Expansion packs for Blizzard games have always been something of a big deal.

The company has a well-earned reputation for tirelessly re-balancing and adding to all of their games for years after release, and that's just the free updates they publish. Their expansions are usually the culmination of a year or two worth of gameplay tweaks, player feedback, and creative decisions all wrapped up with a sizable addition to the core game itself, and the result often feels like an entirely different experience from when it shipped. It's one of the reasons people are still out there playing Diablo II, Starcraft, and Warcraft III religiously.

So when word began to trickle down about The Burning Crusade, the first expansion to Blizzard's genre-defining massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft (and currently the single most popular game on the planet), expectations were naturally pretty high.

While an expansion pack every year or so is par the course for most MMOs, they also usually just slap on an extra continent to tromp around in and new things to kill without really doing much to alter the basic game. After all, you don't want to burn your hardcore paying subscriber base by tossing their entire world around.

So looking back a few months after the release of The Burning Crusade, now that things have had time to settle in a bit and some of the wow-factor of just being able to see the new sights has worn off, it's pretty remarkable just how much of an overhaul the whole shebang went through, and nearly all of it for the better (don't let the bitter hardcore-raid types tell you otherwise). True to form, Blizzard made good on their opportunity to make some drastic adjustments to the formula, and the end result is a greatly updated, streamlined, and modernized version of the game millions of people have been playing for two years now. Here's our rundown of what's changed, what's stayed the same, and what you can expect if you've yet to make the trip into Outland.

I.    The Basics

For starters, let's go over the ramifications of the expansion pack to all the players, including the handful who have yet to buy it.

Word of Warcraft has been updated fairly steadily since it was launched, with class and talent reviews often coming packaged in with extra dungeons in large patches (Blizzard likes to call them "updates") being released roughly every couple of months. These started out as mostly bug fixes and a handful of high-level encounters, and eventually turned into some pretty elaborate world-level events like the opening of Ahn'Qiraj and the invasion of the world's major cities by the undead to herald the coming of Naxxramas, a floating beast of a 40-man dungeon that was so difficult that most players never even got in the front door. This gives the top-level players some new content to take a crack at and keep them interested while keeping the game up to date and balanced, but after a while the patches were exclusively catering to the hardest of the hardcore, meaning if you were stuck on a backwater server or didn't have a whole lot of free time to burn through, the odds of you ever getting to see some of this stuff was pretty low.

About a month before The Burning Crusade hit, however, Blizzard released a monster patch clocking in at just under a full gigabyte. This updated the game version to 2.0, and carried with it almost all of the core changes that were to come with the expansion, of which there were many.

In effect, even if you didn't buy the expansion, you still get this patch, which contains all of the important behind-the-scenes stuff as well as some nice upgrades to nearly every aspect of the game world.

The graphics engine itself got a noticeable coat of polish, every class got their talent trees rebuilt significantly to further diversify the different builds, and the two new playable races -- The Draenei for the Alliance and the Blood Elves for the Horde -- began to crop up in NPC form all over the world. In addition, all the stuff that was to come with the expansion as far as higher-level spells and items were snuck into the game code in advance of their actual release, so even though you couldn't actually use all those nice level 70 bits of gear or learn those level 70 spells, they was all still technically in there. The PvP system was completely overhauled o be less grind-intensive as well, resulting in a lot of players dropping everything else to start picking up the previously-exclusive PvP epic-level reward loot.

Likewise, a lot of the abandoned areas of Azeroth began to phase to life, which was pretty interesting to watch. The Caverns of Time opened for the first time to reveal an incredibly bizarre (and cool) new instance hub, and the previously creepily-empty tower of Karazhan, which had been squirreled away in a dramatically empty and useless corner of the map for two straight years, acquired a handful of activity at its base overnight. It's now crawling with extremely high-level enemies, as well as some wizards who've come down from Dalaran to start players on a new quest chain to gain entrance.

