World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Announced

[StrikeMaster Ice]

Most of the 'rumors' regarding Blizzard's first World of Warcraft expansion turned out to be true, from the name of the expansion, to the level cap being raised to the new playable races and more.

Forgive us, as this news bit might seem a bit more 'consumery' than our usual fare, but it's only because some of our editors (as well as thousands of industry folk) are still consumed by World of Warcraft so we have to cover the details.

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Level caps are raised to level 70
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Blood Elves are confirmed as the new horde playable race.
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There will be new starting zones in the form of Quel'Thalas (for Blood Elves) and another for the alliance race.
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The alliance race has not yet been announced.
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While there's a lot of new content slated for the existing continents, the new Outland areas (formerly the orc world of Draenor) will be overseen by Illidan.
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The rumored "flying mount" indeed exists for level 70 players.
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Jewelcrafting will be the new profession that allows players to make rings, trinkets and neck pieces.
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Eight new high level dungeons will pick up where Blackwing Lair and the forthcoming, Ahn'Qiraj dungeons left off.
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Item sockets (a la Diablo) will allow for more customization of gear.

For more information or to watch the trailer, head to Blizzard's expansion page (which works now, but isn't accessible yet from any of their web sites).

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?op...=1462&Itemid=2

Great news for WOW fans.

EDIT: Hands-on Preview of World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade

ANAHEIM, CA--We got a taste of the new World of Warcraft expansion firsthand today at Blizzcon. In particular, we got to play around with the new Blood Elf starting area in Quel'thelas. As you can see from the screenshots, the art style of the new area and the elves themselves is very reminiscent of Teldrassil, the Night Elf starting area from the original World of Warcraft. The primary difference is that the weather in Quel'thelas seems sunnier and less dark than the skies of Teldrassil and Ashenvale, with more reddish and orange hues as opposed to a purplish tone. The area of Quel'thelas offers a lush, woodsy feel, with trees intermixed among the Blood Elf structures, some of which extend high up into the sky. The structures contain a lot of winding ramps and clickable portals to allow you to move around the high platforms. Six classes are available to the Blood Elves, including priests, mages, warlocks, warriors, hunters, and rogues. The latter two were unavailable for play at the show. We chose to be a warlock as we explored the new area.

One of the things we noticed about our warlock is that it possessed two spells that are not standard on any warlocks in the original World of Warcraft. One of these was mana tap, an instant cast buff that drains mana from an enemy target and imparts an arcane aura upon the caster. This aura can be stacked three times. The aura takes up a buff slot on your character and lasts 10 minutes, but it doesn't do anything by itself. The other new spell is called arcane storm, and it's related to the arcane auras you can stack on yourself. When you cast this second spell, it consumes your auras and gives you back 12 to 140 mana points for each arcane aura you've stacked on yourself. These two spells are racial abilities unique to Blood Elves. But remember that two of their available classes, warriors and rogues, do not use mana. So instead of gaining back mana, Blood Elf warriors will gain rage, and rogues will gain energy from using their racial traits.

It's worth noting that there are short cooldowns associated with both of the new spells, so they can't be spammed constantly. Aside from racial specializations, we took notice of some of the other details about the Blood Elves. Their dance is basically the Chubby Checker "Twist," much like John Travolta did in Pulp Fiction, sans the finger waving over their eyes. Surprisingly, the female Blood Elves do a very similar dance, though they also borrow some moves from the seductive Night Elf female dance.

If you've played World of Warcraft before, then you won't be very surprised at the sorts of starting quests you'll be asked to do, which include killing X number of Y creatures, and possibly returning Z number of items to quest givers. The first one sent us over to a nearby large green crystal, where we had to clear the area of eight ghostly, eel-like creatures. We were then asked to clear out the surrounding area of lynxes and collect some of their collars. Later on, we were asked to explore a mystical tower to the west of our starting town and clear it of wraiths that had overrun the winding ramps and platforms of the structure. Unfortunately, just as we were about to turn in the quest items and get more information on why the tower had been overrun by evil spirits, our time on the station ran out.

An encouraging sign we've seen is that the mobs we were fighting appear to be entirely new character models. The original World of Warcraft had a tendency to recycle basic character models (the Baron Geddon boss in Molten Core looks just like a bigger, orange version of the warlock voidwalker pet, for example). But we didn't see too much of this tendency in our brief taste of the Blood Elf area. The mobs we fought, including the mana eels and the wraiths, all seemed to be fresh character designs.

Blizzard's stated goal with the Blood Elves is to give the Horde side a more "attractive" (in appearance) race and starting area, which will hopefully help address population imbalances across the servers. What we've seen so far has been interesting, but we're definitely eager to learn more and to try the higher-end content available in the Burning Crusade expansion pack. Stay tuned to GameSpot for more details about the expansion pack as information becomes available.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/world...ml?sid=6136860

[JustinPinter]

Awesome....I want WoW so bad. I just cant pay that much per month and I dont have a good enough computer to run it on.

[BustenRhymes7790]

First of all, if anyone has Safari, can you do a similar list for that? I don't have Safari, but I've heard complaints of numerous bugs with it. Anyways...

