 In a break from Blizzard’s normal pattern of giving a street date for a game or expansion mere weeks from when it’ll actually appear on shelves (something I imagine retailers never enjoyed), the company announced today that the expansion to the blockbuster MMORPG will be released on January 16, a day I predict will see all sorts of mysterious ailments infecting people around the world, and who have no choice but to go to the store stay home that day.
The question is whether I’ll be able to find a Collector’s Edition anywhere in the High Desert or whether it’ll mean a long drive down to LA and the Burbank Fry’s …
Well, maybe iTunes went nuts. Or it could be a momentary loss of control combined with them adding a Latino store for American customers. In any case, they have four free songs up at the moment, as well as a number of TV shows.
Free music is goooood.
I feel like a small helpless European country. Late last night, without warning, my iTunes software switched me over to the German iTunes store without me doing anything. (Switching back just required reentering my account information, at which time I was forcibly pushed back to the US store.)
Bizarre.
Firefox 2.0 has been released and it is to be your browser. Download it now.
I’ve been answering questions about the alpha on various message boards, so I’ll repost the information here as well, as it comes to me.
I also took a few screenshots of my very demonic-looking draenei paladin and a few of the Hellfire Peninsula. I’ll try to post those in the next day or two.
Anyway, more alpha info:
- I didn’t even make it to 61 in the alpha (the election is seriously kicking my butt) and I made over 100 gold just fooling around a little in Outland. EVERYONE will be rolling in dough and able to afford to learn the basic level of flying mount riding skill unless they’re a complete ninny.
- On the changes to hunter itemization: You’ll feel weaker as your gear suddenly isn’t a matching set of stats the way you might have wanted them to be, as some pieces of gear will get more RAP than AP or more AGI than +hit or more +hit than +crit. I guess, on average, people’s gear is about the same, but to keep there being variety, not all pieces got the exact same balance of stats.
Oh, and there are craftable guns with significantly higher DPS than my dwarf destroyer, which suggests that all pre-60 raid guns will be great stuff, pre-60, but replaced pretty quickly after that.
Your pre-expansion purple gear will still have more stats generally than level 62 and 63 greens, but pure numerical superiority will start to vanish pretty quickly.
The best-geared pre-expansion character will just get to 62 or 63 a little faster and then still replace their gear with quest items and so on.
If anything, The Burning Crusade looks to be more casual-friendly than the regular game, with a wealth of single group dungeons that can be played at ascending difficulty levels and smaller raids as a standard.
- All the master trainers appear to be in the Horde and Alliance towns in the first two Outland zones, but you’ll need to skill up to 305 (where the new recipes start) with old world recipes. I got to 305 Engineering with good old thorium bullets.
- There are three sizes of arena teams you can form (it’s like smaller versions of guilds). The ladder brackets are only available to those teams. Otherwise, you can play something like an exhibition match.
But world PvP is fully integrated into Outland, so I don’t think it’ll be hard to find a team of any size.
- Higher level bullet recipes are more complex, taking more components and more steps to make them. There was a recipe for an engineering bag (like herb and alchemy bags now), but I don’t know if it made it all the way through alpha.
On the other hand, there are better store-bought bullets available too, including ones usable at 60.
- It’s hard to beat blood elf lands for a magical civilization. If and when Dalaran ever opens up, it’s going to have a pretty high bar to leap over.
- The first few outdoor quests in Hellfire Peninsula were cake in my Zul’Gurub gear, although this being alpha, some of the quest text wasn’t as clear as it could have been always. In Honor Hold (and presumably Thrallmar) you’ll be given some orange elite quests at 60 to do the first dungeon — whose name completely escapes me this morning for some reason — with rewards people were favorably comparing to Molten Core gear. (Which I think was an overstatement, but a lot of people said it, so I could be wrong in my view of said “omg” cloak.)
- With 47 blood elves in the entire world in alpha, within 30 seconds of making my blood elf warlock, I ran into a naked dance party.
- There are PVP-controlled towns in Outland. If those flip sides, you’ll be affected. But no zone, as I recall, has ONLY those towns. If you use Honor Hold/Thrallmar as your base (which most people will for a long time), you can totally avoid PVP, if that’s your preference.
- I did not see a non-combat pet vendor in either the Exodar or Silvermoon, but both were going under major revisions last time I played the alpha. (The floors had been removed from the Exodar as they rearranged things — many dead characters as a result.) Silvermoon has a TON of cats running around, though, so I suspect the Horde may have their own crazy cat lady, hopefully with a new skin or two. Didn’t see anything comparable at the Exodar, but maybe.
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