In short, the 2.0 patch brought all the expansion goodies to the table except for the actual physical areas of the expansion itself. What this breaks down to is, if you're just starting out in the game, or if you've got a lower-level character and have yet to break into level 60, there's actually relatively little you'd get from the expansion pack that you're not already getting from the update patch. You're still too low-level to go into the Outland areas, and if you've already started a character and are seeing the world for the first time, there's not a whole lot of incentive to start over as one of the new races and see that new content since it's kind of all new to you anyway.

All the expansion-only items, races, and soforth are actually in your game data, and there's no restrictions placed on your interacting with them. So while you can't journey to Silvermoon and see all the Blood Elves running around, you can still see the ones that were placed in the original game area. If someone goes and buys some Draenei stuff from the expansion-only starting area and then sticks it on the auction house, you can still buy it and use it without the expansion installed, and so on.

On top of that, for the first time there have been a handful of new lower-level quests retroactively placed around Azeroth that let you gain reputation and rewards from the expansion cities. Even though you can't physically go to them, you can do quests for their citizens here and there and their opinion of you will rise. The only thing the lack of the expansion will prevent you from doing: Physically journeying to the new starting areas for the added races (or creating new characters as those races), learning the new profession of jewelcrafting, entering the Outland, and taking your character past level 60. There are also a couple of new instances that are on the non-expansion portion of the game world but have an entry requirement above level 60, so by default those are also off limits until you upgrade.  Still, if you've got a level 30 Tauren Hunter kicking around that you plan on keeping, then you're probably cool with holding off on the expansion for a bit. There's plenty of new stuff you get for free to chew through before the additional content will even come into play.

That said, if you've got the cash to burn and plan on getting the expansion anyway despite starting fresh, it wouldn't be a bad idea for two big reasons...

II.   The Newcomers

The expansion's main additional content is centered at the beginning and the end of the game. For the grizzled veterans, there's the Outland, which is the meat of the expansion and which we'll get to in a minute. But for those just starting out (or who want to start fresh on an alternate character), the Horde and the Alliance each got a new race to play as, as well as corresponding capital cities and starting areas for each.

For those playing the Alliance side, the Draenei are now available, and are a really refreshing contrast to the otherwise fantasy-staple races of the Alliance. According to lore, they're the remainder of a race called the Eredar -- basically, demons -- who hail from the same original homeworld as the Orcs. Blue skinned and sporting horns and hooves (and terribly amusing Russian accents), they're easily the coolest thing to happen to the game world since its inception. The Draenei starting area, likewise, is a far cry from the medieval-ish townships that make up most of the rest of the Alliance lands, and their "Capital City" is actually the crashed remains of the spaceship they used to flee their homeworld (yep, the Draenei are aliens).

Blizzard does a very good job of selling this, though. The whole affair is all glowing crystals and arcing electricity and other sci-fi based goodies, with the Draenei themselves playing against type and cast as absolute champions of virtue and justice. Most of their initial quests revolve around repairing the damage their crash landing has done to the surrounding wildlife, and the pacing and writing therein is much more tightly woven and cohesive than any of the other race's beginning quests. While you got a general feel for the lore playing as an undead or a dwarf, the Draenei quests really put an emphasis on who they are and ties in much more closely with the plot of the game, which makes everything that much more involved in the process and a hell of a lot more fun. A common complaint in MMOs is that they never feel like your character does anything significant; for the first time, this has been addressed directly and the whole thing is written practically as a single-player game might. Newcoming Draenei are very much made out to be the hero, and thanks to the heavily-scripted quests, you walk away from Bloodmist Isle and the Exodar with a very direct sense of purpose. Instead of just being a stepping-stone to the game proper, the starting area is probably the most fun you're going to have on your shiny new goody-demon until you reach the Outland. The quests are really that much better.

On the other end of the faction spectrum, the Horde get the somewhat-controversial Blood Elves as their new race, once again intentionally casting against type.

