Time to enter the wolves' den with this popular MMORPG game (Incredibly long review).
Thank you. :)
----------------------------------------
Personal Rant
For me, It's always a good laugh to read the reviews people bestow, in all of their infinite knowledge, on games that are "popular" by general census.
First of all (for the duration of reading this at least), I ask that you throw all that you have heard about this game out the window, especially those saying it is a waste of time; it truth, it is a waste of time, but it's also a MMORPG, so enough said on that matter (all games are a waste of time unless it's your job or hobby to be playing them). If you have a personal life, then you would be better off living it as opposed to wasting time on a game that will become incredibly addictive to you, play it for a few years with a passion, and then hate on it since it wasted your time even though it was entirely your decision to start playing.
---------------------------
Review:
Gamespot said that "The Burning Crusade is a superb example of exactly what an expansion pack for any game should be." in their respected review of the game, and quite frankley, as a whole, I'd have to concur whole heartidly with them.
Never has a game, even a non-multiplayer one, has ever delivered such a mass amount of content as an expansion pack as "The Burning Crusade" has, and in MMORPG form.
Expansions have been known to absolutely ruin MMORPGs in the past, with Ultima Online being a prime example of this, but Blizzard managed to keep WoW's charm throughout the expansion, almost to a fault. It some cases, it is indeed just more of the same; though, what's wrong with doing something that has a success to begin with? Nothing. It's how almost all companies do business.
Personally, I do not like the path they are taking World of Warcraft, but that does not mean that I should bash a perfectly well made expansion with bias opinions and hate on it just because I don't want to either pay for it, play it, or experience anything it has to offer within.
I've played and obtained maxed level characters on all types of Servers, Normal, PvP, RP, RP-PVP, you name it. An example of people overexaggerating is that some people are scared to death of PvP servers thinking "Oh dang, if I go there I'll be ganked and camped every hour that I play! I just want to play the dang game and not worry about it!", and that's perfectly fine; however, it my experiences of playing those realms I was ganked maybe twice in my entire time up to level sixty and then level seventy when the expansion was finally released. Perhaps I played on relatively tame servers, but I also played smart by avoiding ganking areas such as Stranglethorn and found safe places to grind without the opposing faction nearby.
Indeed, on whatever MMORPG I play, whether it be UO, DAOC, EQ, FFXI, RO, RF, LoTR, Eve, and multiple korean "grinds" as they are known, I tend to get max levels before I judge the game and then reflect by thinking "Hey... What could've been better, what was incredibly fun, would I do it again?" and so forth. That is exactly what I did with WoW and this recent expansion.
Many people were incredibly upset that they wasted time raiding for what is now deemed as useless gear in the expansion; though, they should have known, by common sense, that level seventy gear would be vastly superior. However, it is true that they were made obsolete a little too easy, heck, at the start even greens were better than most level sixty epics (excluding most weapons). Though, such is the way things happen sometimes, and it is childish to hate on a game just because it wants to move it's story forward and make the characters stronger as a whole.
So this little point leds me to my first point that I would've change, and I"m sure many will agree with me on this point - they should have made at least tier two sets more relevent in the game by at least putting in a quest to imbue them up to Burning Crusade standards or making the level 58-62 greens a little less powerful than the tier two equipment. It may be childish to hate on something like this, as I said in the previous paragraph (so as not to contradict myself), but simply making a point that it would have been better, while not letting your emotions affect your rating, is a perfect way to display your displeasure in this.
The way everything was set up in the Burning Crusade was great... for the first few months. Thereafter many people started having trouble finding groups due to everyone just wanting to do heroic runs or arena battles and people were pretty much left stranded by grinding to level seventy; it became even worse than FFXI to get a party going it was so bad on some of my servers. This leads to my second point with the expansion pack.
They should have foudn some what, other than just collecting special items for heroic raids in the future, to boost up the amount of people wanting to do each instance within the game. While it may be a little too radical, even allowing for "NPC" replacements to take part in a party would help millions of players out with finding a class they were unable to get after a few hours, and then finally disband with nothing to show for it. While you may not want a NPC bot healing or tanking, if the AI was good enough they may even prove to be better at it; perhaps even a "commander" system could be set in where you train and equip a mercenary (for instance purposes only) to be whatever you want, it's just a small idea (maybe even a dumb one, but at least it's better than just standing around asking random people if they want to do an instance, the groups has been trying to form for hours... yada yada). Though, in the end, something really does need to be done about the accessibility of the lower level dungeons.
