I hope everyone is having a happy Halloween.
Let me touch on The Burning Crusade for a moment.
Some people misunderstood my comment about Blizzard being lazy declaring the Blood Elves as the new Horde race. It has nothing to do with the Blood Elves as denizens of Azeroth. I know full well they were in Warcraft 3.
My problem (well, part of my problem) is that they are the exact same character models as the Night Elves. They just shrunk them, rotated the ears, and swapped the color palatte. From the screenshots, the Blood Elves even appear to have the exact same hairstyle options as the Night Elves.
That is what strikes me as lazy. That they couldn’t be bothered to create a new body type, because that would mean they’d have to remodel all existing armor and textures to fit the new race. I would not be at all surprised now, if they just too Tauren models, changed the feet hands and heads, and called them Pandarens for the Alliance,
Because you’d think that when you have the #1 game in the world and make as much money as that, you could afford to put a little bit of variety into the race selection. Model-wise, at least.
Also, I don’t feel that “we though the Horde needed a pretty race” (a quote from Blizzard) was a valid justification. It’s The HORDE. They don’t need to be pretty. Not to even get into the fact that, at least on paper, the Blood Elf racial trait seems wildly overpowered.
But regardless, there is a lot of cool stuff coming with the expansion. New zones, new instances, higher level cap. All pretty standard with MMO expansions, but very welcome nonetheless.
Slotted items sounds pretty cool but I’m willing to be that only items found in the new areas will have slots, which strikes me as a little cheesy. And if it’s the case, it will really limit the usefulness of the jewelcrafting profession for a while. But we’ll see.
Gripes aside, I will without a doubt be pre-ordering the expansion, because it is, after all, more World of Warcraft.