The story behind these guys is that they're the remainder of the original (and Alliance-sided) High Elves from Warcraft I - III. After their entire homeland was trampled to bits by the undead in the previous game, they've now resurfaced as having rebuild most of their capital city while fending off the remains of the undead in the area and re-establishing themselves as a major power on Azeroth.

The setup for them going turncoat and joining the Horde? In Warcraft III, the Undead Campaign had players attack their home city and eventually destroy the Sunwell, which was the source of the elves' immortality and magical affinity. With the Sunwell gone, a nasty little side effect emerged with the survivors. Turns out the Elves weren't just proficient with magic. After thousands of years of life extended by the energies of the Sunwell, they'd actually become physically addicted to it, and without a new source of magical energy, they eventually devolve into a hunchbacked, pale-skinned, seriously-jonesing version of themselves, like an elven crackhead.

The solution? Get a new Sunwell! Problem is, such a thing doesn't exist on Azeroth, so the Elven High-Prince decided to take matters into his own hands and side with a couple shady characters from the game's lore, in exchange for being allowed to siphon some of the energies remaining in Outland to keep his people from getting junk-sick from lack of magical energy. Needless to say, the Alliance wasn't too keen on their stalwart ex-allies making buddies with the enemy, so they were cast out of the Alliance and eventually formed a tentative pact of convenience with the Horde for support.

If all that sounds a little needlessly convoluted, it's because it is. You get the impression Blizzard's lore-writers had to stretch it a bit to justify the addition of the Blood Elves to the Horde. There's some speculation that the primary reason for shipping the Elves to the Horde Side was because too many players were playing Alliance because they were "prettier", and this is probably more accurate than Blizzard would like to admit. The Elves are extremely out of place physically with the rest of the Horde, not just in terms of looks but in sheer design. Stick an Orc and a Blood Elf next to each other, and they barely even look like they're from the same game, which has a really weird effect on the overall appearance of things when you see thirty of these guys running around Orgrimmar. Given how closely they resemble anime characters, it's a little hard not to think of them as designed from the ground up to be as stereotypically geek-attractive as possible to siphon the teenage otaku crowd away from the Alliance and balance the populations a bit. They even have "Hawkstriders" (read: Chocobos) as their racial mount. Commence eye-rolling and expect to run into lots of Blood Elf hunters named "Sepharotth" and "Aeirith".

It's probably worth noting that this worked like a charm. A few servers have already reported Blood Elf populations that eclipse the rest of every other race in the Horde combined.

Still, for all the thinly-veiled aesthetic reasons behind their existence, there's no denying that they've been meticulously fleshed out in the game itself. The new capital city of Silvermoon is breathtaking to look at, extremely bright and shiny with red and gold everywhere. It's easily the most vibrant place in the game thus far, with loads of little touches that grant a lot of legitimacy. You can hear concerned citizens talking about world events, see protests on the street by various dissenters, and even follow a group of the other horde races around as they are given a tour of the city. It's all very alive in a way that none of the other original major cities are.

Much like the Draenei starting quests, the Blood Elf beginners area is packed with very race-specific, lore-filled things to do that are much more heavily scripted and carefully linked than those the original game ever had. You get a genuine sense of progression as you work your way southward with the quests, culminating in an extremely cool assault on the undead stronghold of Deatholme. Once again, the new starting stuff is vastly superior to the quests all the other non-expansion races get, so if you're starting a new character with the expansion installed but don't feel like being an Elf, it's still definitely worth it to take your new character and move them to the Silvermoon starting area to begin from there.

Either way you go, one big benefit to questing in the new areas is the fact that you'll be rolling in cash by the time you're ready to leave. The quests themselves pay orders of magnitude better than those in the standard game, both in coin and items. Popping out the other end of the Ghostlands after having done everything there will have your Blood Elf gloriously twinked out in comparison to how they'd usually look at that level. While this isn't exactly fair, it's certainly not unwelcome either. The extra loot isn't going to matter in twenty levels of course, but it's still a nice incentive to check out the new stuff. 

