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.