World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade review

The two new races, Blood Elves (Horde) and Draenei (Alliance) are everywhere in the outlands with new cities and reputation factions - with corresponding quests. This time, you will be asked to choose a faction to gain reputation with, and once chosen, you will lose reputation with the other. We highly recommend the tour of Shattrath City, with a summoned creature as your guide. Blizzard's take on the "we're walking, we're walking... we're stopping" is hilarious.

As races to play, we will have to see. From their racial passive abilities, the Blood Elves seem built to overpower all the other races, hands down - even if their jokes are the worst. Seeing how the new races and the new classes - an Alliance Shaman and a Horde Paladin - work with the new end game content will have to wait for some brave soul to level one to 70. Which, considering, may be tomorrow.

Quests follow a logical and intuitive line and led us from area to area seamlessly. So, while slightly overwhelming, we soon found that by following one quest it would soon merge into another. There were so many players around that monsters and baddies were tough to find, having usually been slaughtered the second they appeared (and still are, we imagine, and will be for the next few weeks) but Blizzard did an admirable job handling the respawn rate. That said, occasionally we found that it glitched, causing enemies to regroup so quickly we died under the never-ending waves of mobs. Player behavior when vying for the right to kill the next group of enemies was shocking at times - whoever said competition brings out the best in people hasn't ever camped a named mob in Hellfire Peninsula.

Drop rates on the gathering quests still tend to be unbearably bad, so you'll have to kill a ton of various foes before their corpses will yield the item you need to complete your misison. And for those of us playing Alliance, we have two words: Fei Fei. Quite possibly the worst quest ever, in the history of all games. Whoever concocted that nightmare, all we have to say is: Bad game designer. Very, very, very bad game designer. No treat for you!