'The Burning Crusade' Attacks at Midnight

At a wisp past the stroke of twelve tonight, in boroughs scattered like seeds throughout the realm where humans and beasts alike share free parking, shopkeepers and merchants will unlock their gates and conduct business under the moonlight. "The Burning Crusade" will at last begin, and players of the ingenious and massively successful role-playing game will have their first chance to finally, after years of torment, upgrade their "60" characters to "70s."

All right, so I'm a little rusty with my gothic literary motifs. In any event, at three Fry's Electronics locations in Sunnyvale, Fountain Valley, and Anaheim, and at the GameStop location in Universal City, developers of the most anticipated expansion package in the history of multi-player games will be on hand late tonight to sign the first copies of "World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade."

Meanwhile, already in Europe, the earliest adopters are already forming lines in front of software boutiques, for what could conceivably be called "That 70s Show."

You see, up until this point, 60 has represented the highest experience level a character in WoW could attain. With only a 60, there's only so far a character can go...and that's by design. As BetaNews' own engineer Eric Steil explained to this particular newbie, a character such as his -- a level-60 male Tauren druid -- might not necessarily be the most well-outfitted. The reason, Eric says, is because he only has time to be a casual player, limited to just a few meager hours of gameplay per day. (Something about a job.)

But there's certain "end-game" content that up until tonight has been limited only to characters who attain level 60, regardless of how well outfitted they are. Once a character is at or near that level, it can communicate with one of the many "envoys" that pervade the game - a non-player character, or NPC - asking permission for teleportation to a raid mission where he might put his new-found skills to use. There, he might also have the opportunity to win some of the armor or fine cutlery that he probably needed going into the raid in the first place.

Eric's World of Warcraft character mounting his trusty...uh, steed, about to beseech an envoy for entry into the "Eye of the Storm" - forbidden up to now.

With tonight's release of "The Burning Crusade," some of the math changes. "The whole expansion seems to be designed to open up more of the content to the casual players," Eric told me. "None of the instances are doing the full 40-man raids anymore, they've limited it to 25 people. My understanding is they also set it up so that you don't have to devote eight hours to a single raid, like the high-end content is now."

So it will be easier for players who have lower-than-60 characters to set up the scenarios they need to build experience, honor, and armor plating. Plus, the game will stop punishing players who only have two hours to spend on one stretch. It took just over two years for Eric to build up his sixth character to the level where it could approach an envoy and even ask for a passage into the forbidden Eye of the Storm battleground - forbidden, that is, until tonight.

"Overall, in a way the expansion is more of the same, but I like how they're trying to make it more open to the casual players as well as the hardcore players," said Eric, his Tauren druid armor hanging at his side for a moment. "They've even added an option to the new instances to switch them into 'heroic' difficulty, for the hardcore players to redo them at 70 and make them more challenging."

What this may mean, from the way Eric describes it, is that players all over the WoW realm may actually be heading back to some of the existing realms, now that certain raids are limited to 25 characters rather than 40, to build up their armor (picking up "epics," to use the lexicon) so that they can approach the newer battlegrounds later with something that can more readily withstand the blast.

"I'm looking forward to hopefully not being so far behind everyone else in my guild at leveling up," said Eric, meaning now he doesn't have to repeat some of the lower levels, seemingly endlessly, using up those precious free-time minutes not spent keeping BetaNews from collapsing. Many players have more time to run even lower levels repeatedly, building up their experience more slowly (in real time) but incrementally, even if it means defeating lesser characters with ease, just to get ready for the end-game instances - a process called "farming."

This weekend, you might not have to be a farmer to get ahead any more.

However, many players may opt for Eric's strategy: build up characters to the new maximum level of 70 before attacking even the current end-game content. "The current end-game stuff I might actually see after hitting 70," he says, "since a full 40-man raid group won't be required to have a small chance of killing the boss - that stuff is very hard and very time consuming as it is."

The biggest new addition to the realm of WoW is an entirely new continent, which in terms of the virtual realm, is likely to be the planet's biggest tourist attraction this weekend. "I think I'm going to be heading to Outland as soon as I can after I get the box tomorrow," Eric told me, "even though for the next week or so the first areas in Outland and the new race starting areas are going to be flooded with people.

"Of course, that assumes that a) the servers stay up," he added, "and b) their Web site stays up so you can put the key in for the expansion." As it stands today, Eric's having a difficult enough time logging onto the account management page.

With the expansion pack preparing to sell for a suggested retail of about $40, for every "small" 25-man guild required to go on an epic raid, retailers will reap $1,000. Multiply that by the number of guilds that wreak havoc in the WoW realm, and "The Burning Crusade's" weekend revenue might look more like something attributed to box office receipts.