World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Preview

Moving beyond the new races, another relatively cosmetic change that will likely have a huge impact on the game nonetheless, is the flying mount, the spectral form of Nether Dragons. Vaguely resembling a dragon (with ghostly wings, jaws and talons), the shape of these ephemeral beasts will shift constantly. Not only do they look extremely cool, they will also allow you to cross vast distances at the approximate speed of the current "taxi mounts". What’s more interesting about these mounts, however, is that they will come in several varieties, and that you likely won’t be able to just buy them. This is absolutely fantastic, as acquiring gold in all sorts of dubious manners won’t help you to get an epic flying mount. You will actually have to quest and put in some ‘work’ in order to get it. Players are required to be level 70 to get one of these mounts, and knowing how the game operates, the coolest of these beasts will likely take a fair bit of grinding and questing to acquire.

A Draenei bubble boy!

Serene and idyllic...

I’ve already covered jewel-crafting and socketed items in the previous preview. Naturally, the ability to add a whole set of new bonuses to items (that will cancel enchantments on them and also offer different sorts of bonus types) will add a whole new dimension to "gear twinking".

Now, while I’m pretty sure that Blizzard will do a bang up job on the PVE front, the area of the game that needs the most work is certainly the PVP. As it stands, the rank grind appears completely out of whack; the amount of time it takes to rank to 14 is ridiculous and with the complete absence of world PVP, the three battlegrounds that are currently available likely feel nauseating to folks who have spent months grinding honor in them.

We know that the upcoming content patch 1.12 has been dubbed the PVP patch. Blizzard is already promising improved world PVP, multi-realm Battlegrounds and other enhancements, but what the Burning Crusade expansion clearly needs to concentrate on is to better define the structure of PVP combat. The direction of the next content update shows that Blizzard is listening to their vocal community after all, at least to a degree. Likely, they are paying close attention to what Mythic is talking about implementing in WAR, PVP-wise. Here’s what World of Warcraft lead designer Jeff Kaplan had to say on the subject to Gamespot: "We're building a PVP objective into every new Outland zone for outdoor world PVP. They're different for each zone. Hellfire Peninsula actually has three objectives that are very close to each other. Picture an outdoor Arathi Basin that's always ongoing. We're going to have some other big announcements that have to do with the PVP system, but that will be closer to launch, so we're not ready to talk about that yet."

Clearly, the PVP segment has been identified by many players as the weakest point of World of Warcraft. While the mechanics of the actual PVP combat are great fun, one simply gets the feeling that bits and pieces of PVP were thrown into the game as it evolved without any sort of form or structure, without a clear goal in mind. Hopefully, Blizzard has taken note of this fact and is working hard on correcting this in The Burning Crusade.

I, like so many other gamers, am hoping that they will once again rise to the challenge and deliver the type of gaming experience that will keep us in the world of Azeroth for many years to come... or until we check into a rehab clinic for game addicts. (Move over, Uros, this is MY side of the padded cell! The Horde side is over THERE! - Six)