Blizzard Hints At New StarCraft, Launches Burning Crusade

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.

Comments

Tag line from the theatrical trialer:

[Lethyos]

Your servers are not prepared!!

Serious aside: once you get your copy, there is no need to run the installer from the discs. All you need is the key to upgrade your account using the provided key—you already have all the content as of the 2.0 patch series. If you run the installer, it rolls your local copy back to 2.0.3, and once you start the game, you would go through two patch cycles back to 2.0.5. Save yourself some time and just upgrade your account directly at https://upgrade.worldofwarcraft.com/expansion/.

Re:Tag line from the theatrical trialer:

[XMunkki]

Actually there IS a need to install the CDs, as not all TBC content came with the patches (I suspect mainly the Outland regions). Don't know how it is in the US, but it's like this in the europe. It is true it will re-run a few patches after installing though.

And yes, you can play the non-TBC regions with a normal unupgraded client even if you have activated TBC.

Re:Tag line from the theatrical trialer:

[Tony Hoyle]

The European servers died at ten past midnight (the portal opened at midnight). After a server reboot they died *again* about 15 minutes later.

Oh and blizz sent out a load of duff CDs (many people can't read CD4) and they sent out the wrong keys with the collectors edition so you can't get the 'exclusive' content unless you take a pair of scissors to your box and send bits of it to an address in France...

Outlands fun? Think again.

[BelDion]

Outlands is a gankfest right now and pretty much every quest mob is being camped...

Plan B: grind in Winterspring.

Re:Outlands fun? Think again.

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah i got my first kill->gather quest done right outside thrallmar last night. Outlands is teh awesome so far, I wouldn't waste much time in winterspring, no phat lewtz, plus I was getting 1000-1100 XP per mob for the lvl 60-61 mobs... The green drops are awesome, time to head back to Orgrimmar and put stuff on the AH for those who aren't level 60 or don't have the xpac yet... mwuhaha!

Re:Somehow, I just don't care

[johnashby]

Actually, you get: 7 new outland zones and 4 new Azerothian zones. Something like 15-20 new dungeons for everything from 5-man parties to 25-man raids 2 new races, complete with the final merger of the class differences between the factions Team arena PvP combat An entire new profession(Jewelcrafting) is not something to scoff at...it's a fairly major addition Now, 500 hours is not an insignificant amount of time, but consider that it takes 250 hours to get the average character to 60. Since you say you raided MC, I assume that was your only character since the other 250 hours were spent there, no doubt. The game's flavor changes significantly even when you do simple things like play a new class. This expansion is quite large...but I sympathize with your viewpoint. Given that we've paid $15 a month for 2 years, I'd think the disc should cost $20, or if it's $40 it should include a free month of playtime.