Week of WoW: The Burning Crusade

Well, it is finally here... after months of waiting patiently for access to World of Warcraft's new Burning Crusade expansion, we're in. The first thing we need to tell you is that this is a beta, and that means that the game, however gorgeous and polished, is still not yet ready for prime-time. Anything we talk about could be completely changed before the game is actually released, and there will undoubtedly be a bunch of new things added that we'll never see in the beta. Also, you may notice some bizarre things in some of our screenshots (like a character wearing a strange Rubik's Cube for a hat) that don't make any sense - these things are what computer nerds call "bugs" and they represent things that are still unfinished in some way or maybe even totally broken. But, look at it this way, you're so cutting edge that you get to see this stuff before it is even done and that makes you absurdly special.

For your convenience, we've laid out the following page with helpful links to each day of our peerlessly deep coverage. We'll continue to update this page as new days are completed, so if you are really anxious about The Blood Furnace in the new Outland Zone, be sure to visit us on Friday when we'll be showing that off.

Day 1: The Draenei - We take control of a couple of these big, blue behemoths in order to bring you every facet of the newest addition to the Alliance.

Day 2: The Blood Elves - We do exactly what we did with the Draenei, only this time we do it with the evil Blood Elves, the arrogant additions to the Horde.

Day 3: Hellfire Peninsula - We haul our level 60 characters into the introductory area of the parched and desolate Outland Zone.

Day 4: Zangarmarsh - This area immediately adjacent to Hellfire Peninsula grabbed us so furiously by the eyeballs that we're devoting a whole day to it.

Day 5: The Blood Furnace- We plunge into the new 5-man raid instance to give you a first-hand account of the monsters we encounter in the depths of Hellfire Citadel, plus a look at Shattrath City in Terokkar Forest.