World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Preview

Sooo... the great adventure into the Outlands begins. Right off the bat, there is a couple of things I should note. It took me two freaking days. Yes, that's TWO FREAKING DAYS to download 2.13GB worth of Burning Crusade installation files via the Blizzard downloader. Watching that freaking bar go from 99 to 100 percent was like having your teeth pulled in slow motion.

Once the download was finally done, all the files checked for CRC errors and I proceeded with the installation (which finished successfully), I got a notification from my ISP letting me know that they are having issues with their back end and that the net connection *may* be a bit slow.

Oh yes, it was slow, my friends. It stayed in the 3000ms range throughout my time in the Outlands (and no, the test server wasn't lagging, it was my net), which gave some slutty Night Elf priestess ample time to corpse camp me till about two minutes ago when I logged off and decided to write this report. Log off my character named...

THUNDER?!

Yep, apparently, and much to my dismay, upon logging into the BloodMyst PVP server and reaching the character screen, I was greeted with a message that said "Twolions" is in violation of the game's naming policy.

Are you kidding me?!

Have I offended a great medieval knight from England who was the first man in existence to moon a bunch of Arabs during the Crusades?!

What the hell, dude?!

Give me my name back, Blizzard! If Hitler had a nickname, I'M SURE IT WASN'T TWOLIONS!!

Anyway, all these snags aside, I am very excited (and that's an understatement) to be in the closed beta. I didn't yet get a chance to make a Blood Elf or a Draenei character, but I did take THUDNER (oh c'mon, Blizzard) through the Hellfire Citadel and then to Nagrand (well, I kept going left at all the crossroads really).

The Outlands are a massive place. Took me forever to get anywhere with my Ghost Wolf form (I lost my epic mount, don't ask how). My general impression of the stuff that I've seen thus far is that both the landscape and the creatures are vastly more outlandish and alien-looking than in the "old" World of Warcraft. While everything looked pretty spectacular to me, I was constantly under the impression that the area was invaded by a bunch of drunken Korean graffiti artists. There is something distinctly far eastern about the art design.

Granted, the area around Nagrand looked a lot more like cultivated Barrens (with nice plants and trees, but still Orcish-like) and I liked that very much. Incidentally, that's where the slut Night Elf Valanya started corpse camping my 3000ms Tauren butt, and suddenly, my admiration for the scenery grew into open hatred towards the skinny, lap-dancing Night Elf sluts.

Speaking of hatred towards the opposing faction, the world PVP seems like a big thing in the expansion. I have no idea if the concept will "take" or not, but if the "action" (or the lack of thereof) in the Eastern Plaguelands is any indication, then, Blizzard has a lot of work ahead of them.

To be fair though, it seems that world PVP is now inherent to each new territory and not just an appendix to the PVE stuff (so to speak). Each zone has towers and other structures in the environment critical in some way to that area. I can't wait to get into some serious world PVP action (finally!).

This is indeed a good thing, plus, the real action will DEFINITELY be in the 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 PVP fights. Incidentally, I specced my Shaman to have 43 points in the Enhancement tree. Needless to say, I'm dual-wielding now, mofos! Actually, I'm not yet, 'cause I don't have a second one-hander, BUT I WILL BE SOON!

Other neat additions to the game that I have noticed thus far include a Trojan scanner at the start of the game (I'm not kidding; it's looking for key loggers on your machine). Well, wait, come to think about it, maybe that feature will be relegated to the closed beta.

Other neat stuff includes a much more detailed overview of each of your stats. You now can categorize stats into spell, melee, ranged, etc. This allows for a detailed overview of your spell crit chance, calculated damage, etc.

The Windfurry and other Shaman-specific weapon buffs now have a duration of 30 minutes (thank ye, Lord!). You can have an extra bag in the bank, you can now hold up to 25 quests, and, I actually earned XP while playing!

That was like having sex after prison for my Shaman! He felt really great.

THUNDER signing off.

Hey, Blizzard. Give me my name back! (In all seriousness though, I got a response from a GM explaining that this happens to copied characters, and that it's not a big deal. Phew.)