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I love feeling the Wrath of the Lich King

Greg Dewar
The Commuter

Monday, November 17, 2008

Photo by Flickr - nomacnolife
Photo by Flickr - nomacnolife

A metal-bound icebreaker cruises softly through the calm waters in a deteriorating mist. The subtlety of icebergs present themselves, cropping up like diminutive mountains in the coastal sea. Then there is silence, all but for the hum of the sternwheeler’s engines, and the sloshing of water, the crack of ice striking the hull. An angular and stern face, that of a scout tower, is sighted over the bow! Heroes and warfighters rush to the prow of the ship to look on in angst: Northrend has just been sighted. The ironclad erupts into a living state with a flurry of activity as players prepare to disembark at the dock. Chatter buzzes in the air, wafting to and fro in the mist as the ship leans to make it’s final approach to the dock. A lurid few cannot wait (myself included) and leap headlong into the icy water; our magnanimously heavy armor weighing us down. It is not enough to stop us. In one fashion or another, the treads of our boots kiss the gravelly sand of Northrend. We are here, and level 80 isn’t far off.
Screenshot by Gregory Dewar. Spoiling too much would prove nothing, so I won’t spoil much in this article except Dalaran. And I won’t mince words, because this is taking away from my time playing World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King. WoW:WotLK is fucking amazing. That being said, I’ll tell you a little about it. The quests are much more varied than in The Burning Crusade(BC), WoW’s first expansion. You’ll find yourself doing anything from assisting the red dragonflight to using a gryphon to pick up wounded civilians from a War Zone with the Scourge. It keeps it interesting and takes the “grind” to 80 out of it. Very rarely does an NPC ask you go out and kill 10 of “X” creature. And collection quests seem to be spiced up finding new ways to do the same old gag: whether it’s collecting things off of randomly spawning corpses, or berries off hard to find bushes.
Screenshot by Gregory Dewar. PvP vociferously turns out a new battleground involving a defense and attack siege mission to take the enemy team’s artifact or to protect it, flip-flopping roles as sides win. This carries into the new world PvP zone, Wintergrasp, in which a side takes the fortress of Wintergrasp and then defends it every two and a half hours. The side that has it then has to defend it again. Owning Wintergrasp gives you access to PvP vendors and quests otherwise not accessible in the game. It feels like Alterac Valley used to in it’s epic days, before it turned into a short grind for battleground marks. Battles last forty minutes and are insanely fun. One of the siege engines requires two people: one to drive and one to man the gun at the back. Instances thus far are shorter and have less “trash mobs” to grind through to get to the bosses. The instances seem to have easier to complete quests, better rewards, more voice acting and more story than in BC or classic WoW. I can’t speak for the 25-player raids as I haven’t done any yet. One thing in WotLK really stands out above all the rest: the city of Dalaran. It picked up and moved from it’s protective bubble nestled between the Alterac Mountains and Lordaeron into the Crystalsong Forest of Northrend. Huge purple spires rise up into sky of the floating city fortress only accessible through flight, portal, summoning, battleground exit, or rune portal. It comes complete with a bar in it’s sewers that includes all the arena NPCs, as well as the ability to climb one of the spires of the citadel and look down on the city. The streets are filled with a variety of shops selling all kind of wonderment, including a three-person mount, a toy train set, the Tier 6 and 7 vendors, and the general epic level 80 gear vendors. New are bind on account items that scale with levels, that you may trade between different characters on the same account that show some familiar fare from classic WoW, such as the Ancient Bone Bow, the Heartseeker, the Headmaster’s Staff, Herod’s Shoulder, and many more!
Screenshot by Gregory Dewar. I was most impressed in WotLK by the lore. The game seems to finally carry on the saga that was setup for a finale in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. No more space travel, aliens, or hordes or weird demons. It’s time to take on the Lich King: formerly Arthas Menethil. The team that’s doing the lore now seems particularly knowledgeable about it. They know stuff that, basically, I thought I was the only person to know. Stuff from Warcraft 1, books, graphic novels, Warcraft II and Beyond the Dark Portal, etc. Stuff that the average WoW player has little inkling at. There’s been a shift in the lore and storytelling in WoW. Instead of the old mantra of “Screw what we already made, make something new,” they’ve turned it around and said “players like what we’ve already made and want to learn more about it and spend more time with; let’s expand on that.” And thank the Titans, I’m excited to see familiar faces and locales, and to explore Azeroth further, not some bizarre floating chunk in outer space that only holds credence in that the Orcs and Draenei were initially from it. Between Dalaran and the lore I spent hours joygasming before I realized I needed to level. WotLK does most of the rest of it right, as if they’ve finally realized what makes a good MMO wasn’t BC, but it was a mix of classic WoW and storytelling that keeps players wrapped up and involved.
My only advice to is buy it, if you aren’t playing it, you aren’t living. At all.

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