As usual, each of the new races gets their own specific traits and advantages. The Draenei have a naturally occurring passive ability that gives a small bonus percentage to their party's hit rating with spells or weapons, depending on the Draenei's class. They also have "Gift of the Naaru", a reasonably potent free healing spell that affects everyone around them. The Blood Elves get a fairly unique and useful ability that allows them to siphon the mana from any of their targets once every few minutes and build up a charge, which can then be released as an Arcane Torrent that restores the Blood Elf's mana while silencing any hostiles near them for a couple seconds. Judicious use of this ability actually makes the racial skill extremely powerful, and easily one of the better ones in the game.

Lastly, the doozy of a change: Each new race has the option of choosing the class that was previously available only to members of the other faction. So, Blood Elves can be Paladins, and Draenei can be Shamans. This has pretty serious ramifications in everything from PvP Combat to Raid Group Makeup, and was originally highly unpopular with nearly every veteran player of the game. In the couple of months since the expansion was released, though, dissent has largely quieted down and the decision is now generally regarded as a good one. Of course, this means a vast proportion of the Elves and Draenei you see are either Paladins or Shamans to take advantage of this, but that's pretty much to be expected.

Also worth noting that the Draenei are one of the few races that cannot be rogues (which stands to reason, since hooves are not exactly stealthy), and the Blood Elves are the only race that cannot be warriors -- too small and skinny, supposedly...Though this doesn't stop them from being plate-mail wearing, sword-and-shield wielding, tank-like paladins, nor does that logic apply to the much smaller and weaker-looking Gnomes, who can sit there smacking dragons in the face all day and tank with the best of them, so! That restriction doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

III.  Through the Dark Portal

Of course, the main event of the expansion is the upping of the level cap from 60 to 70, and the opening of The Dark Portal itself, leading to the near-destroyed Orc/Draenei homeworld of Draenor, which had been torn completely apart at the conclusion of Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal and was now a chaotic mix of floating continents and strange borderlands rubbing up against outlying dimensions.

Anyone who played any of the previous Warcraft games knows that the Portal is central to pretty much every last bit of story in the game, and there are volumes of it. Yet for all that, almost right up until the expansion release the Portal sat dormant and closed off in its own relatively-unused corner of the world. You could go to it and take a look if you wanted; it was surrounded by demons, sitting at the bottom of a big crater, sort of glowing and looking menacing but not doing much. If you poked around enough you could learn that it had recently been rebuilt yet again by shadowy forces (having already been destroyed twice in the previous games), but they had yet to figure out how to activate it. So it stayed for two years.

The 2.0 Patch kicked things off a month early by having the Portal crack open and setting up a garrison at its base, with demons constantly pouring out and a few simple "get ready!" quests to help the Argent Dawn faction fight them back; a small taste of what was to come. Demon Lord Kazzak, a giant raid-encounter outdoor boss, was revealed as the culprit behind eventually re-opening the thing, and he had fled through it back to Outland, leaving a similar-looking lieutenant to take his spot -- whom you could fight, if you had good gear and thirty-nine other friends. The European Servers made a bigger deal about this than the American ones, selling it as a new raid encounter to tide players over until the actual expansion dropped. But that was nothing compared to what was waiting on the other side.

Something you hear a lot about World of Warcraft is that, for all the emphasis on combat, there's not really a whole lot of war to speak of. The world was pretty static, and there wasn't a whole lot the player could do to get around that. This was remedied a bit by some of the later update releases that had giant world events attached to them, but none of those even come close to stacking up to what you see when you first go through that portal.

It's chaos.

You pop out on the other end, looking down a huge stairway to where a giant pitched battle is going on. There are NPCs charging down the steps where a giant Pit Fiend is standing, there are Infernals raining down all over the place, Horde and Alliance have set up triage tents on either side, there's fire and explosions and all kinds of craziness. It makes a damn good first impression, and makes it pretty clear just how much Blizzard was able to hone their presentation for the game in the two years they'd been working on it. Staring down that stair at the battle below you is quite a sight.

