New race for WOW Alliance starts

Under the name, The Burning Crusade, Blizzard has presented excerpts from its unfinished code which will hopefully, one day become a great add-on that will give just that another kick of WoW-drug to over six million players and beyond.

Probably the most mysterious thing about the add-on was the existence of the new alliance race. Since the Horde side got nicely designed Blood Elves, it was expected that Blizzard will run an opposite thing for the Alliance side, unlike all the rumors who pointed to the Pandaren. It seems to us that Blizzard probably didn't want to get into problems with the Chinese Government, since Pandas are protected animals in China.

The new Alliance race mostly look like Taurens with blue skin, but with several twists in the overall design. Since the design wasn't over, we were informed that detailed explanation of what I played woudn't do justice to the overall experience, which was very positive.

The add-on brings a new continent to the table - for which you need access via The Dark Portal. I have entered The Dark Portal and it left me breathless - Blizzard really pulled all the stops in order to make the continent extremely visually impressive. The starting zone into the new continent mostly reminds me of Silithus with impressive look to the sky, filled with flying objects.

The continent itself is no stranger - most of the nature bridges are made "mobile", interactive with the player. If you fall down, you're either talking to the lady or walking to the edge of the cliff. The E3 version of the game had a built-in timelimit of play for each character, which would slowly loose all of the health and die after some 20 minutes of play. Luckily for myself, there were a lot of characters to choose from.

There are several dozen new monsters, which should add to the gametime. Blizzard expects completion of the game within the next couple of months. What really fascinates is the new medical bag, so that you can continue creating the potions without any problems. New profession, Jewlery is definetly a tricky one, but Socketed items ad the flavor into the original game.

Classes are far from being completed, since you could not play the role of Hunter, while it is known that every race is getting an asset which will equal the level playing fieid. Mages, Druids and Warriors got a significant rewamp, which was mostly due to gets all the classes into the balance once more.

Flying mounts were not ready for E3, so we cannot comment on them. Or in fact, on any mounts - Blizzard obviously wanted to make sure, so the classical mount button simply disappeared from the inventory.

All in all, we can conclude that the WoW: TBC will offer couple of hundred more hours and earn Blizzard even bigger sum of money on their bank account. Only, judging by many games from E3, Blizzard is the pace setter, not the follower. ?