The Burning Crusade: how not to make a game expansion

[Valour]

Usually an expansion pack to an existing game is a way of adding to the existing material with the hope that people who have played the original game all the way through will rekindle their interest through the expansion. This has been done successfully in the past with successful expansions like WW2: 1946 for Aces of the Pacific; the many official and unofficial add-ons, maps, and game modifications for the Unreal Tournament series; Warcraft II and III's expansions; and the Grand Theft Auto and Halo add-ons and expansions. With a wide range of successful projects to take lessons from, you'd think that the usually outstanding production team at Blizzard Entertainment would have thought a little more carefully before going ahead with World of Warcraft's first expansion pack, The Burning Crusade. Don't get me wrong -- it's got a lot of great qualities, and if you have been playing WoW for more than a year, TBC was practically a revelation. But the purpose of an expansion pack is to enhance or build upon a game, not to invalidate or otherwise trample on it, thereby ruining the original WoW content for new players. Unfortunately, The Burning Crusade did exactly that. Below is a list of the major new features in TBC, how they wrecked World of Warcraft, and some suggestions for repairing the damage.

The Burning Crusade: how not to make a game expansion