You're told to report to a wind rider of whichever faction you happen to be as your first quest, and next thing you know you're airborne and given a quick tour of the first area you'll be spending some time in in Outland: Hellfire Peninsula.

And so it begins. All the things that were mentioned for the new starting areas applies here, only tenfold. Again, the quest chains here are both much more involved and far better scripted, as well as much longer. The land is used far more economically in outland, with a minimum of pointless running around. You move to one area, get quests that move you progressively farther away, and eventually move to a new area entirely, heading first west, then getting the option of either branching north or south towards the end-level areas, and eventually returning back to Hellfire Peninsula for the start of the endgame.

The land itself is nicely diverse, absolutely gorgeous, and surprisingly dangerous. It's a rite of passage to get stepped on and killed by a Fel Reaver while running around Hellfire (you'll know one when you see it). Wandering high-level elites are a common sight in almost all the areas you can reach, and even most of the basic surface enemies still have a few nasty spells and skills they can toss your way, forcing you to stay on your toes compared to the standard Azeroth-bound enemies. In almost every area there are at least three or four outdoor boss encounters you'll eventually be tasked with completing as well, and these often yield extremely good quest rewards. While it's possible to solo your way through most of Outland, a lot of the best (and most lucrative) quests require a small group to complete, so snag some buddies to get the most out of it. In a nice touch, quests that were tuned for more than one person will now indicate this in your quest log, including the suggested number of players, which is advice you should probably take. When they say "Suggested: 3 Players", you should read that as "Bring at least 3 people or die a horrible, gruesome death." Provided you're not hideously antisocial and weird, this is definitely a more fun way to burn through the quests.

Probably the most noticeable thing about all the quests is that there is just a lot of them, often in extremely long chains. Rather than putz around looking for the next area you're supposed to go, Outland has all the fat cut out; you're never without at least a dozen things to do at any given time, and the rewards for running the quests blow most of the pre-expansion gear out of the water. Don't worry about going into Outland under-geared, you won't stay that way for long.

And don't worry about money, either. If you clear the whole of the expansion continent from end to end, you're looking at anywhere from four to six thousand gold in quest rewards and random drops alone, which is a staggering amount of money compared to how much was the norm before. Still don't have your epic mount? Problem about to be solved very quickly.

In fact, it's shocking just how far up the ceiling has been raised, and it's become a point of contention with a lot of the serious raid guilds who had all their efforts at organizing and clearing the most difficult end-game stuff rendered entirely moot in one fell stroke. All that lovely Tier 2 and 3 raid gear you spent hours and hours and hours of your life working towards? Get ready to sell it for pocket money. That stuff's all getting replaced within a week, tops. Your average random green-item drops in the Outland are often impossibly better than anything you can get outside of it, and even the easiest of instances coughs up loot comparable with what used to be extremely high-end raid loot not a few months prior. The bar has been raised across the board rendering anything that came before it completely moot, and there's certain to be at least a few guilds who are incredibly bitter about that (which, if you're like the author here and don't have the time to raid like a fiend, you can't help but smirk about -- cry me a river, suckers).

And, of course, along with the new land and new gear comes new talents and other fun toys to play with.

All professions can be trained up to level 375, up from the previous cap of 300. This enables commensurately powerful crap to be made. Potions, bags, and all the other player-made stuff have higher-level counterparts available right from the profession vendors, with only the truly nutty recipes being regulated to drops this time around. Alchemists will be pleased to learn that they can now specialize in a specific type of potion that will grant them a chance to make free multiples. So, for example if you specialize in Elixirs, every time you make an agility elixir, there's a base chance you'll make anywhere from two to five of them in one go. Tailors and blacksmiths can now make some truly serious epic-level gear (with some truly serious material requirements to match) that only they can wear, making some items exclusive to their specific profession. New high-level enchanting and engineering recipes also abound, and Blizzard has already stated that many more are going to be forthcoming with future updates, so no matter what you do, there's something for everyone in there. In fact, that's an almost crippling disadvantage to those who don't get the expansion: It's going to be fantastically hard to make any money selling the old player-made stuff now.

