Blizzard hits home run with 'World of Warcraft' expansion
Within 24 hours of its release, 2.8 million people bought "World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King." Servers had waits of nearly an hour to get online as new users and renewed accounts flooded in to check out the changes. Popularity doesn't always indicate high quality, but Blizzard has once again shown itself worthy of the adoration of millions of players nationwide by delivering more of everything they have come to love along with new elements, zones and character options to keep players busy for countless hours.
Following the tradition of its first expansion, "The Burning Crusade," "Wrath of the Lich King" again requires players to enter a new realm where a great evil is preparing for war. This time it's Northrend, home of Arthas, the Lich King and a variety of other new races, creatures, quests and breathtaking scenery.
The temperature might be arctic, but Northrend is far from a uniformly barren wasteland. The world includes hidden vibrant glades, perpetually burning forests and deep gorges where unseen voices whisper strange and discouraging things to you. The new mage city of Dalaran is appropriately grand and comes packaged with its own seedy underground economy in the sewers. You can befriend delicate sylvan creatures and jovial potbellied walrus men.
But beyond the cosmetics, the game also adds a lot of new elements to play. You'll still find plenty of the old standbys when it comes to questing (go kill this, collect this, etc.) but players will also get to use a new mount-based combat system to ride dragons breathing fire upon their enemies, drive around siege weapons and steal horses to ride to their allies. The quests range in difficulty from entertaining but easy to surprisingly hard as you have to avoid other siege weaponry and small armies trying to overwhelm you.
Another new element for "World of Warcraft" is integrated cut scenes. One of the most impressive quest chains of the expansion culminates in an amazing scene using graphics previously just reserved for previews that lends it an even more epic feel. The game has also addressed one of the often ridiculed flaws of the environment, that no matter what your character does, things don't change. Now depending on different quests you have accomplished a peaceful town may begin to appear as a blighted landscape crawling with monsters.
A huge amount of new content has been added for characters to explore on their journey to hit the new level cap of 80. Along with hundreds of quests in the world there are more than a dozen new instances to raid complete with gorgeous settings, impressive adversaries and, of course, upgraded loot. Players who have spent a large amount of time tackling endgame content before Wrath will find leveling and many of the early instances incredibly easy as they are normalized for new, poorly geared characters. The result is that you can plow through a lot of the beginning content or take your time depending on your play style to explore, build reputation with all the new factions offering up great rewards and work on advancing professions with a multitude of new recipes. There's also a surprisingly addictive achievement system that has players running around doing goofy activities from fishing for coins in fountains to hugging squirrels.
The expansion also introduces the first new class since its original release, death knights who are sworn agents of the Lich King. The class uses a new means of casting spells through runic power, building up reserves through fighting rather than having them drain away through use. Combined with special debuffs they apply to enemies and having to track three different types of runes, they are a complex but satisfying new addition to the game. Since you can't leave until the starting area is complete, it's a really good thing it's so much fun, featuring appropriately evil tasks assigned to you by Arthas, including running down and slaughtering crying peasants.
Their starting zone is instanced, keeping any other players from trying to take advantage of the new characters until they've gotten to know the system a little better. People who want to fight other players might not be able to spend all their time killing new death knights, but they can still be satisfied with a new zone for player-versus-player combat, new daily PVP quests and a new battleground.
Overall, anyone who found something to love in "World of Warcraft" before will find a lot more to get them excited in "Wrath of the Lich King." Blizzard has shown that it is willing and capable to put in the effort to continue to produce a fantastic product worthy of the adoration of its fans and one that even people who have never logged in before can respect.
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
Genre: MMORPG
Platform: PC, Mac