Burning Crusade Impressions Roundup

With the Draenei out of the bag, the news sites have taken some time to reacquaint themselves with the new corners of Azeroth. From the Gamespot hands-on report: "To navigate these vast new areas, the expansion will add flying mounts, such as winged dragonlike characters that can run along the ground even more quickly than the fastest epic mounts in the game and also take to the air at any time and fly anywhere. Though you'll need to have a character at level 70 to get your own flying mount, you'll enjoy increased freedom of movement--and apparently, Blizzard's content team is also designing out-of-the-way pockets of content and monster camps to be discovered by adventurous players who don't mind exploring the new areas." More impressions below if you Read More.

Comments

Re:I'm impressed

[prichardson]

Check the Related Stories tab underneath the summary.

Blizzard developer interview

[joejor]

This New York Times interview is very informative. You get the impression that

1. the interviewer knows enough about the topic to ask intelligent questions, and
2. the interviewee enjoys the topic and has intelligent answers

25% have killed Ragnaros?

[ZombieRoboNinja]

According to the NYT interview, Jeff Kaplan thinks that about 25% of WoW players with level 60 characters have killed Ragnaros, and 15% have killed Nefarion.

I can sort of buy the first statistic... sort of. Ragnaros is regularly downed by pickup groups now, so I can see a fair amount of people getting a shot at him.

But Nefarion? 15%? To propogate a meme, ORLY?

For those with actual social lives, Nefarion is the last boss of Blackwing Lair, currently the second-hardest dungeon in the game. You have to kill seven bosses before you get to Nef, and each of them can take weeks for a new guild to learn to defeat for the first time. And since the dungeon resets every Tuesday, you have to clear your way through all of them EVERY WEEK to even get a shot at learning how to kill Nef - a process that takes months for some guilds.

In other words, Kaplan is estimating, from his "gut feeling," that 15% of the people who've gotten to level 60 will ALSO have spent 15+ hours a week for several months in BWL. Either the WoW playerbase (of 5-6 million) is even more fanatical than I would have guessed, or this is a big overestimate, and possibly an attempt to justify the fact that for about a year now the WoW development team has focused almost exclusively on new content for the high-end raiders who make up a small proportion of the fan base. (I guess I shouldn't be complaining, since I'm a raider myself, but hey.)

Misleading summary

[Anonymous Cumshot]

The flying mounts will ONLY be usable within Outland, one of the new zones to be added in the expansion.