Blizzard's Burning Crusade

To the skies!
Geographically, Outland is a region of broken up terrain floating in space because of all the ripping up the portals caused. It’s a fractured, surreal land, and it’s all designed to work with one of BC’s most exciting new features: Flying mounts!

‘First available at level 70. You’ll have an entry level mount that’s significantly cheaper than the Epic mount. In a lot of ways it mirrors the ground mounts you could get at level 40, and at level 60,’ says Chilton.

All mounts confer the same abilities, you can access all areas regardless of the mount, and cross terrain you wouldn’t be able to on foot. The difference is the better mounts move faster.

The cost will range from ‘a few hundred gold’ for a standard mount to a ‘few thousand’ for an Epic mount. The final numbers haven’t been determined, but at Level 70 a player can expect to be making money at about twice the rate of Level 60, so the costs are balanced to take that into account. According to Chilton, the expensive mounts will approach the speeds of the Griffons and Wyverns used for fast travel.

So just what can you do with your sexy flying beast? Chilton told us that much of the Outland was designed specifically for this new gameplay element: ‘In several areas of Outlands there are areas only accessible by flying mounts. They could be cliffs or floating rocks. There is content you can only access up there, and quests you can only complete by getting up into those areas. The instance of Tempest Keep is a good example of that, it’s only accessible by flying mount.’

The Blood Elf starting area of Eversong Forest promises to blow away Horde players of old.

The obvious question here is will there be scope for aerial combat, and the answer, perhaps sadly is no. Chilton feels that it was best to leave out flying mount specific combat as it would alter the feel of WoW combat too much, and also require a complete reworking of character animations for a huge number of models: ‘It takes the focus away from what the rest of the game is about. All of our combat is based around both the attacker and aggressor being on the ground. It would take a dramatic retooling of the combat model we have right now, and all the animations necessary to support flying combat.’

The Arena
Not everyone wants to raid, but everyone wants top items. Previously raids and quests were the only way to get top items. To give players something cool to do to get those items without the ‘grind’, Blizzard is introducing the Arena system.

Tom Chilton explains the workings: ‘With BC the Arena system gives rewards on par with the best you’ll find in the rest of the game. Any time we start new raids, we’ll start a new Arena season that gives us the opportunity to add a new set of Arena rewards to keep up with that. Each season lasts three months, and at the end of that, based on your position on the ladder, each person in the top team is going to receive an Epic armoured Netherdrake mount.’

So as a motivation for playing the Arena, you’ll score items equal with the best available, the Epic mount and the simple prestige of strutting around as numero uno.

If you grab a copy of Burning Crusade when it comes out, this could be you!

Level up!
Seventy is such a nice, big number, and expect to see it pretty quickly throughout Azeroth and the Outlands. Blizzard was reluctant to guesstimate how long it will take level 60s to work up to 70 as it was still fine tuning that, but when I played the Alpha BC world during my visit they’d bumped the max for that test from 65 to 66 the day before, and 66 guys were everywhere. Lead Designer Tom Chilton reckons really hardcore players could jump to 70 within a week.

Blizzard expects most veteran players to work their existing characters up to 70 before moving on and starting fresh with the all-new BC characters. Chilton revealed they expect the exception to the rule to be players that instead choose to play as either Paladin or Shaman in their new accessible guise under Horde or Alliance.

‘We’ll see a mix, but I think it’ll be slightly tended more towards players taking their existing character from level 60 to 70.’

What good stuff lies in store for 70s? Chilton gave an example: ‘Once you have done the Hellfire Ramparts, which is normally a level 60-62 incidence in Hellfire, at Level 70 you’d be able to come back to that and get completely new loot. It will very much satisfy your expectations as a level 70 player. In the hard mode instances, if you take a level 70 dungeon wing and put it into hard mode, we’ll also have a better chance to get some of the epic items from those instances.’