World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade - Launch Event and Collector's Edition Pictures

World of Warcraft is a phenomenon that spiraled out of control and not even Blizzard or Vivendi could have anticipated the sheer number of players that chose to join the realms since its initial release in 2004. It was only natural that Blizzard had in mind an expansion pack for quite some time even if it's obvious they can't support the number of existent players (hence the limited number of expansion sets on the market and the huge demand for the new title).

The latest growth in the rank of WoW players, reaching now more than 8 million subscribers all over the world, has determined the launch of "The Burning Crusade" on 16th January. Unlike other publishers that are launching games separately in different parts of the world, Blizzard has chosen to make the release last night, world-wide. I am confident that we would have seen some serious lynching if one part of the world have would played the next expansion and the other one would have read articles about it.

For the true fans, a Collector's edition has been released and actually sold by preorder from August and earlier, but we were fortunate enough to receive one so we'll be sharing the contents for you. The contents are no mystery for any WoW player but we'll list them anyway. They are as follows:

- Expansion Set: The Burning Crusade (PC and Mac);
- Inside "The Burning Crusade": Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes DVD;
- Collector's Edition Soundtrack;
- The Art of The Burning Crusade: 208 pages of art, featuring never-before seen images;
- World of Warcraft Trading Card Game;
- Exclusive In-Game Pet (Netherwhelp);
- Outland Mouse Pad.

We urge the fans not to undertake any desperate measures when seeing the following pictures and we advise them to take a breath of fresh air if any suffocation symptoms may appear. We promise to come back with a review as soon as humanly (or dwarvish) possible.





Photo: Tudor Raiciu for Softpedia.com