World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade

Release

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade was released at participating Electronics Boutique/EBGames stores across the USA and Australia, which opened their doors at midnight for fans to pick up their expansion packs within the first few minutes of the game's scheduled release date.

South Park

South Park's animated TV episode, Make Love, Not Warcraft was produced on the alpha server for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. The folks at Blizzard were very cooperative in assisting the animators in crafting the machinima that was filmed in-game. They even provided the model files and graphics so they could be altered and used for animation. The developers even used "The Sword of a Thousand Truths" as an actual weapon to be found in the game.

Trial Edition

In June 2007, Blizzard Entertainment Europe sent out a trial edition by mail to anyone who had a current paid subscription or had ever had a paid subscription to World of Warcraft, to try the expansion for free for 10 days. It requires to have the base game installed and offers limited functionality.

Players can start a new dranei or blood elf character and explore their new starting areas. An existing high level character (+58) can also be taken through the Dark Portal into the Outland. All expansion quests are available, as well as the items and skill advancements, but the characters cannot level beyond level 60. New skills such as jewelcrafting are also present, but players are not able to train new levels or certain recipes as the trainers are all located in the expansion zones. Pets can also be kept, and the characters count against the character limit (10 per realm, 50 per account). When the trial expires, the new characters become inaccessible but can be unlocked when the expansion is bought.

Awards

• Apple Design Awards
  • 2007 - Best OS X Game
• Games for Windows Magazine
  • March 2008 - #5 Game of the Year 2007
• GameSpy
  • 2007 – #7 Game of the Year
  • 2007 – #5 PC Game of the Year
  • 2007 – PC RPG of the Year (Readers' Vote)
• GameStar (Germany)
  • March 28, 2008 - Best PC Online RPG in 2007 (Readers' Vote)
• Golden Joystick Awards
  • 2007 - Online Game of the Year

Information also contributed by Agent 5, PCGamer77, Sciere, and Vaelor.