Working your way to level 70 of course unlocks an additional ten skill points to further shore up your chosen class build, and every class got a handful of new, extremely powerful spells to add to their repertoire. Shamans get the long-awaited Bloodlust and the ability to summon elementals, mages get invisibility back, warlocks are graced with a few truly nasty damage-over-time spells and some useful utilities like an auto-vending healthstone altar, and stupid jerks the druids get a free flight form at level 68, meaning they don't have to cough up the nine hundred gold or so for a flying mount.

Assuming you're not a druid, you're really going to want that flying mount though.

They come in two flavors, just like regular land mounts, those being the utilitarian Standard  and the everyone-else-will-hate-your-rich-ass  Epic. Both types can simply be bought at the friendly neighborhood flying mount dealer once you hit level 70, so get the experience, cough up the cash, and you're in. While Blizzard alluded to some special flying mounts that would be available via quest in the coming updates, as of the 2.0 build those have yet to be implemented, so you're stuck with the generic species of fliers for now. You're also stuck paying for them at full price. Your reputation and PvP discount bonuses don't apply when it comes to flying mount training.

This isn't so bad if you're going for the basic standard flier since simple questing will almost certainly pay for that; the epic variant however costs a cool five thousand gold for the training and another two hundred on top of that for the mount itself. Depending on how lucky you get with your drops (and how good at saving your money you are) you may well have this much saved up from questing as well by the time you're done, but whether you want to blow it all on something you don't technically need is another question. Of course, given that the standard flier is a 60% speed increase (which is painfully slow if you're used to even the epic land mounts), and the epic one is 280% (!), it can become a serious test of patience to fly from one end of Outland to the other when you know you could be zipping across it at an absurdly faster rate. It's only pretend money, right?

The other downside is that your flying mounts can only be used in Outland itself, for the pretty utilitarian reason of Azeroth not being made for flying mounts, and thus being full of holes and untextured areas the players could conceivably get into if given airborne privileges. While there are supposedly plans to allow non-Outland flight "some day", Blizzard has stated that to re-do all of Azeroth to be flier friendly would be a hideously time consuming exercise, and basically to not hold your breath.

Even so, if you plan on hitting any of the endgame content, a flying mount of some variety is absolutely required. In an interesting method of ensuring you're the proper level, many of the high-level instances are airborne, so get ready to take to the skies for some of the really cool stuff.

IV.            Dungeons, Raids, and You.

While the road to 70 will keep you preoccupied for a good while, inevitably the time is going to come when you're going to want to start hitting up the instance dungeons heavily. Not only does this yield far  better loot than you can get otherwise, it's also required if you want to get your reputation up with the various factions around Outland. Why get your reputation up? Unlike the original game, where reputation didn't matter unless you were either going for a mount from another race in your faction or hitting up the added-in super-high-level raids, faction means everything in Outland. It a way, it's become an alternate version of experience points, and in many ways just as necessary if you want to move ahead. While character experience will make you more powerful, reputation points will allow you access to a bevy of good stuff you can't get in any other way, from epic weaponry and armor to new mounts to ridiculous enchants to Heroic Keys, which unlock far more difficult versions of the dungeons with improved loot for the seriously hardcore. In the short term, reputation gains are also a way of ensuring that even if you didn't get any actual loot from a dungeon run, at the very least you gained a sizable chunk of reputation, so you're not walking out as empty-handed as you might think.

The other more compelling reason to head to every instance you can is that they're pretty damn fun.

There was a time, before the expansion, when it seemed like all Blizzard was interested in patching into the game were enormous, multi-day-long, time-and-material intensive 40-man raid dungeons, almost all of which required you to be at least a little geared up from the previous dungeon, which itself was also a multi-day farming-intensive 40-man, and chances are the one before that was the same thing. While this was great for the superhardcore types, your average weekend warrior was basically out of luck if they wanted to see any of this stuff. You either threw away all your free time and joined a raid guild, or you put your level 60 on ice and made a new character.

