Wrath of the Lich King

Wow is a hard game to review. Being around for 4 years and having 11 million subscribers, it's created this polarizing effect. Either you're a fanboi about to cross the 10,000 hours played mark or you're a hypocritical hater fabricating excuses to keep the hate alive. There just doesn't seem to be that many 'tweeners wondering if it's worth picking up, and no review is going to change that. Also, the breadth of content is so vast it probably warrants half a dozen separate reviews to cover the bases. Trying to cover all the facets of the game in a single review glosses over everything like the eyes of a bimbo at a physics seminar.

But, this is where we are. Wow is easily the biggest selling PC game of the year, and it's the only game I've played in the last two months. The Wrath of the Lich King expansion is big news, and it does warrant discussion. This summer, there was a lot of talk on the WoW forums about bailing on the game for greener pastures (like Conan or Warhammer) and a lot of people have taken a break from the game. While I can't compare WoW to its would-be dethroning knockoffs, I do have the persepective of someone who's played the game and taken an extensive break from it. Is the expansion going to make me fall in love with the game all over again? Or is that flame burned out?

I came back to the game about a month before the expansion when the big content patch, Echoes of Doom, was released. I did this to get a jump on some of the new content, like Achievements and the new talent trees, but also wanted to get one of my characters to level 70 prior to Arthas' arrival. So, there was some preparation for the changes to come. With the expansion proper, the two main additions to the game are the new hero class, the Death Knight, and the new content continent, Northrend.

The Death Knight

I found the Death Knight to play most like a warrior with a rage bar that builds through combat and Rune power is consume via abilities. There are three schools, which act like three stances. Blood is a melee dps stance which gives out party buffs. Frost is a tanking stance. Unholy is sort of a melee Warlock stance. In reality, the class doesn't play like any other in the game. It's a novel gameplay mechanic, and the class is serious uber compared to other classes. I expect big nerfs on the horizon, especially when the Arenas get rolling.

The Death Knight's introductory quest line may have been the best storytelling in WoW. It introduces a new game mechanic, where the players are in the world but in an instanced form of it. There are several "stages" in the quest line, and the stages change by turning in certain quests. This is obvious, because at the beginning Arthas is on the first balcony, then eventually he shows up on the mountaintop.

The questline has to rapidly get your new character up to level 55 in terms of talent points, gear, and learning the class mechanics. From a storyline perspective, the questline has to evolve your character from being a minion of the scourge to integrating your toon into your faction. I found the story a little rough and abbreviated, but serviceable. The rewards for that quest chain came fast and furious, which kept the pace up. It seemed every quest gave talent points or gear upgrades. Some of the quests, like the one where you blow up people on the beach with a ship-mounted canon, and the one where you bring the rain from a lich are some of the most fun quests I'd ever played.

The problem with the Death Knight is that you go from new, fun content ramping your character up to the main world, to Hellfire Peninsula, which I think may be the worst zone in the entire game. This is where I stalled on this character. I just don't have the patience to grind through Outland right now, and the novelty of the new, overpowered class just doesn't overcome that. Some of the quests were fun, hella-cool. So, once completing the initial Death Knight quest line, I pretty much stopped on the character and switched to my recently leveled 70 priest and hit Northrend.

Northrend

I initially found the continent a little disorienting. It has two starting zones on opposite sides of the continent. I would say the continent in geographical size is on par with Outland or Kalimdor. I had a hard time figuring out how to get from one starting zone to the other, and the first few flight points I discovered didn't initially connect those zones for me. I settled down on the first zone I hit, Borean Tundra (aka Boring Tundra) and started knocking out quests there. Borean Tundra is a mash-up of other zones in the game. It's part Wetlands, Westfall, Azshara, and a few others. There are a lot of quests in this zone, and a lot of different factions are represented. Overall it's probably the best to get the feet wet here, because it serves as a sampler for the rest of the content in Northrend. It also showed how the achievements integrate well with the new content. About the time you finish the zone, you get the quest achievement for that zone. That achievement serves as a metric for how much more of a given zone you have left. Other achievements show up too, like the D.E.H.T.A. achievement (D.E.H.T.A. is a sub faction of the Cenarion Expedition that is a spoof the animal rights terrorists PETA). The one thing that was missing from this zone that the other zones had were the expansive story quest chains the other zones in Northrend. But, like I said, this zone is the sampler-pack appetizer for the main course.