There is one thing that somewhat ticks me off about the expansion, and it's not the fault of the game itself, but the community. World of WarCraft provides some of the most armor and equipment choices than any of game out there; yet, they are still ridiculed when they reuse perfectly well done armor sets. Indeed, they recolored and reused some sets, why wouldn't they? They already had thousands of different sets for their cloth, leather, mail, and plate users... Why is everyone calling them lazy? In addition to reusing sets, they also made some unique ones that people just convienantly forget about when they rant how much blizzard is lazy. The Outlands, which was added by this expansion, is a superbly crafted world that had a lot of exciting new places to visit within the shattered world when the Dark Portal was original opened, ravaging the land and it's inhabitants. The first portion, while sterotypical, had a view point that far surpassed any other area in the non-expansion game. It was basically a wasteland set ablaze, and you could see incredibly far into the distance (which would probably account for their increase in required Ram for the game). However, for those who stuck it through they saw some interesting areas such as "The Dragon's End", where dozens of dead dragons were seen pierced by Jagged rocks, or maybe even the "Ecosphere" in the Netherstorm... Which held a small eden from the harsh environment outside the protective sphere.
I've read a lot of people saying there were no new quests in the game. Well, all I have to say to that is "bull crap". There are at least a dozen new types of quests in there, as well as the old ones that were frequent in Azeroth. Some examples of new quests at the top of my head:
Flying Mission
Bombing Mission
Possesson (Control a raid boss and fight another raid boss)
Summoning Defenders
Getting Ogres Drunk
Quest to see into the ghost world (while not actually being dead).
Defend the Point Missions
Assassination (Present in Azeroth, but not to some degrees it goes into)
Capture and Hold Mission
World PvP Missions (which was introduced in the patch that prepared Burning Crusade, but also was present in Outlands).
Arena Battle Quest (Fight in the arena and defeat the Ogre Champion!).
Easily accessable world raid quests.
One thing I enjoyed doing was going through the dung of the Antelops to find some special seeds in Outland; that was gold. Haha.
In any case, those are simple examples that just come to mind when thinking about some of the quests in Outland.
World of Warcraft, in attempts to keep this review as short as possible, is general is basically a community game; by that I mean it would be boring if you didn't have your friends or people to help and/or show off to. It is a MMoRPG, and this type of genre is about the community as a whole and not a single player experience. People keep on treating it like this and expecting to preform some type of miracle since Blizzard has such a great customer satisfaction record, but they're only disappointed themselves as Blizzard delivers what it promised in an expansion pack, and if people didn't find it to their likings it's entirely their own feelings and not mutual shared among the nine million subscriber masses. It's okay to not like a game, but to rate such a popular and successful game below a seven just because you don't like it? Well, I'm sorry, but I just hope that most of these people don't get a job as a professional reviewer in the gaming industry.
It was my decision to stop playing this game some time ago, but despite my (now hostile after feeling the sting of reality in how much time I've wasted) feelings towards it I will never resort to going to the side with whom are part of a natural phenomenon with any game that's popular in gaming, and just have to find something wrong about it just to be "cool" and "hardcore" on the internet (though some people may genuinely hate it, and more power to them... But you know that at least a third of those people have an active account and play it daily, but say they hate it on the forums just to look "mature" and "cool" to everyone else). Good game, people.... Good game.
In the end most people will quit playing this game and dislike the fact that they wasted their time on a game that they just quit on; though, with having an original collector's edition of the game myself, and playing the game since beta, at least I'm able to say that I've made a lot of friends with whom I now talk to on AIM, and most of the time I've played was enjoyable. Gaming may not be important overall, but making new friends is one of the things that's all about, and World of Warcraft has most definitely helped me along with that in spades (I've even known multiple people who met on WoW and got married in real life).
WoW will always be special to them for that reason, and such stories are always great to hear about... Tell me, what has any online game, not just WoW, given to you in real life? Perhaps it wasn't such a waste of time after all (with all contradictions to the beginning of this review sarcastically intentional).
In any case, for those of you who read through all this, despite it having no real value to most people what someone else says, thank you and take care. Though, if I had the time, I'd definitely write a few more pages on improvements, dislikes, likes, and overall myth busting that people are bringing to the forums and reviews; a little sense of reasoning is always good in a community full of people who spread bias rumors and opinions.
Though, as long as they are in good health (which I hope they are), more power to them. If not...hope they get well soon.