Apparently someone at Blizzard did the math on this as well: Spend lots and lots of money and time developing and crafting these incredibly elaborate dungeons...Only to have a sizable chunk of the entire subscriber base never even get to see them. Hmm.

Presumably for that reason, the new instances are a dramatic change of pace from the usual endgame content, a decision that's sparked a lot of controversy from the buttery raid guild fanbase claiming the game is being made "too easy" -- and has pretty much all the other players cheering and playing tiny violins for them. Gone are the 40-man raids, and the ones that are still in the game have been rendered entirely obsolete thanks to all the Outland gear. The largest new raids in the game cap out at no more than twenty-five people, and even those are generally very straightforward affairs than can be completed in a couple of hours, at least so far.

While the actual number of players required has been brought down, the instances and raids themselves have gotten noticeably jacked up in terms of both difficulty and creativity. Just because you don't need as many people doesn't mean these things are any easier to actually complete; now it's simply feasible to actually find, say, nine other solid players for a Karazhan run as opposed to thirty-nine for Blackwing Lair.

In addition to being made more difficult and involving, they've also been made shorter and easier to get to. All the Outland instances are grouped together in hubs and increase in difficulty as you work through them (think Scarlet Monastery), and all are tied together with a specific theme in mind.

On the creative side of things, Blizzard has taken the complexity of some of the later raid dungeon bosses originally patched into the game and scaled them down to be applicable to five-mans, which results in some pretty wild boss fights that move well beyond your standard tank n' spank affair. One of the better examples is Blackheart the Inciter, a huge ogre boss with a particularly nasty (and amusing) trick up his sleeve. About thirty seconds into the fight, he'll stop attacking and call out "Time for fun!", at which point he casts an undispellable, unavoidable mind-control effect on the entire party and forces everyone to commence beating the hell out of each other. Hilarity ensues.

The two real standout instances in our opinion, which are nearly worth the price of admission to the expansion pack all by themselves, are Karazhan and The Caverns of Time. If you run nothing else, be sure to take a trip through them at least once.

Caverns of Time incorporates the rather brilliant idea of allowing you to re-play moments from the history of the Warcraft series by sending you and four other players back in time to key moments in history and re-living them in the first-person. So far there are three events to play through, though only two of them are really viable at this point. One is the opening of the original Dark Portal itself and amounts to a 30-minute long boss rush as you fend off temporal invaders trying to kill Medivh the Wizard before he can complete the spell that will bridge the worlds and open the gate. The other, easier-but-more-interesting quest is actually a throwback to the canceled Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans game, which told the story of Thrall the Orc Warchief. Though that game never came to pass, Blizzard incorporated the gist of it into Warcraft III's plot development. Here, though, you actually get to participate in a key moment of it -- Thrall's escape from Durnholde Keep, where he was held as a gladiator. You go in, bomb the Orc holding barracks, and spring a younger Thrall himself from prison in a full-on jailbreak. A real treat for anyone who keeps up with the game's story, and the whole thing can be done in an hour and change, minimizing the time requirement while managing to be more interesting than any of the original game's instances.

Karazhan, on the other hand, is a 10-man raid dungeon that takes a good long time and a lot of coordination to finish, but it's absolutely worth doing it. All the stops were pulled out for this one, and it shows. It's a massive tower (the original home of Medivh himself) full of ghosts, demons, giant mechanical constructs, and some of the most interesting and sometimes hilarious boss fights so far. Blizzard's been touting it as the crown jewel in the expansion, and it only takes a single trip in there to see why.

V.   PvP

The thing that's changed the least in the expansion (at least so far) is the Player-versus-Player experience. While a lot of changes have come about organically thanks to the class re-balancing and soforth, there is only a single new Battleground included with the expansion called Eye of the Storm. It plays as something of a cross between capture the flag and king of the hill, and is put together to ensure speedy games where turtling is virtually impossible. Anyone who's spent hours in a Warsong Gulch or Alterac Valley stalemate can definitely appreciate that, though it would've also been nice to see some updates to Warsong Gulch or Alterac Valley themselves to make them less prone to deadlocks.

