Posted by Mike on Jan 17th, 2007
Blizzard has brought us World of Warcraft’s first expansion pack, “The Burning Crusade”, which most everyone should know has brought us four big things. The Blood Elves, the Draenei, Outlands and, well, server issues.
The issues with the server are actually not as bad as one might expect. They have been restarting the realms regularly, but, as far as I’ve noticed, there haven’t been the problems with lag that accompanied other big changes. This might be due to the fact that much of the code base has actually been running for nearly a month now.
Over the next several days, I’ll bring a bit of a first impression from the expansion, with each day focusing on one of the three additions to the game.
The first in this series will focus on the Blood Elves.
First, you might be interested in reading a bit of the back story. The first two chapters describe not only the creation of the world, but also the Sunwell.
The quests in the starting zone for the Blood Elves focus largely on their dependence of magic, and many of the NPCs warn you to control the your lust for it, lest it drive you mad.
The quests seem very well thought out, and much more helpful than the quests included in the original game’s starting zones. While each race has it’s own version of a “collection quests”, a quest where one has to collect a some number of unique items, only in the Blood Elf area, thus far, have I noticed that they provide the player with an extra bag for the task.
Readers of Penny Arcade already have an idea of how the new Blood Elf zones are. Honestly, that comic is probably far too close to the truth.
Silvermoon City is, quite frankly, remarkable. It stands in quite remarkable contrast to the Night Elf city of Darnassus, but also nearly every other city in the game, including the new Draenei home city, from what I’ve seen of it.
Two points worth noting. First, and less importantly, is the sealed off instance in the Ghostlands. It’s impossible to say what level range this might become, though I’m hoping it turns into something around the level range of Shadowfang Keep or Gnomeran. Something for players in either the high 20s or low 30s range.
It will clearly be an instance where one encounters a number of trolls. Quel’Thalas, after all, was taken from the trolls, and so one can clearly imagine a number of quests, originating from Blood Elf NPCs, to either fight back against the trolls, or to recover items that may have been stolen.
The second point, which is particularly useful for lower level players of the Horde who may wish to take their current characters to Silvermoon City, and that is the pair of teleporters. One is located off to the side of the courtyard above the Undercity, with the second of the pair inside Silvermoon City in the Sunfury Spire. This allows characters to port from one city to the other without fighting through the Plaguelands.
Despite my initial thoughts that the two new races would swarm the starting areas with players, thus far it hasn’t been terrible. There are a larger number of players there than under “normal” circumstances, but the number of enemies in the zones has, thus far, been able to support it, from what I’ve seen. This is sure to vary, realm to realm, and will most likely change this weekend, when people will have more time to play the expansion.
Posted in games
| email this article
If you liked that, try...
- The Burning Crusade: /flirt and /silly
- Blizzard announces Wrath of the Lich King
- Fortran Adventure Source Code Found
- Comic Rundown: Marvel Gets Dark and Dirty
- Shoot the Head!
No Comments »
No comments yet.
Podcast RSS
