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Blizzard's Boxing for Azeroth dropped last calendar week, launching Globe of Warcraft'due south seventh expansion and sending players off in search of new lands to explore and a ways of attacking i another. E'er since WoW launched in 2004, players accept chosen to marshal themselves with one of ii factions: the noble, good-hearted Alliance, whose troops and soldiers take born the brunt of the assaults on Azeroth, or the scheming, treacherous Horde.

In lore, the ii factions are quite different, simply these differences are largely smoothed-over in gameplay terms, with Blizzard removing nigh, if not all, of the race-specific class spells. Outside of world PvP or Battlegrounds (custom small-calibration maps intended for PvP engagements), most players could feel the "conflict" between the Horde and Brotherhood entirely within PvE quests and bosses. In that location have too been a number of cases where the Horde and Alliance cooperated to take down raid boss targets neither faction could take killed alone. Upward until now, if you wanted to ignore the fact that a factional disharmonize existed at all, y'all more-or-less could.

With Battle for AzerothSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce, all of that changed. The Horde, under the leadership of the Forsaken banshee Sylvanas Windrunner, launched a fell, unprovoked assault on the Night Elf capital of Teldrassil, burning the neat Globe Tree to the ground. Players on both sides were genuinely outraged, as this calculated deed of mass murder went beyond annihilation we'd seen in-game, including the Cataclysm-era bombing of Theramore (Theramore, dissimilar Teldrassil, was not the majuscule of an entire race). By the fourth dimension the Brotherhood made its counterattack, millions of Alliance players were itching for payback — very much including me. Battle for Azeroth promises a story and game mechanics that give individual players a reason to care about the factional conflict.

TeldrassilBurning

Teldrassil called-for, along with all the NPCs nosotros couldn't salve. The game deliberately gave you lot hundreds of NPCs to rescue and an incommunicable timer to do it with.

The opening beats of the story, at least for the Alliance, involve Jaina Proudmore, a leading NPC in the serial since Warcraft III. In the Frozen Throne expansion for that game, a much younger Jaina killed her father, Admiral Daelin Proudmore, when he attempted to atomic number 82 an unprovoked attack on the Horde. In response, the island nation of Kul Tiras (which the Proudmore family led) withdrew from the Brotherhood. Now, with war between the Alliance and Horde truly joined and the Alliance still badly weakened past the events of the previous expansion, Jaina must render home to her family unit and face the judgment of her people, while attempting to convince them to rejoin an Alliance they left out of a profound sense of betrayal.

Drustvar. Nothing creepy hither. Nope.

The game gives y'all iii areas to choose from when beginning your quest and I've chosen Drustvar. It'southward a solid pick — I'm articulatio genus-deep in searching for the culprits behind attacks on multiple villages. The entire quest chain is delightfully creepy, with a solid nuance of HP Lovecraft tossed into the mix. Leveling is fast, the art is gorgeous, and the music is easily some of the best WoW has ever fielded. The new Daughter of the Sea theme may non have the haunting beauty of Anduin's Theme from Legion, merely it's a tune I've found myself humming multiple times in the past few weeks. But so far — and I have to stress that I'thou but a bit into the expansion — it feels a bit as if that initial narrative thread in which we swore bloody vengeance on the Horde has gotten a bit side-tracked.

"Visit Kul Tiras," they said. "It'll be fun," they said. WELL I'K JUST HAVING A PORKLOAD OF FUN.

There are absolutely some nods towards the factional conflict congenital into the gameplay mechanics, including a new War Mode y'all can enable in a capital letter city that gives an XP bonus and is intended to give players a reason to enable PvP. There'due south besides a new gameplay mode, known equally Warfronts, that we'll talk over in the actual game review, one time they've gone live. But so far, Battle for Azeroth doesn't experience much unlike than the expansion that came before it. That's not a negative — Legion's storytelling and cinematography were both incredibly stiff and the new game continues to deliver. There are also iii areas you unlock to visit non long after the new campaign starts. Combat in all three is explicitly hostile territory and the game does give yous a more PvP-centric expanse to play through, should you wish to do and then — but if you lot were hoping for more massive prepare pieces to instantly leap into along the lines of the called-for of Teldrassil or the Alliance's counter strike against the Undercity, you lot may exist disappointed.

But not me. I've got curses to intermission, noble houses to investigate, and blades to sharpen. Sooner or afterward, Sylvanas Windrunner is going to pay for what she'due south done. I'd have liked to take seen Blizzard continue the PvP theme flowing in a more than impactful style throughout the entire expansion, only by hitting PvE content now, you can be ready for the first Warfronts when they open in early September.

Now Read: Earth of Warcraft No Longer Requires Game Buy, Battle for Azeroth Arrives August 14, and Earth of Warcraft Subscriptions Surge Thanks to Legion Expansion