World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Previews and Trailers

There’s still a lot of new content surfacing from last weekend’s BlizzCon, including two previews and a couple of “zone tour” trailers for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

We’ll start off with Kotaku’s preview:

Where The Lost Isles are sunny and cheerful, Gilneas is dark and bleak. There’s still the same sort of verticality to the playfield, with hills rolling a bit more than hills had rolled previously, but all in all it’s a very familiar looking place. Think Darkshire and you’re heading in the right direction.

Perhaps if I had tried the Worgen first I would have been a bit more impressed, but after the bright, humorous Goblin experience, the Worgen just felt like a bit of a letdown. It felt less like an exciting new race, and more like humans in furry outfits. In fact, one of their racial abilities lets you shift back and forth between human and Worgen, which means you essentially are a human in a furry outfit, albeit one that can run very fast for 10 seconds at a time on a 3-minute cooldown timer. Another new race that should give rogues even more ways to run away. It could just be that the excitement from levels 1-5 was more necessary to the Worgen experience than Blizzard expected. I suppose we will find out sometime next year.

And finish things off with IncGamers’ preview:

A brand new secondary Profession, Archaeology, will also be introduced, giving players another way to customise and improve their characters. By unearthing and studying artefacts, players can unlock additional Glyph slots, new profession recipes, paths in the ‘Paths of the Titans’ system, money and other items such as mini pets. Not much more is known about this profession at this time, but it’s bound to be popular.

There was some big news for guilds; a new guild advancement system is being brought in that will benefit players who are part of a guild. In Cataclysm, everything a guild member does will go towards the advancement of their guild. Things like completing battlegrounds, raiding and heroics will improve the guild’s standing, accumulating guild experience points and gaining points in its talent tree. There will be 20 levels that a guild can progress through, unlocking abilities such as a group resurrection spell and guild heirloom item recipes.