World of Warcraft Expansion Pack Review

By Nathan Bruce
BHS News

The new expansion for World of Warcraft has been announced. There are many new additions including new character models, a level cap increase to 100 and a number crunch. First the character models; WoW has been using the same models for over nine years. This is a necessary update because the community grew sick of the same horrible look of my characters. In the most recent expansion they added Pandaren as a new race; the facial structure had more polygons (complexity) than some earlier models entire body. With the new Dwarf models had 1,160 polygons; the new models have 7,821 polygons. This makes the characters and their animations look smoother.

Along with the character models they have added ten levels. This stands out because the past two expansions have only increased by five levels. This gives people even more hope for this expansion because leveling from ninety to one hundred will provide more gameplay. They have said they want to get away from the boring tedious feel while leveling up.

Blizzard has decided it would be in their best interest to give a number crunch. This means that they are scaling the numbers down. Instead of the raid doing 1,000,000 damage per second to a 600,000,000 HP boss (600,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 600 seconds to kill) a raid would do something like 1,000 damage per second to a 600,000 HP boss (600,000 / 1,000 = 600 seconds to kill). Even though we all love our big numbers this change is positive. This will bring back good memories of a previous expansion Wrath of the Lich King; it had great gameplay and lore.

Also, they are allowing you to level any character to ninety, this benefits everyone. Say your friend was on a different server and you want to play with him/her, you can instantly have a level ninety and quickly get into the action. You might even just get bored of leveling so you can use it on a character you don’t quite feel like playing all the way. Blizzard has also said they will put a guide for people using this feature so bad players aren’t ruining the community.

Most people are excited for these additions but many people are weary about the concept of going back in time to alter the present day. All in all this expansion is going to add many things people of the community have wanted. The best part of this expansion is going to be the free level ninety character.