Behind the Blue Curtain: Inside Blizzard Headquarters with Wrath of the Lich King

Several others are however not so clever, serving to perpetuate the age-old fantasy cliché of “anthropomorphize a random member of the animal kingdom and assign them a culture out of human history,” such as the Tuskarr, and Wolvar, two-legged walruses and wolverines, respectively.

But, these are the same guys who have already gotten away with creating talking cows, interplanetary goats, and drunken pandas—all with a straight face. At this point you can put nothing past them.

Some slightly more familiar faces are setting up shop in Northrend as well, such as the Westfall Brigade, Argent Dawn, Venture Company, and Scarlet Crusade.

I’m sure teenage male players everywhere are hoping that Blizzard continues the trend of reusing old-world characters in expansion content with a fresh appearance by High Inquisitor Whitemane.

Also, the Lost Vikings are back. No longer content with being consigned to Easter egg status in Uldaman, they are now the Vrykul, one of the major antagonist groups you’ll be facing off against.

Of course, there is also the star of the show, Arthas himself, without whom there would be no Wrath to base the title around.

While it was promised that you would be “interacting” with him from very early on in the expansion content (though it wasn’t explained what that interaction would be), the final challenge, adding him to the Warcraft Villains Cannon Fodder list, will elude players until “the end of the patch cycle,” which likely means around the same amount of time that Naxxramas came out prior to The Burning Crusade.

The Hands-On

Following the demo, we were whisked upstairs and set loose upon several dozen machines running an early alpha build of the game, while they immediately began plying us with large amounts of pizza and Dr Pepper—the staples of any true gamer’s diet.

To be honest, the hands-on time felt almost as though Blizzard was trying to just prove to the media that the expansion exists. Nearly all of the real meat and potatoes they seemed to be keeping to themselves for a later date…

You couldn’t play a Death Knight, the talent panes were locked, all of the characters started at level 70 so there weren’t any new skills to speak of (though some old ones had been modified), and while you could train Inscription, there weren’t any recipes for it.

Still, I got to spend some quality time—over four hours—with what was available, during which I was able to thoroughly explore the early starting zones (a debuff called No Man’s Land prevented anyone from venturing into the higher level areas), and participate in a few of the early quest lines.

Based on this, the presentation, and speaking with the game’s two lead designers later in the day, I felt I walked out with a good handle on what the expansion will have to offer to various stripes of players.

To me, the 10/25 “dual raiding system,” with every instance in Northrend available as either Normal or Heroic is the most interesting single addition. With it, the game has made a sharp 180 degree turn from its roots, going from top-tier content residing solely in 40 man instances requiring weeks of practice to master, to being able to 10 man Arthas, one of the greatest antagonists in WarCraft history.

In the long run I think it will turn out to be a wise design decision, ensuring that a much larger percentage of the playerbase will be able to experience every major encounter the game has to offer.

But, at the same time, unless they have some sort of Auto Balancer 9000, it will effectively double a portion of the workload for every instance, and Blizzard is not a company known for moving swiftly to begin with.

Also, as a former raiding guild leader I would be concerned with the lost prestige for guilds who make a name for themselves going after server first kills.

While Tom Chilton did mention that they are considering not opening up the 10 man version of an instance until the 25 man has been cleared, honestly, I don’t think it would be much fun on anyone’s part to wipe twenty times a night for a week learning the final encounter of an instance, beat it, then only just begin to savor the sweet taste of victory… when a 10 man pickup group wearing greens walks in the next day and clears the place out inside of two hours.

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