Friday, November 14, 2008

Wrath of the Lich King Review

Here is a review I wrote for Wrath of the Lich King. I wrote this after playing for eight hours straight.


You are a citizen of New Avalon. You spend your days mulling around the city, living out your life. One day, you emerge from your house to see a giant floating object to the north. You look at it for a moment, then shrug and continue your daily life. If only you knew what it meant, it might have saved your life. Hours later you are fleeing through the city, people being killed all around you. You look to your left to see a woman shot down by an arrow. You turn to your right and see a soldier. He braces himself to intercept your attackers when he gets pulled behind a house. You can no longer see him, but you hear his screams of anguish and pain. You trip over a loose rock and fall to the ground. As you roll on to your back you see a man with a covered face raising his sword. With one thrust your life is ended.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) is the second expansion to one of the best selling PC games of all time, World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft had over 11 million subscribers as of November 10th. Within three days, that number jumped by about one million just because of the expansion. That’s almost three fourths of Australia’s population. Needless to say, Blizzard has done it again.

WotLK introduces several new things to the WoW universe. Players can now go to the new continent Northrend, where they complete quests and fight monsters to try and reach the new level cap of 80. If players have a character that is at least level 55, they can make a “Death Knight” class character. Death Knights are WoW’s first Hero Class, a class which is relatively stronger than other characters. A Death Knight is a fallen hero who has pledged his soul to Arthas the Lich King. When players create a Death Knight, they start out at level 55 in a contained area where you learn the story of their defection from the Lich King.

As a new follower of the Lich King, you are sent to make a weapon and prepare for battle. This is to ease players into the new class, slowly explaining the new combat style, which is specific to Death Knights. Within minutes you are out on the battlefield, maiming and killing people. You are a soldier in the attack on New Avalon, described in the first paragraph through the eyes of one of the citizens. You fight by using the energy of various runes, which have to recharge after each use. You have three types of runes to choose from, and can hold up to six. As you progress through the Death Knight’s story, you get to experience every part of the attack, from start to finish. This is done by changing the layout of the different parts of the area as you progress. You will see players in the same part of the story as you are, but anyone too far ahead or behind will be invisible to you, along with objects and items that you currently have no use for.

As you near the end of the quests, you are ordered to execute a prisoner. When you enter the room you find out they are your friend from before you began to serve the Lich King, whose race is the same as yours. They try to break The Lich King’s hold on you, and eventually sacrifice their self to you to keep you from being killed for defying orders. You then finish up the storyline by participating in a charge on the few remaining soldiers. After fighting your way past the men, their leader does battle with the Lich King and defeats him, sending him back to Northrend and freeing you from his control. You then join up with your appropriate race’s faction, and leave.

Once you hit the level 70, you can travel to Northrend to find and defeat the Lich King once and for all. There you experience a plethora of new quests, ranging from planting bombs in tunnels to prevent monster attacks to flying around on dragons attacking enemies on the ground and in the air alike. There are also several new dungeons for you to venture through and fight in known as instances. For people who do not play WoW, an instance is only accessible by you and your party, to prevent other players from spoiling your fun.

After hitting level 80, you can now pursue Arthas himself, and attempt to banish the Lich King once and for all. In another new addition, all of the new instances have skill levels depending on how many people are in your party, with different level enemies and different items that drop. Most of the people will be after the legendary sword of the Lich King, Frostmourne. Another new addition is a completely revamped player versus player battling system, which includes new places to fight, and an area where anyone can attack anyone else at any time, regardless of faction. You can also take control of siege weapons and destroy buildings, adding an entire new aspect to battles.

WotLK takes about 8 gigs of memory to install, and the graphics and sound are greatly improved, which means some low end computers may not be able to run it, even if they could before the expansion. Northrend is very nicely detailed, as are all the new weapon and armor sets you can acquire. Despite the large improvements, graphics still look rather cartoonish, and the music isn’t quite good enough to play instead of just jamming out to your iTunes library while you play. The quests are also lacking in areas, you still run into the same “go here kill this, go there collect that” variety of quests seen throughout the rest of the game. Nevertheless you feel compelled to keep playing, knowing that there is always something fun to do.

WotLK was definitely made to please long time WoW players, as well as to attract new players. And with a meager 40 dollar price tag for the basic version and for 20 dollars more, you can get the Collector’s Edition which gives you’re character a rare pet, Frosty the baby Frost Wyrm. You will of course need the first two parts of the game to play this expansion though, so if you are just starting, expect to pay about twice as much to get all three. If you’re cheap you can always play a less expensive game such as Everquest or Guild Wars, but it’s true what they say, you get what you pay for. And WotLK is definitely worth the extra money.

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