This, in many ways, is the heart and soul of the new continent, and the largest single zone Blizzard has created to date. With no handholding questing indicators, adventurousness and good orienteering are still prerequisites, but once you've done your initial exploring, backtracking and tedious travel times are reduced.ДЄfter the two initial zones, players from both ends of the continent are led towards Dragonblight. The vast new zones are very liberally scattered with flight paths, even to the smallest settlements, and there are fewer neutral towns and common quest lines the division between Alliance and Horde was nebulous at best in Burning Crusade, but has been reinforced this time around. Luminescent, aurora-tinged skies are an ever-present feature. There's some inconvenience involved, but the ports have most services you need - and you feel very much like you're clinging to the edges of this new continent, pushing into it with your allies. Instead, you'll be returning to the main Alliance and Horde bases in Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, and from there using regular transports back to the mainlands to trade and train. Although there is a shortcut involving the services of a friendly mage, Blizzard is quite deliberately withholding any sense of being at home in Northrend from players Dalaran is mostly inaccessible until the mid-70s at the earliest. What you won't be doing is pressing straight on to the new capital city Dalaran, and establishing a base of operations there. If you're more bothered about a sense of the new than speedy progress, this is the place to be.

Overall, the Tundra seems less structured than Howling Fjord, but offers a more powerful, alien atmosphere that's quite distinct from anything in the game to date. This battle centres on the offshore island Coldarra and the Nexus dungeon, an obscenely pretty, crystalline structure containing some of the most breathtaking sights in WOW to date. You'll also encounter the mages of Dalaran here, and the first stages of the fight against the Blue Dragonflight and its mage hunters, who aim to stamp out all magic use from the world. Questing centres on the struggle with the wilderness and helping out the Tuskarr, the friendly and adorable race of walrus-men whose giant sea-turtle transports connect the Tundra and the Fjord via the vast Dragonblight zone between them. Friendly red dragon reclines in the Borean Tundra.Д«orean Tundra is a vast, open expanse of coastline, windswept moorland and hot springs, more thinly populated than Howling Fjord, but more easily navigable.

The fight focuses on the struggle with the warlike Vrykul. Despite the zone's size, it's efficiently crammed around the spectacular, intimidating Utgarde where it plunges from the Fjord's high cliff-tops to the sea. Howling Fjord is home to the lowest-level dungeon - Vrykul fortress Utgarde Keep, quite reminiscent of Hellfire Ramparts - and it arguably has the more densely-packed, sophisticated and rewarding quest lines. But the choice between them isn't an easy one. The twin starting zones at the eastern and western extremities of Northrend, Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, are already well-documented. More so than the Burning Crusade's Outland, more so even than some of classic WOW's two landmasses, the new continent of Northrend has been created as a journey. With its huge, exquisitely crafted play-fields, minimal instancing or invisible walls, and insistence on lengthy real-time travel, it always has been. But there's one area in which WOW has always been uncompromising: travel and exploration. Furthermore, there's the controversial move to make all high-end raids accessible to teams of just ten players. In Blizzard's enthusiasm to clean the slate and put every player back on a level playing field for the expansion, early Lich King quests shower you in gear that easily replaces all but the best Burning Crusade equipment. Could the next WOW expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, go any further?

Warhammer Online has stripped things back even further, with instant respawns, easy teleportation around the world map, and content carefully sculpted into a non-stop waterslide of experience points. That's what MMO veterans of EverQuest and its ilk like to call World of Warcraft, and to some extent - when it comes to death penalties, ease of soloing and generous quest rewards - they're right.

Howling fjord vs borean tundra