World of Warcraft – The Burning Crusade Review (PC, Mac, Online)
The Burning Crusade (BC) expansion was release just a bit over two years after the original World of Warcraft MMORPG went live, and boy was it long overdue. While there is no doubt that WoW was a massive achievement (feat of strength?), it was by no means content rich enough to remain engaging for two years.
It certainly didn’t hold my attention as I took a long break before BC came out. In fact quite a few of my friends took breaks at similar times.
But promises of new and more lured me back for The Burning Crusade. Two new races, a whole new continent, new dungeons, and loads of new loot were just some of the features that this expansion boasted.
The amount of new content was rather ambitious. Pairing that with the rocky launch of the game makes it easy to see how two years went by before Blizzard was able to release BC.
The promise of new and more might have lured me back, but it didn’t hook me. After leveling up my character into the new higher levels, exploring the new zones, starting a brand new character using the new race, I just couldn’t seem to find much in the way of new. Oh there was plenty of more, but I wasn’t recovered enough from my EQ hangover to appreciate more.
Funny thing is that BC really had a lot of end game innovations that were quite well done. I might not have appreciated them then, but I am getting a chance to take advantage of them now (two years later).
So it was back to break time for me, waiting for the next expansion to come out.
I actually started playing again in anticipation of the following expansion. Playing is maybe not the right description; it was more a super concentrated leveling push, where I plowed through the BC content at high speed. But still out of all the World of Warcraft games that have come out in the past five years, BC garnered the least playtime from me.
Review
Release date: Jan 16, 2007
Website: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/
TFG World of Warcraft Review
This is an expansion, not a standalone game. Will only work paired with the original World of Warcraft game.
Features
Higher Level Cap – Before BC the highest level a character could obtain was sixty. Ten brand new levels were added, raising the cap to seventy. With higher levels came new skills and of course new level appropriate equipment.
New Continent – The massive continent called Outland was “discovered” in this expansion. It’s a huge chunk of rock in outer space that houses seven distinct different areas.
New Races and starting areas – Finally the Horde got a “hot chick” option. I may not want to play a human in a fantasy setting, but I also don’t want tusks or horns coming out of my head. Thank you for adding the cute Blood Elves.
The Alliance got stuck with the Draenei, huge blue horned humanoid things. Makes me gladder I don’t play on Alliance.
Flying – It was the logical next step in transportation (no combat on mounts, even flying. They are only for transportation.)
New Dungeons – They introduced quite a few new dungeons, but focused more on the small five man groups and paired the large dungeons down to twenty-five people.
They also shortened the length of most smaller dungeons and split the larger ones into wings. This gives people the option of splitting the larger dungeons up into multiple nights. Essentially this amounts to shortening the time that is required to play the game in a single sitting, which in turn means that a much larger pool of people have time enough to commit to running a dungeon or raid.
Heroics – BC introduced the concept of giving the dungeons a difficulty level. Once you reached level seventy you had the option to unlock the heroic level on the dungeons. This made the rewards better, but also increased the challenge quite a bit.
Emblems – The other great change to dungeons was that they softened the random loot drop grind by having the boss monsters drop emblems. These emblems, usable by anyone, were then exchanged at a vendor for an item you of your choice.
Not only did this cut out the endless frustration of running through an entire dungeon and then not getting a single piece of equipment that you wanted, it also meant you weren’t restricted to just getting equipment if you didn’t need upgrades – you could get mounts, recipes, enchants, and various other hard to obtain items that wouldn’t necessarily be found in a dungeon.
Daily Quests – Daily quests was Blizzards answer to high level PvE ennui. These quests could be repeated, but only once a day.
Most quests in WoW can only be done once, that makes much of the content of the game single use only, but with the addition of daily quests this was no longer the case. In fact this solution gave high-level folks quite a bit of daily chores to run and keeping entertained.
Most rewards for the daily quests involved faction with whoever was doling out the quests, and since each quest could only be completed once a day, it forced most players to progress at a specific pace. Meaning no one ran out of content too fast because they rushed through it.
Green is the new Purple – The item game for BC was interesting to say the least. An item that has their name written in green is a low quality magic item, as opposed to a purple item (name written in purple), which is of almost the highest quality and usually hard to procure.
Well in BC a lot of the green items that were available right off the bat tended to be better then some of the old purple items. Thus the phrase “Green is the new Purple” was coined. Penny Arcade even made a shirt out of it (not sure if they coined the phrase or not).
Trade skills – Lots of new recipes were added since they raised the skill level obtainable in every trade skill.
Jewel crafting, a brand new skill, was added. This allowed players to craft gems that could be used to enhance their own items. Of course this meant that now items had to have slots for gems on them. A whole new layer of equipment management was added with gems and jewel crafting.
Arena PvP – Small teams go up against each other. This (I guess) was really popular as it encouraged teamwork and synergy. Of course if you didn’t have a regular group that practiced together you were pretty much SOL.
Things that bothered me
-It’s completely isolated
Having only a single portal from the original continent to the new one made it extremely difficult to travel back and forth. Travel time was increased and since travel time is in direct proportion to irritation level, you can see where this leads.
-New continent is too big.
