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World Of Warcraft Devs Reflect On MMO's Landmark First Expansion
Originally released 14 years ago in 2007 and now new again in World of Warcraft Classic with its re-launch today, June 1, The Burning Crusade was a landmark expansion for the MMO. The first expansion to the genre-defining game set the stage for what would come in the future in a variety of ways, and it left a lasting impact on Azeroth.To get more news about safe wow gold, you can visit lootwow.com official website.
As the first WoW expansion, a lot was riding on it--and it delivered. The expansion added the game's first new races--the Draenei and the Blood Elves--that shook up the meta, along with new zones, more PvP content, and much more.
The old is new again, as The Burning Crusade launched for WoW Classic today, allowing players to revisit vanilla TBC how they remember it all those years ago. Ahead of the launch, GameSpot spoke with Blizzard's Brian Birmingham (lead software engineer) and John Hight (executive producer for WoW and vice president at Blizzard), both of whom are veterans of the games studio who looked back and reflected on the launch and impact of The Burning Crusade.
They also told us what it's like to be revisiting the expansion with WoW Classic and they shared some behind-the-scenes stories from its development. The developers also touched on revisiting the expansion to bring it back for WoW Classic, temptations they had to change features and systems based on modern game development practices, and what they are most proud of from The Burning Crusade.
"It's such a massive game with so many little nooks and crannies. Our players have been great at pointing out places where we need to do further investigation," Birmingham said. "We dig in and really try to make sure that we can get things as correct as we possibly can. I'm really proud of the fact that we got this so close."
Brian Birmingham: I feel like one of the things that it really did was expose us to what it meant to have an expansion, which was to us so much like unlocking a new place to explore and new journeys to uncover. And this otherworldly space that you get to explore in Outland is just such an inviting and exciting place to go through. And some of those early raids, especially Karazhan, are some of my favorites and being able to deliver on that kind of promise of, "Hey, there's a new chapter, a new thing to go do." It was something that was really exciting about this expansion.
John Hight: WoW was so huge, just discovering it, exploring through it, you could feel the boldness of WoW when it first came out. How do you one-up that with an expansion? I think the imagination behind each of the zones, plus introducing some new races into your playable characters, was quite an incredible experience. I can remember that I had preconceived notions about what Burning Crusade would be, and they were much smaller than the reality of what it became and that excitement of crossing over through the Dark Portal...I tried to avoid knowing what I was going to see on the other side. I didn't play in the beta, so it was quite a treat.
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