Straight From BlizzCon: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Features

As we reported earlier in the week, the second World of Warcraft expansion is, indeed going to be Wrath of the Lich King. I was present on the show floor at BlizzCon when it was announced, as well as when they gave the first official demonstration, and I went on to get over an hour of hands-on time with it (which I will post my impressions of shortly).

For now, I have condensed the hour-long demonstration down to the finer points for your reading enjoyment. If you want to skip straight to the good stuff, it’s in bold.

Ten Ton Hammer should have video of the entire demo up soon. I know this, because I was standing about a foot behind a guy wearing a very loud and conspicuous TEN TON HAMMER jersey who was manipulating a large camera on a tripod.

New Continent: Northrend.

Dalaran has decided to move a few thousand miles for some reason, and is now the capital city of Northrend.

Level cap increased to 80.

Hero classes introduced.

First hero class: Death Knight

- Will be unlockable by any character through performing a series of quests, raiding was said to not be involved.

- Will not start out at level 1. They weren’t clear if it would start out at your character’s current level (presumably max) or just a mid-range level.

- Uses a “rune” system in place of rage or mana; players select runes to inscribe on their runeblade, and consume them by performing spells and abilities linked to a particular rune type.

- More hero classes will be added in later patches/expansions.

No new races or new “regular” classes.

New profession: Inscription – Permanently improves spells (adding a knockback to Fireball, or increasing the DoT duration or damage per hit was an example given).

Back from the dead, something that was on the Coming Soon page since shortly after the game launched, then vanished without a trace: Siege weapons, and destructible buildings to use them on. From the sound of it, they’re going to be vehicles.

New Battlegrounds and  Arenas to placate the PvP demographic, along with:

An entire zone in Northrend devoted specifically to PvP (I thought they already had one of those in Hillsbrad pre-Battlegrounds…).

 Guild bank system, with the ability to track and control who makes deposits and withdrawals.

Flying mounts usable in Northrend, but not in the pre-expansion world. It was said to be too time consuming to “retrofit” all of the legacy areas to be usable for flying mounts. Chalk that up as another reason they cut Druid crow form in beta.

Arthas will be an interactable character whom players will get to meet (presumably before killing him).

One (at least) new raid instance before the expansion is released.

As in the prior expansion, full Tier 5 will be outclassed by level 71 greens.

Integrated voice chat: “No more paying for Ventrillo!”

“Daily quests” (I assume quests you can complete once per day, they didn’t elaborate), “to cut down on gold farmers,” (again, they didn’t elaborate).

No new 40-man content (that they mentioned), and the dungeons already extant in the pre-expansion world are being left to rot: “We put a lot of work into those areas, but we’re through with them, we want to move on. We’re fine with players going straight from 1-80 and getting into the new content.” I think this is a bit shortsighted… anyone who had ever played EverQuest a few expansions into it (particularly after the Plane of Knowledge) will undoubtedly recall that the “old world” was almost completely abandoned… Does Blizzard really want people utilizing only the bleeding edge of their content, which is, by its newly-added nature, an ever-increasingly smaller percentage of the world?

New hairstyles (hey, it sells expansions for The Sims).

And finally, in true Blizzard fashion, when asked for the ETA on release: “It will be released when it’s done.” Surprisingly, the audience roared their approval at this.

I admit, perhaps I’m too much of an optimist, but I was expecting something more… grand, audacious… unexpected. If you asked me a week ago to sit down and come up with a list of what I thought was going to be in the second WoW expansion, most of the above features would have been on it. On top of which, most of them are nothing that haven’t been done in half a dozen other games that have come before, though perhaps not with Blizzard’s level of quality.

With nine million subscribers and counting, Blizzard most likely feels that if they have the formula down, why go out on a limb and try and reinvent the wheel? Looking out during the demo at the thousands of adoring fans hanging on the announcer’s every word, and going stark raving mad in response to every miniscule new announcement, I can’t really say that I blame them.

We’ll have more from BlizzCon in the coming days, including my hands-on impressions of Wrath of the Lich King, photos, and, if they fix a SNAFU with my Press badge, hopefully an interview or two.