World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

"This is the first time Blizzard has genuinly disappointed me."

Back when World of Warcraft first came out, I was totally pumped. I love the Warcraft lore and I just love Warcraft and Blizzard games in general since 1993. WoW gave me that sort of in depth look that I always wanted. It was truly what you would call a nerdgasm.

However, after 2 years of the game being out and now with its expansion, it's left me a little sour. My reasons are not unfounded of course. Though I will be gearing this review towards both casual and hardcore players of the game since Blizzard states it's for casual gamers. So they deserve to know what they are getting into as well.

First off lets talk about some general things about the game. Graphic wise the game is brilliant. The cartoony style is still very well done. The forests of Terrokar are absolutely gorgeous and it even makes you feel like you want a nice get away vacation house there sometime. And other places such as Nagrand had this beautiful, surreal, dream like feel to it. It's incredibly immersing, which is exactly what you want out of graphics in any game. The new race designs are really nice as well. The hair styles for the Blood Elfs and the horn and tentacles for the Draenie (I'll probably never be able to spell that right) are really varied, so there's no worry about finding a style you will like.

The music is still incredibly ho-hum material here. In fact you will most likely end up turning it off and turning on music of your own. It's incredibly bland and too moody for its own good.

Sound effects wise this is grade A material. Great voice acting, of what little there is, great background sound effects that serve to make you feel like you are REALLY in the world of Warcraft.

Now that we have the sound and graphics out of the way we can go on to talk about whats really important about this game.

World of Warcraft, in a nutshell, is about leveling up your character, getting cool weapons and armor, finishing quests and fighting 50 foot tall monsters.

Blizzard likes to claim that this is an MMO for the casual gamer. Now, anyone who has ever gotten their full Tier set pieces know this simply is not true. More on what tier set pieces are later though. Though, to this games credit it isn't all bad. The rested experience, which is 200% more XP than you would get normally from monsters, is a nice incentive for the casual gamer. However, 15 to 20 minute long gryphon back transportation rides to get from one town to another is not. Casual players of games want a quick boost of actual game play time. Something they can walk away from and felt entertained by. Casual players also would not want to spend 5+ hours inside of a dungeon, less than 0% drop rates on certain items or weapons, gathering materials you need for job classes, it's just not going to happen.

I know a lot of you hardcore players are probably thinking: "Well, I'm in a great guild and we can finish a 5+ hour raid dungeon in less than 2!" Well, this is fine, only can you really expect a casual player to get into one of the top 5 guilds on your server? The answer is of course no. I'll talk more about the community of the players later on as well.

So basically what I'm saying is, if you want to see some of the more cool bosses and dungeons you are most certainly going to have to put forth the serious hours in doing so. And Burning Crusade only makes this worse. So to elaborate further, Burning Crusade is geared only towards the hardcore players.

BC did a great job of making the main lands of WoW completely pointless. There's no reason to do the 20 to 40 player dungeons anymore. So this gives new players an even harder time to see the more interesting stuff in this game. The only way they can see Molten Core or Naxxramus is if they hit level 70 and Blizzard sets those instances at heroic difficutly, but by then you're probably going to be interested in the newer 20 to 40 man raid dungeons. Tier set pieces that came from those dungeons are now pointless as well. Tier set pieces is armor you acquire through the bigger dungeons that require more players to complete. Basically the more pieces to your particular class set that you have, the more powerful you can become. So, even if they made they dropped the level requirement for these and made them drop in 5 man instances, they would still be pointless. The reason being is when BC was released, they of course made new armor and weapons for levels 60 through 70. The thing is a lot of these items are really really good, unless you have a full tier 3 character.

Also since BC added on a whole new continent to explore anyone 58 to level 70 is probably going to STAY in this new continent. I'm on a full population server and when I went back to a city capital to train my character to get new spells, the city was practically a ghost town. The reason being is of course everyone is on their main character trying to get to level 70. I feel really sorry for any new player to this game that wants to party for a 5 man instance because chances are they are going to a really rough time finding anybody.

So, now we know how new players are effected by this expansion, but how about the hardcore people?

Well, chances are if you have a level 60 character you're going to buy Burning Crusade regardless of what I say. Hell, even I would.

But quite, honestly I'm fed up with this game as a whole.

There are some balancing issues, of course, but with any game like it's going to take a long time to fix these things. Especially when new skills and armor and weapons are added. So that's actually not a big issue with me.

What is a big issue with me though is that it takes too long to get to places and there's too many people all doing the same quest at once so now it takes even longer. I know the problem of everyone doing what you're doing at once will fade, but pretty much a week into playing and only a slight change would make anyone agitated. Even for someone who's played the game since it first came out, like myself, I'm was still angry about the long flight times and long dungeons.

Again, a lot of you are saying: "so get in a good guild." This brings up yet another problem I have with the game. The community of players. It seems like most people you come across anymore are unfriendly and selfish and egotistical. Not even the Gamefaqs and WoW boards is safe from it. You pretty much have to be unfriendly yourself just to progress any where in this game or to fend off people. I tried hard to get into a good guild on my server. They weren't even in the top 5 and still, could not get in. Why? Well, they didn't didn't have "room" for Warlock classes. Not to mention it didn't please them that I didn't answer the question about why I left my last guild. They then proceeded to mock me. I understand recruiting random people doesn't make for a good guild, really I do. But there is no reason for way more than half of the community to act this way. Some guilds even go so far as to have a base set of magic resistance. You know I understand some people take this game very seriously, you would pretty much have to in order to reach level 60, but when something is taken this seriously it ceases to be fun. It's more of a stress creator and a chore. This is also such a social heavy, as social as the internet can be anyway, game as well. So if you can't enjoy that, you won't enjoy a lot of this game.

This brings me to PVP (Player Vs. Player). These range mostly to capture the flag to control towers A, B and C etc.

Blizzard recently added a patch that made "crossrealm" PVP. This means you can fight other players from other realms in the Battleground instances. And, depending on what server you are on, the queue times can be incredibly short or incredibly long. Guess which one I was on? The wait times for some of our Battlegrounds were so long you were better off not even wasting your time. 20 minutes for Warsong Gulch, 30 to 40 for Arathi Basin and over 1 hour for Alterac Valley and Eye of the Storm. Now, you would think the same thing could be said for the opposing faction right? Wrong. Since on my server the alliance outnumbered the horde, the horde got instant queues. And since premade vs pick up groups is definitely an issue that needs to be dealt with, the horde ends up winning a lot of games in usually about 1 to 5 minutes. So guess what? You wasted 20 minutes to an hour 1 waiting on that battleground to start. And another thing is, that means fast, easy, good gear for the horde. Does that even sound fair to you? It doesn't to me.

I know a lot of "clever" people would say "So reroll horde and quit whining." Well, to those of you who would ask that question, I ask you this: Why can't I have a working system that's fair? Why can't I have a game that works RIGHT?

And this isn't an issue that's fresh and new, this is a problem that should have been fixed a long time ago.

I'm paying for it, and so are lots of other people, so we all deserve that. So now you say "so cancel your account."

Well, that's what things are looking like. But I didn't pay 50 dollars for this game just for that.

To sum this all up there is no reason for new players to buy this expansion pack yet until they are high enough level to even hold their own in Outland. Casual need not apply unless they want to sacrafice relationships or a job. Hardcore players, more so than me, can probably look past most of its flaws and find it enjoyable still.

As for me, I'm staying away from this one for awhile longer.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/26/07