World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Previews

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion pack is the subject of two more previews, and this time they’re over at Ten Ton Hammer and AtomicGamer.

From TTH:

The new leveling zones for current level capped players will be similar in style to WotLK with two choices for a starting zone with the choices being Mt. Hyjal or The Sunken City of Vashj’ir, the latter of which will be home to a new sentient cat like race. Players will then be filtered into what looks like the main leveling zone of Deephome, which is located inside the Elemental Plane of Earth. Once through Deephome most players will be on to Uldum and then finally to Twilight Highlands. Once again, the ability to fly has a level cap restriction which was hinted to be 85, but nothing concrete on that yet. The upside is that once you do unlock flying you will be able to fly everywhere in the game and they do mean everywhere, Undercity is being completely revamped to allow flight (think roof caving in due to the cataclysm) as are all the capital cities.

And a snip from AG:

As far as talents go, Blizzard’s not going to be extending the talent tree past 51 points, and instead will be redoing the talents entirely and giving players more points so they can get further into each tree. They’ve got a new advancement system that’ll tag onto the Glyphs – it’s called Paths, and it’s based on the titans that created Azeroth. Many of the path-based bonuses shown were just examples, but they will be general increases rather than being tightly class-based and often help people in your party or raid as well as your own performance.

Blizzard’s also committed to giving high-level players more to do right from the start. For raiding guilds, Lich King felt particularly unfinished when it was released as it only had one major raid dungeon – a recycled one that felt old and archaic, even for players that had never stepped foot in it before – and a couple of separate raid bosses. Serious raiders had all of these encounters pretty much cleaned out within weeks, then spent several months waiting for Blizzard to catch up. With Cataclysm, Blizzard is committed to giving players much more right from the start, with multiple new raid zones ready upon release along with plenty of dungeons.