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Game Developer Blizzard Entertainment's long-anticipated expansion to World of Warcraft has gone live. Initial impressions are ... not available, since all 8 million players are currently in the Outlands. I'll take that to mean the servers for the most part have not melted yet. At a Burning Crusade launch party, a Blizzard exec revealed we may see a new StarCraft game very soon. But today is all about WoW. If you're not playing, and want to live vicariously, check out WarCry's extensive preview of the expansion. You could read designer Jeff Kaplan's comments on new features at FiringSquad, or Shane Dibiri's talk of inspiration at Next Generation. One new expansion a year, eh? Some folks are already looking to the future, where we probably won't see WoW on consoles, but may see it with security dongles. 0.1% of the Earth's population can't all be wrong.

OneMadOgre writes "Ready or not, here it comes. Blizzard has announced that the World of Warcraft will be released to NA/AU/NZ on November 23, 2004."

OneMadOgre writes "Ready or not, here it comes. Blizzard has announced that the World of Warcraft will be released to NA/AU/NZ on November 23, 2004."

BitWarrior writes "Recently today it was revealed that Blizzard, the creator of many legendary games such as the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft franchises, will be using BitTorrent to distribute their Beta release of their latest game, World of Warcraft. BitTorrent is becoming a hit among companies required to distribute large quantities of data to their customers. Valve also jumped on the BitTorrent bandwagon last month(NYTimes, first born required, blah blah), hiring its creator, Bram Cohen. The one downside to Blizzards move is that BitTorrent has been added to many Universities black lists of clients to allow through their networks. Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?"

An anonymous reader writes "The last of the races and classes for World of Warcraft have been released. Check WorldofWar.Net for a good summary of the details." They've added new classes for rogue, priest, and paladin, as well as hero classes for high-level players. There's a few new races as well, such as trolls and gnomes.