WoW fans celebrate Burning Crusade

WoW fans have been frothing at the mouth with all new content released in the latest expansion, Burning Crusade. Could you play 28 hours straight though? More info on the first player to hit Lvl 70…

Despite being a simple upgrade to an already established game – albeit one with 8 million paying subscribers worldwide – Brad Harker, EB Games’s director of stores for Australia and New Zealand, said it was the largest launch of a PC game in the last 12 months.

“The last title that released on this scale was Halo 2 on Xbox,” he said.

And though fire-breathing dragons and treasure hunts are typically associated with children, the most rabid fans of the online fantasy world are adults.

Although WoW is frequently described as a “game”, interviews with players and endless news reports suggest that it is more of an alternative life than an occasional sidetrack. Players frequently spend 50 hours a week in the virtual world – often on top of a regular full-time job – but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

One of the game’s new features was to raise the level cap from 60 to 70. Most experienced players had suggested it would take a number of months at least to achieve the goal.

Gullerbone, a 24-year-old French WoW player, reached level 70 at 4:04 am (CET) on January 17, 2007. He is believed to be the world’s first. The fact that a player has managed to reach level 70 so fast will not please developers Blizzard, who had hoped to see the Burning Crusade occupy fans for at least a year.

When asked if he alone played the character non stop for 28 hours, Gullerbone said: “I sure did. I slept from two to 10pm on Monday (woke up two hours before TBC launch), so the physical preparation was a part of the plan.”

Source: SMH, Pro-G

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