The first big news from the event is that the expansion will be introducing two new races – The Blood Elves for the horde, and a currently unannounced Alliance team.
The Blood Elves starting zone, Sunstrider Isle, is located North of the Eastern Plaguelands, located within the two uppermost zones that currently don’t have a title in the current version. The zone is described as a much more ‘lively’ Darnassus, with bright trees, twisting fountains, incredible structures and creatures that fit within an Autumnal forest. The Blood Elves will be equipped with two fascinating racial traits – one being Mana Tap, an ability that allows the caster to pull mana from an enemy, if they have a mana pool. The other is called Arcane Torrent, which can silence all spell casters within a certain radius for two seconds, and will convert mana per the casters' Mana Tap. Blizzard has stressed to gamers that the new race will primary be a spell casters race - mages, warlocks, and priests etc. – however it is currently unknown what classes the team will be able to use.
Unfortunately, there will be no will classes within the expansion. However, the game does introduce a new profession – jewel crafting, which enables gamers to produce various jewels such as necklaces, rings, which will allow players to put jewels into sockets on your weapons and armour, also another new feature in the expansion.
That’s not all though. The game will now upper the level cap to level 70, allowing for a lot more dungeon raids, quests and even a level 70 exclusive flying mount. Yes, a flying mount. While the mount will only have restricted use to the Outland, the flying mount will allow gamers access inaccessible areas and quests.
One of the greatest things with this latest expansion is that Blizzard are clearly focusing on providing the Warcraft fans with a story that ties-in nicely with previous Warcraft titles. Illidan is back and has closed all the portals to the Outland, so gamers will travel through the Dark Portal, which opens up a number of server-wide quest and dungeons.
There are currently eight new high level dungeons announced, some of which will expand in length and difficultly by a considerable amount. Not only that, but a lot of the new dungeons will involve gamers going back in time and witnessing key Warcraft events before the current situations in World of Warcraft. For example, a dungeon called the Caverns of Time in Tanaris, previously guarded by an elite dragon. And obviously, the dungeon will focus on gamers going back in time to events that happened in previous Warcraft titles. In this case, one of the areas gamers will come across will be Hillsbrad Foothills, where you’ll visit Tarren Mill when it was still occupied by the humans. There will also be other areas in the game that will tie-in with key characters such as Thrall and even Illidan himself (some only being exclusive to level 70 players though).
Outland will apparently urge gamers to get into the zone as soon as possible, so no real level cap on when you can access the areas.
If that wasn’t enough, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade will incorporate an all-new Battlegrounds zone, the Hellfire Peninsula from Warcraft II, and will be geared towards gamers in the level 54-70 range.
While that’s all we currently know of the expansion, we thought what better time then now to unveil that Blizzard will finally be introducing the much-needed auction house linking. Each capital city for both teams will have an auction house in all major cities, with other major towns such as Booty Bay being considered for including an auction house also. A couple new high-level instances will also be included, as well as a lot of other features that makes us jump up in joy.
Look forward to upcoming news on the expansion in the coming months. But let us say that Blizzard's first foray into the MMORPG scene has definitely come off as a huge success, and it’s great to see that World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade will incorporate so many exciting and fascinating new elements that tie-in so closely with the original Warcraft storyline.
While we’ve probably bored you half to death by now, words obviously can’t describe how this game will look, so we went out of our way to provide an all-new trailer and a bunch of new screenshots showing off some of the new areas featured in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. Enjoy!
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Trailer (48.8MB - avi)
Loading...