The other large addition is the Arena System, where players can form dedicated teams from two to five players and be ranked as a team. The big benefit here is that it prevents (or at least stymies) repetitive honor farming to get the really good Battlegrounds Reward gear. It also goes a long way towards making the fights more fair, since you don't know who you're fighting in an area team until you see them, and only specially allowed potions and the like are usable in the area. Blizzard also claims that the matchmaking system takes the gear level of the participants into account, though this didn't really seem to be the case when we tried it. Either that needs some fine-tuning, or there simply aren't enough players in the arena system yet to always make good matches. Either way, it's nothing drastically wrong with it and arena fights can be good fun if you have a solid crew together.

There are also world-PvP objectives for each of the new areas of Outland, as well as a neutral city that can be controlled by either faction at any given time. If your faction controls the PvP objectives for that zone, you get a decent buff as long as you're there.

This is a cool idea in theory, but if you're on a server where the player balance is skewed heavily in favor of one faction or the other, it's virtually impossible to hang onto any objectives for long if you're on the smaller side no matter how hard you fight, and as a result these objectives just end up being ignored. This wasn't really a great idea back when Blizzard tried it out in a few areas of the original land mass before the patch, and while it's more prevalent here, it really isn't any more fun or useful because it has such a high chance of being impossibly unfair.

Luckily, none of the objectives are required, and there's no serious penalty for not having them at any given time, so if you're on a server where you're on the losing side, it's easy enough to just enjoy the benefits on the off times your faction has control, and ignore it when they don't.

There also remains the age-old complaint of class balance in PvP, and that's something that will probably never be fully balanced out. Hunters will their points in Beastmastery and Warlocks in general still have a vastly improved chance of surviving any encounter, and a mage getting the drop on you tends to spell certain death regardless. Paladins still take absolutely forever to kill, shamans are still insanely irritating to fight, and so on. Almost all the old complaints about the one-on-one PvP system remain -- It's a bit telling that there are no one-on-one arena fights allowed.

V.            Etcetera

So that's the good; is there any bad?

Yes, though it's all relatively minor.

Besides the usual PvP complaints (which it's pretty pointless to complain about anyway), the primary issue that springs to mind is that there are still a fair amount of minor bugs in the game. Some bosses will randomly reset themselves to full health if the group is standing in a weird spot, there have been numerous occasions of enemies spawning far below ground (so they're able to hit and kill you but you can't hit them back, and they can follow you anywhere including indoors), as well as a fairly common bug where the game will show an enemy at one location, but the server will report them at another. So you might see an enemy standing 20 feet to your left swinging wildly, and you're getting hit by it. Kill them, and you're unable to loot the corpse because the client and server are reporting it at two different locations. Logging out and logging back in fixes this, but it's still a pain, and it's been a couple of months now and it has yet to be fixed.

There have also been scattered reports of players logging out in one location, and logging back in in another, sometimes below the ground where they immediately plummet to an expensive death. Disconnecting while moving can also lock you out of the game for a few minutes until the server corrects your location.

None of this happened before the expansion hit, so it seems like it's just an engine bug or two that still needs to get ironed out.

There's also the debatable argument as to whether the game has been dramatically improved from the grind-heavy repetition that marked the endgame of the original. While a lot of these things have been streamlined -- you get reputation points running instances, you don't have to farm for it separately, for example -- there's still the fact that you have to grind for it, period, and that in and of itself is really little more than a time-consumption tactic.

It's quite minor here compared to other MMOs, however. It's even relatively minor compared to the non-expansion variant of WoW, so again, it's pretty hard to complain about that. Grinding is de riguer for every MMO in existence, so rather than complain about it here, it's better to point out that at least it's not as bad here as pretty much everywhere else.

Overall: 9/10