Dave - "I spent an hour on it the other day and Bhav spent like 10-15 minutes trying to help the issue before he went to bed that night as well. Server is just acting up weirdly."

Mike - "I had a lot of trouble with this - i couldnt get the screenshot to upload at all on the server, no matter how many times I tried. I had to end up simply linking to its original host, although I managed to get the original concept art to appear."

Bug across all browsers - media is being crappy. Won't work half the time. It's not about syncing the servers either. It is probably a server issue, but it's just being inconsistent. This is giving us issues with thumbs, pics in articles, and regular screenshots. For example, this Pursuit force thumb was uploaded and synced like 5 times. Also, the IE tabs look like crap (same picture).



Same bug again, but in firefox



All browsers - check out the bottom 5 recent releases, they seem to be random - fairly important



All browsers - Keesie reported this problem like 5 months ago and nothing has been done.

Keesie - "
- release dates only showing up on the game list, not on the gamepages itself. If you go to a gamepage it says: "release date: " and no release date given at all...

- UK release dates not showing up at all."



Another bug, found by Justin - http://staff.psu.com/viewtopic.php?t=6245

On to the PS3 browser.

The 'Store' heading is below the others (I think this happens on Safari too) - this is a big one that def. needs fixing



The search button isn't displaying correctly - this isn't a biggy but could use fixing



Articles are being pushed down while the sidebar stays in place - this is another big one that needs fixing












The tabs look weird - not as bad as IE, but could be better



Finally, media won't display in articles - this is another important one to fix

[BustenRhymes7790]

Updated

[Ptaslm]

When it comes to the release dates it really depends on what you type in.

For example if I type in TBA or Q2 2008 or just the release date for the US then yea, that error pops up.

[BustenRhymes7790]

Yeah but the DMC4 release date is done correctly, but it's happening regardless. So Seb, you think we can fix these?

[BustenRhymes7790]

New bug - nothing appearing under PSU Content on the forums

[BustenRhymes7790]

Eric says:
What's this mean?
Eric says:
Hello Seb,

We have now configured your FTP server to accept passive or active mode connections. Please confirm that your staff can connect, upload and download files using passive mode.
Eric says:
Does that mean it's fixed?
Justin says:
he is lettin you know it should be fixed
Justin says:
although I added the 2d2v videos and they didnt work
Justin says:
but they could be a wierd codec
Justin says:
I added some new images and they are loading here and there
Eric says:
sigh...
Eric says:
stupid thumbs not loading
Eric says:
Ferrari Challenge looks broken
Eric says:
but I saw it like 2 hours ago so I know it WAS uploaded
Eric says:
not fixed yet
Justin says:
yeah
Justin says:
well let Seb know
Justin says:
send him an email and post it in the thread

[BustenRhymes7790]

Screens not displaying properly


We need to get shit like this fixed

[The_Only]

Yeah, its a mess right now.

Seb has contacted his server guys, though, so i'm sure that things will be sorted asap. He will get back to us on it.

One thing I did notice was that it finally let me upload pictures yesterday for my Silent Hill feature.

[BustenRhymes7790]

Seb - I did all this work, I'd like to know you at least looked at this.

[BustenRhymes7790]

New bug - ad replaced by poll when I pressed back

[luxurys]

Member section not loading:

[BustenRhymes7790]

I know this is in another thread, but it should be in the bug compilation

Justin: "The entire Theme section is fucked. Basically what is happening is PSU is no longer uploading the pt3 file for the themes. Images are loading fine, but try any of the themes in the first 5 pages and none of them will work. You will either get a PSU 404 Error screen or some "PSU media server disconnect...error code"

This is a huge problem. We need to have this fixed immediately and we need to even write an article about it explaining to our users what has happened.

Also, when I upload themes I am getting all sorts of bugs. Either the upload bar doesnt work, or the uploading will stall, or I get errors saying the image uploaded, but not the p3t file.

Can we get this fixed as soon as possible!!!"

[The_Only]

"Lock file exists. Previous backup process still running. Try again in a few minutes. If this script continues to fail, contact a Systems Administrator. Could not call script"


Now i'm getting this message after trying to sync the server. There are quite a few images not showing up on the front page too - mostly dusty and dave's latest news posts.

[Ptaslm]

another error. Games with the same titles, but are on different consoles are linking the same screenshots and videos. Not sure if this was meant to be but yea. I just added Silent Hill Origins for ps2 and it brought in all the pictures and videos from the PSP version.

[Ptaslm]

screenshots are still fubar.



I have a bunch of images from over the weekend and monday and tuesday, but I can't upload them.

Edit: Still can't add videos to the site either.

[BustenRhymes7790]

Yeah, media has been funky lately

[BustenRhymes7790]

Two bugs in one screen - nothing showing under forum threads or featured members.

[luxurys]

I added a video and synched just fine...but then I added another right after and when I synched it said the server was locked.

[Ptaslm]

I added a video and synched just fine...

I just tried to upload movies using two different FTP clients and still a no go

[BustenRhymes7790]

Seb, where are we with these?

[BustenRhymes7790]

IT seems that new boxarts, even default ones, aren't adding properly. Here are some screens:

[BustenRhymes7790]

[BustenRhymes7790]