by simply using the item near the bookcase). While this doesn’t change the overall formula much, the explanation of the quests does add to the game and make you feel like you’re actually doing something interesting instead of just smashing the faces of multiple enemies.
However, not all the quests are perfect. The previously mentioned orc quest, for example, spawns another orc spirit you have to kill after the first. While this isn’t normally an issue, a player can just wait for you to kill the orc then steal the spriit, getting credit for the quest. While some classes can work around this, others don’t have the instant abilities to tap the orcs and that can cause a problem. Also, some of the quests have annoyingly rare drops that you need multiples of for a quest. These can really get annoying after awhile but are not really all that common. Also, this may have been a problem more with playing on release day as opposed to playing a few months down the line. Only time will tell on this one.
I enjoyed most of the quests I went on, though – I vowed to not do any straight experience grinding in the expansion if it wasn’t absolutely required. Only 5 and a half zones in, I was able to hit 70. The amount of quests in The Burning Crusade is simply staggering. You can spend a ton of time doing them and never have to grind experience for the sake of grinding. Sure, there might be the occasional quest that has you kill a lot of monsters – it doesn’t feel like grinding if you’re killing them for a good reason, though.
What is the purpose of questing if you can’t get those shiny upgrades for your character? Blizzard knows this and has added some new item types while getting rid of others. You won’t see some absolutely stupid types of prefixes on armor anymore – most of it makes sense for certain character builds to wear. Having started in Tier 2 armor, I was supposed to have replaced most of what I wore by the mid 60s. However, even at 70, I still use over half of the gear I had before. The gear here will be an improvement to anyone that never got a chance to raid in the old world, though – this is especially good since there likely won’t be many runs to Molten Core and Blackwing Lair anymore.
Those shiny upgrades can also be enhanced in multiple ways. The first one is obvious to anyone that played the original WoW – you can enchant the item. Some of the new enchantments are just more powerful versions of old ones. For example, there’s +40 spellpower instead of 30. However, there are some new types of enchantments added that weren’t available before. Some of these are takeoffs on the new caster armor types (+50 to two different schools of magic) while others add to stats that just didn’t have buffs before. The system didn’t really change in how it works, though – you’ll still get materials from disenchanting items.
Another area that lets you enhance armor is through socketed items and Jewelcrafting. While I didn’t get to experiment much with it, Finger did. Here are some of his thoughts on the subject:
Finger: Another addition by Blizzard this time is Jewelcrafting, a new trade skill, and socketed armor. Now, players who are jewelcrafters can take raw gems and "cut" them into actual jewelry, like rings and necklaces, and later on in their careers (designed for those level 59 or so and higher), make gems to be socketed into armor. Not all armor has sockets, but those that do usually have an arrangement of colored sockets with a choice of several gems that can be put in. If you match the colors right, there's a "socket bonus" that gives another additional extra stat. You'll find gems that can increase stats, damage dealt, attack power, life, mana, and more, and I imagine that in the later raid instances there will be super-gems that do a bunch of good stuff at once.
Some of the quest rewards felt a bit strange though. Take, for example, two quests I did in Netherstorm. One rewarded me with a pretty decent belt. The very next quest I finished rewarded me with a belt that just shifted the stats around a tiny bit and had the same amount of bonus damage on it. It seems that there wasn’t as much thought put into the rewards for quests in some areas since you’re likely to wear the first belt you get if it is an upgrade.
There is also another way to get nice loot -- Raising your standing with the various new factions around the land opens up the ability to buy some really nice stuff. As you do quests for the faction and (in some cases) kill certain monsters, your standing with them will improve. Eventually, you’ll have to do the higher level dungeons to progress further in your faction standing. Rest assured, you won’t have to go out and grind endlessly on boring monsters or spend time turning in thousands of a single item just to get a faction to not kill you on sight.
Also, though, faction plays into the main city of the Outlands, Shattrath. You see, there are two factions that have taken up residence here, the Aldor and the Scryers. I won’t spoil the story behind them as it is actually really interesting to learn about. Aligning yourself with either side will allow you to access their special area of the city and, more importantly, buy faction exclusive items. Each specializes in certain areas, too. Most of the things you can craft are tradable to others but the factional armor and weapons you can buy are exclusive. Thankfully, you can take a look at the items you’ll eventually be able to buy before you align yourself with either side. You can even change it around later on if you want – it’ll be very difficult and time consuming, though.