After dinging twice and hitting my 115 quest achievement in Boring Tundra, I headed over to the other starting zone: Howling Fjord. This zone is beautiful. And, it's got an overarching storyline of quests involving the giant Viking mobs and their history, the Vul'kryl. The problem with this zone is all the damn cliffs. With the priest I at least have levitate spell, but I must have used 40 reagents on the spell and still died a few times from falling. This was annoying to the point of buzzkill on the whole zone. This is a zone where you need to fly, which is something you can't do in Northrend until you hit level 77 and drop 1000 gold at a guy in Dalaran, a city you can't get to until level 74 (or getting summoned).

After Howling Fjord, I hit Dragonblight, which is reminiscent of Winterspring. The main point of this zone seems to introduce you to one of the main heavies, the Blue Dragonflight. While running quests for the dragons, I didn't realize it at the time but I was involved in a quest chain that culminated a something I'd never seen before in WoW: a cut scene. And it was awesome. The cut scene showed an alliance/horde attack on Arthas' gate, one the playable races in the game backstabbing their faction, and a significant Alliance npc hero dying. This cut scene introduced several events that actually forever change the content of the game for the player. For example, prior to the cut scene, there were several elite mobs running around the gate. Afterwards, all those mobs were gone, replaced with a bunch of scared npcs screaming their heads off, in the most annoying way possible. It also led to an attack on the Undercity, with all the king's horses and all the king's men, that, while was a lot of fun, it probably went about 10 minutes too long. Another interesting quest chain is the Drakuru quest line, which starts off in Grizzly Hills, where the spirit of Drakuru has you running errands for him around the zone in hopes of getting his body back. It eventually leads into the instance Drak'Theron Keep, where there's a double cross, and then you have to get him back in the next zone, Zul'Drak. Another good example of how Blizzard stepped up their game on delivering a more compelling story through questing compared to the original game and the Burning Crusade expansion.

There are 10 new zones in Northrend. It took me five zones to level to 80, and I averaged about 5 hours per level as a shadow priest. I saw half a dozen instances along the way, and found them all to be noobsauce simple. Overall, I found the difficulty of the new content to be non-existant. Someone was able to level to 80 a mere 29 hours after the expansion hit. I saw the first 80 on my server about 50 hours in. By the end of the first weekend, four days or so, an uber guild, 24 November, had beaten all the end game content. Two weeks after the expansion, we had multiple guilds on our server who had done the same. Everything in the expansion is pretty much nerfed, and the rewards seem to be on par. People who had Sunwell gear are getting incremental upgrades with current end game content. The gear gap between WotLK and BC is no where as wide as between BC and the original game. I think ultimately, this is going to kill the longevity of the game. The uber-players are going to be done too fast and there's not going to be the need to grind through everything to "beat the game". There is just not enough e-peen to stroke to keep them coming back for more.

Conclusion

For me, I enjoyed the new content a lot. I found the quests types to be more varied and not just the same basic quest archetypes I played in the past. I also found the expansive, story driven quest chains to be a more immersive, compelling experience. I enjoyed the changes to the talents and abilities to my characters. But, all that changed once I hit the level cap. It immediately felt like the dreadful grind that burned me out a couple of years ago. I'm not interested in seeing the zones I haven't visited. I don't really feel like leveling my professions. I don't want to run another character through the content I just played through. I don't feel like getting my character raid-ready. I've already cancelled my subscription, one month after the expansion hit. I'm sure in six months I'll come back to visit, but at the moment, I'm already burnt out. I guess the honeymoon is over.