by Byron Mudry on Feb 03, 2007
Here is another review of the Burning Crusade launch. This time with a real sense of humour. Despite reading many other reviews already, I like this persons take on it, it's well worth the read!
Most games are static; MMOs are epochal. The World I once knew -- the World that set a million lives on the road to ruin in November of 2004 -- died sometime around April of 2005. A sea of change swallowed up the golden !s and ?s, replacing them with Scholomance pick-up groups, Emperor runs, and icy phrases like "my six-item tier zero set bonus." That second game died several months later, supplanted by one of resistance-gear farming and strenuous raid encounters that stopped just short of requiring on-the-fly calculus. Group dynamics, guilds, and military coordination -- ideas that barely existed in the November 2004 incarnation of World of WarCraft -- suddenly revealed themselves to be the very core of Blizzard's MMO to end all MMOs. "Life begins at level 60," the message boards warned -- and they weren't kidding.
In January 2007, that third game died, too -- sucked away through a big swirly green aperture and off into the twisting nether.
You can read all about it here.