The zones that you’ll be questing in for these various factions are all quite a bit different but feel cohesive overall.. The first zone you’ll likely start in, Hellfire Peninsula, definitely feels like a warzone. Running around, you’ll see catapults, busted buildings and even an area tilted totally on an angle. The next zone, Zangarmarsh, has a different feel to it – it is a nice, quiet swamp area infested by all sorts of Naga. The rest of the zones continue on with a different overall feel but are all tied together by one common thread – they rest on a huge chunk of land floating off in space. If you look around any of the zones, you’ll see random chunks of rock floating off in the distance and, if you aren’t careful, you’ll end up falling off the world. Yes, I’m ashamed to say, I fell off a couple of times myself.
Overall, though, levelling in the outlands is far more fun than the levelling in the old world. Where before you had zones that didn’t feel quite as alive and had to do a good bit of grinding to get to 60, the outlands change that. Each zone feels alive in its own way, there is a mass of questing to be done and the entire world seems to be connected by the whole floating off in space concept.
Just why do you want to collect all this loot, do all these quests and get to level 70? Well, one of the reasons is PvP – Finger looked into that a bit and has some good opinions on the subject:
Finger: There's a new battleground here in Burning Crusade: Eye of the Storm. This one combines elements of both Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch into one, as there are four bases to capture and hold which will trickle in points for your team. Then, on top of this, there's a variation of Capture the Flag with one flag that sits in the middle of the map. Either team can pick it up and then bring it to one of the towers they are holding for a capture - and big points. As with AB, the first to 2000 wins.
The other PvP addition here is with the zone-based objectives. Most of the zones in Outland have a unique objective, and you can actually gain rewards for participating in these always-ongoing battles. If your side, be it Alliance or Horde, can gain control of the full objective, then everyone on your side in that zone will gain a bonus; for some zones it's bonus damage, and other it's damage plus a small experience bonus. In Terokkar Forest, the controlling side can loot Spirit Shards off of the instances in Auchindoun
Of course, there’s also the whole concept of raiding again. While I haven’t been to any of the new raid zones (along with almost everyone else), I’ve read about them and they sound truly epic. I mean, getting to tangle with some of the big names in the Warcraft universe will really get those types into the lore going. And for the Ug Smash type of players, they’ll like getting to play through some tough encounters.
Finally, you’re going to want the shiny gear to make getting money easier. See, there’s one big, 5000 gold item that everyone in the world will want – the epic flying mount. Sure, they’re only usable in the outland and the skill to ride them is where the huge cost comes from (the skill is 5 grand and the mount is 200), but they seem to be well worth it. I have the money myself to buy one of the lower level ones, but finger has been using one for awhile:
Finger: New to World of Warcaft are flying mounts. Alliance players get gryphons while the Horde get bats. Only available to level 70 players, the gryphon mounts also require that you invest money into riding skill beyond just "epic" riding. This means that if your character still has a level 40 mount, then you'll need to spend 500+ gold on the "epic" skill, then another 800g on the initial gryphon skill. Then there's another 100g spent on the gryphon itself. Finally, there are swift gryphons which are as fast as the ones used in flight path navigation. These cost a massive 5000g to gain the skill for and another 100g on the mount.
But they're worth it. The prospect of saving up 5000g might sound impossible to those players used to money gains in Azeroth, but it's not nearly as hard to do in Outland. Very thrifty players who also know how to work the Auction House can actually have the 5000g ready for when they make level 70; most players will have about 2000g saved up by the time they hit 70, and then will have to farm the rest. But with basic Outland materials going for several times the price of what they do in Azeroth, it shouldn't be too bad.
Of course, that flying mount doesn’t help with the Outland’s major travel issue. While you can get to the main city pretty easily and go back to the old world pretty quickly also, getting back to Shattrath again is a pain. Sure, you can hearth there or beg for a mage portal but, if neither of those are an option, you’re forced to trek back to the Dark Portal. Hopefully sometime in the future, an NPC will be placed in the main cities to get you back to the Outland. Or, even more ideally, Shattrath will get an auction house of its own.
All this stuff is well and good if you’re a current player of the game. What about those just starting, though? Well, there’s something for you, too. Each side has had a new race added – the Alliance got Draenei (affectionately referred to as Space Goats) while the Horde got Blood Elves. Both races have a significant amount of quests in their new added areas and, while I haven’t been able to play through both areas, I’ve heard very good things from multiple players who have. I didn’t, however, get to look around the newbie areas for each of the races and, I have to say, they look just as good as the new outland zones (the new races start on the mainland).
I really can’t say enough to show how much I have enjoyed my time so far in the Burning Crusade. Sure, it had it’s annoying points as almost any game does. However, Blizzard has really added a lot to the game – a ton of new quests, flying mounts, the ability to hit level 70, fun new zones and more. They’ve also managed to revise the WoW formula a bit and make the levels that would normally be tough grindfests in other MMOs an experience that is even more fun than the original game. Burning Crusade definitely sports a few coats of that classic Blizzard polish – hopefully, I don’t have to wait too long for the next expansion.
