World Of Warcraft-Fantastic Expansion Pack To The Epic MMORPG

World Of Warcraft has become a legend in the MMORPG arena. It now has over eight million subscribers worldwide, which is just a staggering amount. And doubtless some CEO somewhere is staggering home carrying the vast amount of cash that comprises his latest bonus. WoW has become the MMORPG that others strive to hold a candle to, but it's highly unlikely that any of them will burn as brightly as this particular crusade.

This expansion pack introduces a new continent called Outland. There's the usual detailed back-story behind this which mostly involves demons, wars and a magical toilet-brush (which gets right under the rim... oh alright, it doesn't, we made it all up). Initial impressions of the land are distinctly bright and orangey, and a bit gaudy even for Warcraft's cartoon-ish graphics, but further in it settles down and there are some highly atmospheric zones to be discovered.

So what else is new? The feature list includes two additional races, the Blood Elf and Draenei (which allow the Horde to play Paladin characters and the Alliance to play Shaman, respectively), and an increase in the level cap from 60 to 70. An extra profession has been introduced (jewel-crafting), as have flying mounts (whee!) along with the expected swathes of content in terms of fresh monsters, dungeons and quests.

There are some particularly impressive beasts, such as the gargantuan Fel Reaver demon, which clomps along accompanied by booming sound effects, shaking the very ground as it moves. The Outland quests are very nicely crafted too, with some imaginative writing and execution in places (there's one particularly fun quest where you get to fly on the back of a wyvern, lobbing bombs at enemy troops). All this content is, of course, geared towards level 60-plus characters, although the two new races have starter zones which cater for levels 1-20.

Blizzard appears to still be considering the casual gamer in its design plans, as it quickly becomes obvious that the new lands allow easy access to some high quality loot drops. Even the lowest level orc just outside of the first settlement can randomly drop something that's quite powerful in terms of the "old" world.

Running the first instance dungeon, you might well find items which would, pre-expansion, have been regarded as "epic" quality. These instances are also designed to be run quite quickly - in an hour or two - which is a welcome prospect for those of us who can't stay up until three in the morning clearing out a vast labyrinth of monsters.

There have been murmurings of discontent from some corners, accusing Blizzard of dumbing the game down too much, but we heartily disagree. The initial dungeons might be regarded as rather trivial loot runs by the more hardcore players, but they'll soon have challenges aplenty when they get to level 70 and start tackling the high-end raid dungeons.

Incidentally, these raids are now 25-player affairs (as opposed to the old 40-person maximum), which will doubtless make them easier to organise for smaller guilds. Again, in our books this is a very positive move towards making WoW a more palatable experience at the higher echelons.

Perhaps the main problem that The Burning Crusade will face is on the PvP servers. With both alliance and horde crammed into the expansion's continent, tensions could soon rise... At the moment everyone is busy questing and levelling, so it's quite peaceful, but as people max out in levels you can be sure that the griefing will come. Getting killed over and over and over again while you're trying to go about your business could well be frustrating, but such is life on a PvP realm.

Verdict
This expansion pack gets a large and bloody orc's thumbs up. There are some great new zones to explore, ten extra levels to play with, flying mounts and, perhaps most importantly, WoW's casual friendly slant gets a boost on several levels. A must-buy for Warcraft addicts.