World-of-Warcraft-The-Burning-Crusade
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Blizzard planning new WoW expansions every year
Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, everyone's favorite frigidly named developer has revealed an intention to release more World of Warcraft expansions on a yearly basis. "Starting with The Burning Crusade, every year thereafter we plan on bringing out a new expansion set - so every 12 months," says Blizzard COO, Paul Sams. More expansion packs to a game that's more or less played by everyone ever? Not surprising. A commitment to yearly releases from a developer whose release dates are often born on top of a rain soaked hill? That's a little more interesting. Still, it seems Blizzard is dedicated to achieving annual releases. Earlier this month, Jeff Kaplan (WoW's lead designer) told Joystiq that Blizzard's plan for expansions are "a little bit more ambitious than one every two years. We have to weigh that against the quality of the product and how much content we want to put into it. We won't put something out until the quality level is there. So, our goal though is to provide content quicker than we have been up until now. We've really beefed our team up -- we have about 100 now and when we started we had around 50." It looks like the developer has given WoW fans plenty to look forward to in the coming months and years, though some may interpret this as series of bear traps being laid on the path of escaping a sordid addiction. Mind your step.
WoW's Burning Crusade: What's new
In an interview with World of Warcraft's Jeff Kaplan, Joystiq was able to gain some exclusive knowledge of what will be coming out for WoW's first expansion, The Burning Crusade. Check out these excerpts from the piece of just some of the new things players will be able to experience: The PvP system is the first big change that our players have been waiting to hear about for a long time. ... The first is the arena combat system. You'll be able to join a team: 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5. There are two different modes you can play: One is called practice mode to hone your skills and the other is competitive mode, which is level 70 only. We also want to get world PvP flowing again in WoW. A lot of players missed it, so every Outlands zone was designed with a major PvP objective in mind, so that's the second of the big PvP announcements. The third thing is a revamp of the honor system. We're not going to do away with the honor system, but we're going to fix many of the flaws with it. The first thing players will really care about is that your honor points will no longer decay. Honor points will now become the like the PvP equivalent of a PvE experience. Honor points are just something you accumulate and then we'll introduce gear to the game so you can purchase that by spending your honor points. We are actually lowering the raid cap which is now at 40. All the expansion raids will be 25 or less. The reason we are doing this is that we can still make the raids feel epic and difficult, but we just wanted to take some of the logistical headaches out of it. We're also introducing a 10-man raid, as well. For more in-depth discussion on these topics and others, including Panderans and voice chat, read our full exclusive interview here.
Hands on with WoW: The Burning Crusade
We've played the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion -- World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade -- exploring both Draenei and Blood Elf starting areas. Anticipation is running high at the show, with many gamers flocking to the Vivendi stand as soon as the show opened. The expansion was running smoothly on a Mac, with no visual UI changes, though there is the new Outland area to explore.
Draenei: WoW's new Alliance race
E3's open, and the rumours have been confirmed. The Alliance race that will feature in the new World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion is the Draenei, an uncorrupted faction of the race who are loyal to the Alliance and look similar to their Eredar ancestors. We'll have more information about the expansion as the show unfolds, so stay tuned.
New Alliance race: WoW rumours start early [update 2]
A source close to the E3 show floor has helped confirm our suspicions that the new Alliance race, as featured in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion, will be revealed at the show. The information we got was vague, but encouraging: Looking at a video on the show floor, the new Alliance race is ugly with grayish skin, and glowing eyes similar to the Forsaken. Its chin has two things like tentacles hanging down, one on either side, and it's humanoid and human-size. There's also a huge picture of Antonidas nearby. This seems to rule out a lot of contenders, though there isn't an obvious race that springs to mind from this loose description. It could be the Eredar, the Broken or, at a stretch, Forgotten Ones -- possibly even oddly rendered Draenei. As for what Antonidas is doing there, we'll find out more on Wednesday when E3 opens. [Update 1 - added The Broken as a possibility, thanks RaptorJedi] [Update 2 - Our informer writes, Having researched this further I am certain that the race is the Broken, the Draenei faction that remain in Outland.]