The new continent turned out to be huge, overly dramatic and rather irritating to travel around on. Its possible that it was designed with flying in mind, but you couldn’t actually fly until you hit level seventy which meant you spent most of your time exploring on your land mount; teeth grindingly slow and infuriating.
Never mind all the floating rocks at the edge of areas that kept popping in and out of the horizon. I have a decent machine and graphics card, but the Outlands were too huge for my computer to handle much of the long distance viewing. Which means I was mostly just looking at hazy fog when flying around. Pretty? Not.
-Equipment getting more and more complex.
Equipment was already getting complex with enchanting items and all the different stats modifiers and when they added gems and gems slots to the equipment I just threw up my hands and gave up. I didn’t end up geming a single piece of equipment I got in BC.
Fist, I didn’t know anyone that had suffered through the irritation of starting a new trade skill (and Jewel crafting is not easy, requiring a lot of faction grinding to get all the recipes). Second I didn’t really know enough about my class to know what sorts of gems to put into my available slots. And third, why bother? I was playing solo or with my husband and doing just fine, what difference were a few gems going to make?
-Daily Grind
The daily quests are a kiss/curse. The idea is sound, it’s just in execution you sometimes end up doing the most asinine chores over and over.
And again it’s a huge cop out in my mind. So I level as far as I can and then my super powerful hero gets to do daily chores? Not terribly heroic.
-Faction Grinding
It seemed like everything in this expansion was dependent on faction grinding. To unlock heroic mode for each dungeon you had to have enough faction with a specific group, to get recipes you had to have faction, sometimes just to walk into an area you had to have enough faction. Ugh it was a nightmare.
-PvP (ugh maybe I shouldn’t even mention this anymore)…
Arena might have been a huge hit, but it also made joining PvP that much harder. Never mind that giving people options to upgrade their equipment even more did nothing but widened the chasm that already divided skilled PvP teams and beginners.
Time played
I would say two months at best. It was by far the least played section of WoW for me in the past five years. Even now I avoid it when I can.
Two and half mushrooms out of five. Its still a disappointing expansion and I would probably avoid purchasing it if I could. Sadly if you want to make it past level sixty there is no skipping this expansion, there is only minimizing.
Mood Progression
(1 Blue) Wearily .. (1 Pink) excited. – (1 Purple) This might be fun after all – (1 Yellow) Wait, that’s it? That’s not new! – (2 Red) Irritated. – (2 Purple) Well at least the new starting areas are fun and the new Horde race is super cute! – (2 Grey) Ran out of newness and not interested in slogging through the levels again, bored, break time.
Last Thoughts
I think what I found the most depressing about this expansion was that it really solidified the fact that World of Warcraft was going to be just another MMORPG.
The original game I see as a basis, a jumping off point. Before BC the game still had the chance to go anywhere, take any direction and use the game as a springboard not just a mold. BC really just took WoW and fashioned something in its likeness.
Tags: guide, levels, loot, mac, mmog, online, pc, roleplaying, skills, world of warcraft
October 5th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I think that the Tauren females are very lovely. They’re nice and curvy unlike the stick skinny elves.
October 5th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
I do have to admit I really appreciate the curveyness of most of the female models. My Orc hunter has fabulously strong legs (or as others have called them, thunder thighs). Its a welcome change from the huge boobs barbie look that most other games promote for their female avatars.
Facial features are whats lacking for me. =/
October 6th, 2009 at 11:45 am
I can give you the raider’s perspective about Burning Crusade(BC). The change from 40-player raids to 25-player raids was extremely painful for a raiding guild because you had to begin to ask more people to sit out. Moreover, this transition to a smaller raid was exacerbated by the fact that the first raid zone in BC was the 10-player Karazhan Tower. In essence, you were moving from 40-player to 10-player. This is one of the main reasons that many long-standing raiding guilds didn’t survive the transition to the expansion.
Another major problem at the start was that the raid encounters were relatively very difficult compared to original WoW and even Wrath of the Lich King. So much so, that the “introductory” 25-player raids like Magtheridon and Gruul’s Lair had to be nerfed several times before a majority of players could even have a decent shot at taking down the bosses.
My guild was able to defeat every boss in the expansion, but I have to tell you that I don’t have any fond memories for any of them. I still remember how it felt to defeat Ragnaros or Onyxia for the first time, but none of the bosses in BC had that epic feel to it, not even Illidan. The lack of luster for the bosses in BC can probably be explained by the fact that we had to (A) kill them over and over again for gear, and (B) were artificially difficult and frustrating.
The only good thing that I really liked about BC was the introduction of flying mounts. Other than that, BC was a forgettable expansion. There is a reason why Blizzard increased the xp gain in Outland, so that players could just rush through that content and get to Northrend as quickly as possible. I really don’t think that Blizzard is proud of BC as a game, but you can really see that they learned from all the mistakes that they made there.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I completely agree with you Diego. While overall it was a rather crappy expansion, there were quite a few great ideas that they took up in the Lich King expansion and made great.
Personally I think the stepping away from the 40 man raids was a decent idea. As you describe, the execution was horribly flawed. But then thats sort of the theme to BC, decent ideas that suffered mainly due to execution.
Thanks for giving the raiding perspective. Not something I had coming out of WoW into Burning Crusade.