World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

Metachronos overall score = 93 / 100

Positive
# Beautiful new environments
# Fun and varied world-PVP objectives
# Lots of great new dungeons
# Great orchestral soundtrack

Negative
# Some quests are very repetitive
# A lot of preexisting content is now obsolete

When it was released in November 2004, World of Warcraft raised the bar for the massively multiplayer genre, and more than two years later, none of its would-be competitors have even come close to matching it. Even at launch there was very little to find fault with in Blizzard's first MMOG offering, and thanks to regular free updates and no shortage of feedback from a community that now numbers more than 8 million players, it has continued to grow and evolve into an even bigger and better game. With the recent release of The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft has never been better, and while you don't need the expansion pack to continue playing, it's hard not to feel like you're missing out in Azeroth without it.You're free to ignore these world-PVP objectives if you wish, but they offer a welcome distraction from the occasionally repetitive nature of questing, and you don't need to devote an awful lot of time to them to enjoy the benefits. In Hellfire Peninsula, for example, capturing three strategic locations will earn you PVP reward tokens that can be put toward a new ring, weapon, or gemstone. And in the Bone Wastes of Terokkar Forest, the first faction to simultaneously control all five of the PVP towers is rewarded with six hours of damage and experience bonuses anytime they do battle in the area. Perhaps the most interesting world-PVP objective can be found in picturesque Nagrand, where the Horde and the Alliance are constantly battling for control of the small town of Halaa in the center of the map. The faction that controls Halaa can purchase special items and turn in quests there, and they will be protected by up to 15 high-level guards anytime they visit. The rival faction, on the other hand, can climb aboard wyverns and fly overhead on bombing runs in an attempt to kill the guards before storming the town, although the takeoff and landing points for the wyverns can be temporarily taken out of commission by players on defense.



The fact that the group sizes required for most new dungeons is smaller than in the original game is a double-edged sword--getting 10 players together is obviously a lot easier than getting 20 or 40, but in a smaller group, you have to be much more selective about who comes along, so depending on which class you play, it won't necessarily be easier to find a good group to play with. As is the case in all massively multiplayer games, your experience in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade will be shaped largely by the other players that you interact with. Playing alongside a good group or guild can enrich your time in the game to no end, while having your corpse camped and getting killed repeatedly by an opposing player will undoubtedly have the opposite effect. In our experience, players who delight in making others' lives a misery are certainly in a small minority, but they're out there, and it's unfortunate that they're often the most vocal in general chat channels. Third-party voice-over-IP programs remain the most effective way to communicate with players who you're actually interested in interacting with, particularly if you're playing through a challenging dungeon where there isn't always time to type messages to each other. And when you're not listening for warnings or instructions from players that you're grouped with, you could do far worse than to have the game's excellent orchestral soundtrack provide a constantly changing backdrop for the animal sounds, enemy grunts, ambient sounds, and weapon noises that accompany the action onscreen at all times. The sound design in The Burning Crusade never fails to impress, and while the Russian accents of the draenei can take a little getting used to, the game's voice acting is generally very good. If you've already spent any serious amount of time with World of Warcraft then you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from its first expansion pack. It's true that some of the new quests can feel like a grind, and it's also true that The Burning Crusade's arrival has rendered much of the old endgame content all but obsolete. This is a superb example of exactly what an expansion pack for any game should be, though, and the gulf between World of Warcraft and the pretenders to its throne is now wider than ever. This year the new World of Warcraft will be released under the name Wrath of the Lich King.