Written by Brian Beck, 1/29/2007
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.
