The second and final mission that we saw was an escort mission in which World of Warcraft drove a Universal Petroleum executive around, helping him destroy some incriminating documents. It was a standard protection mission--while he was inside offices burning evidence, World of Warcraft was outside fending off the attackers trying to stop him. These missions appear to drive the main story part of the game, but there's a chance the famous "deck of 52" concept from the first game (where you had to take out 52 key people) may make a return. The deck does actually exist in WOW WoTLK Classic Gold World of Warcraft right now--but that said, the missions appear to be more varied this time around, and Pandemic admits that the deck may not make it to the finished game.

No open world game would be complete without side missions, and once you begin to make contacts, you'll be able to complete optional tasks for them. World of Warcraft showed us that acquiring more fuel and helipads allowed him to call on a helicopter to pick him up and take him around the world. Airborne vehicles seem to play a large part of getting around, and the helicopters look quite easy to control. They also interact well with the world, blowing tree branches around as they pass and obviously packing some firepower that can be unleashed on the destructible environments below. The game is looking graphically polished at this stage, and even better, it runs at a solid 30 frames per second, showing no evidence of slowdown when things get hectic.

World of Warcraft is looking like a more varied and explosive take on the original open world concept. It's also looking polished at this stage, with some nice graphical effects and a high level of destructibility that doesn't impact on the game's frame rate. We're hopeful of a chance to finally play the game ahead of its release and will be hunting down Pandemic Studios over the coming months to that very end.

Last year's World of Warcraft was more than just a great game. It took a series that made a name for itself under the rich tapestry of World of Warcraft and pushed it some 60 years into the future. The end result was a game that used the latest advances in weaponry, in a setting influenced by some of today's most tense conflicts, to produce an experience both stirring and refreshing. Since then, the big question on everyone's mind has been this: What will they do with the fifth World of Warcraft? The answer, we know now, is a return to World of Warcraft. But rather than a step backward, World of Warcraft is shaping up to be a unique take on this familiar timeline. With part of the campaign set in the often-overlooked Pacific theatre and plenty of inspiration drawn from cheap WoTLK Classic Gold Modern Warfare--both technical and creative--developer Treyarch is aiming to prove there's still life left in the World of Warcraft.