World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Previews

Blizzard’s ambitious World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion pack is the subject of two new previews on the web. The first is at Eurogamer:

Raids are being downsized, with the endgame focus shifting from 40 man encounters to 25 – slightly easing the organisational nightmares of the large raiding guilds. It will also be slightly easier for smaller groups to receive better loot, with 5 man dungeons receiving a ‘hard mode’ – rewarding brave adventurers with more powerful items. For those more interested in raising their PvP honour, new arenas are to be opened, where much smaller teams can battle it out, gangs of two, three or five, in some as-yet unseen sporting events. And the last thing to get excited about in this little round-up, are the… flying mounts. Oh yes, baby. And they’ll be necessary for accessing some of the highest-level dungeons. As well as making people with only rubbish horses want to cry as they save up.

While the second is over at Internode Games Network:

There are some great new quests in this zone and some nice new game mechanics. My favourite so far is the “bombing runs” on demon camps using wyverns.

In this quest chain you travel along a wyvern flight paths and drop bombs on to structures and demons below. The 1st of these quests has you destroy two cannons used by the Burning Legion, the follow up has you dropping several bombs on a throng of demons on a nearby peninsula.