Token Female Gamer

The second expansion for World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King (WotFK), graced us with its presents a mere year and ten months after the last expansion. (Woot! Our wait was cut by four months!)

Feature wise, it was very similar to the previous expansion, a new continent to explore, new higher levels to reach, more quests, more dungeons, and more loot. They even added a brand new class to play.

And yet, WotLK has been the more successful expansion. Clearly a lot was learned from the previous two games, because they somehow managed to keep and fine tune features that worked well while weeding out most of the irritating bits.

But not all the features are recycled, loads of new ones joined the frey, seamlessly blending new and old. A few of the most notable additions being: achievements and vehicle-combat.

For the first time since I started playing WoW (over five years now) I am finding myself willing and excited about spending loads of time online; leveling characters, getting them geared with new equipment, and even raiding a bit.

This expansion is clearly awesome, it is holding my attention quite well, but credit should be spread around, as it could also be that I finally got over my EQ trauma, or the fact that I have a super awesome guild. Whatever the case, it’s working. I’m having a great time playing.

Maybe I am finally over my EverQuest thirteen-hour Vex Thal raid trauma. Five years is long enough to forget, right? Well with WotLK I broke down and tried it, mainly because it was pointed out to me that Raids have the best equipment. My first raid didn’t last thirteen hours; I actually had some fun, didn’t fall asleep from boredom, and got some new items. Success! WoW raid cures old raid scars!

My favorite latest addition to the game has to be the achievements. When I first heard about them I shuddered in revulsion. My only basis for comparison was the console achievements that every console seems to have now (thank you Xbox for starting the stupidest trend EVER!). On the console they have no game enhancing effect at all. Rather they seem to be a way for the player to flaunt how much time and energy they have wasted on pointless side chores that are not part of the game.

In WoW the achievements are like having a list of quests at your fingertips. They encourage a player to delve further in to the world, exploring the farthest reaches of the continents. Most of the rewards for completing achievements are minor, titles, tabards, and pets, but half the time, finishing the achievement is reward enough. This is what achievements should really be, a game enhancing mechanism, not just some glorified scoreboard.

My Guild is tiny, but awesome and super active. There is no way I would be playing the game nearly as much as I do if my guild wasn’t so amazingly solid, both in friendship, teamwork, and in skill. I like to classify us as casual hardcore.

Lets face it; this game is a social environment. Even if you choose never to interact with anyone in the game, it doesn’t change the fact that there are other people running around in the same fake world as you. For me, I like to interact with people who are at least courteous. The way I have ensured this is a) being the guild leader and b) keeping the guild limited to people we know in RL.

It has kept the guild small and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Review

Release date: Nov 13, 2008
Website: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/
TFG World of Warcraft Review
TFG World of Warcraft – The Burning Crusade Review

This is an expansion, not a standalone game. It will only work paired with the original World of Warcraft game.

Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Platform I played on: PC and Mac

Features

Opening Event – Like the previous expansion this one had an event that heralded its arrival. Unlike the Burning Crusade, the event announcing the Lich Kings was actually enjoyable by lots of people. (The BC event was so centralized that all the congregating people crashed the server with lag!)

New continent – Northrend is a brand new continent to explore, filled with ice, forests, and jungles. Eleven new unique zones, one of which they made a world PvP zone – Wintergrasp. Every few hours the battle for Wintergrasp commences. The controlling faction defends the keep as the opposing faction uses all the resources available to make the keep their own.

Also many of the new quests found in Northrend are incredibly well grouped. The need for running around in ten different directions has been decreased a lot as the quests now guide you skillfully and with a clear purpose through the new areas.

Dungeon and Raids – New dungeons and raids obviously were also added to the new continent, with the focus again being strongly on the five man dungeons. Heroic versions of the dungeons are available to players at level eighty. The raids also got the heroic upgrade and now have normal (a ten man version) and heroic (a twenty-five man version).

As of the Argent Crusade patch a new type of dungeon and raid was added, the arena. Essentially you fight in a single room as the boss mobs take turns coming in to face you. It’s very gladiator-esk, but really quite fun. Really cuts down on the running around.

Actually one of my favorite dungeons is Violet Hold. The object is to safe guard the door that exists the one room dungeon as various portals appear and spit out bad guys. Its fast paced with minimal running and has a decisive goal.

Changeable world events – Another fun feature that finally was added to the game are actual world changing events. They are rather sparse and reserved for later in the game, this might indicate that this is a late addition feature to the expansion. Its quite gratifying to see an entire area that you helped “cleanse” remain that way.

Character modification – More and more options to change, move, migrate, cut, color, and pierce your character are being offered. Your character can no only move servers; she can change factions and names. Pretty soon it will be races and gender. Started as a Troll Mage, but have always wanted to be a cute gnome girl on the alliance side? No problem! Send Blizzard some money and they will work their wish granting magic on your poor character.

Level to 80 – Ten more levels to grind through. One thing to note here though is that they really decreased the amount of time it takes to level from 1-70 now. All the quest progressions are messed up in the lower levels because of this, but it is getting people caught up easier. Maybe they also know that Lich King is the best of the game thus far and they want to have players focused on it rather then being bogged down in Burning Crusade.

Dual talents – This actually became available before the expansion came out, but was pegged as one of those “in preparation for expansion” goodies. For a thousand gold you can unlock a whole extra talent set. This lets you pick two completely different talent sets and switch back and forth as much as you like.

Tradeskills – New higher levels and bonuses for reaching the max level. Also a brand new skill, Inscription; it lets you make glyphs, which are talent enhancing items.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/professions/inscription.html

Achievements – The big win of this expansion is achievements. A list of random things for me to do, some easy, some need working on, but always readily accessible. What a fabulous idea. http://www.wowwiki.com/Achievement

Vehicle Combat – Fans have been clamoring for mounted combat seemingly forever. Blizzard finally gave it too them, though really it seems like more of a punishment. Jousting is just one of the many events that requires mounted combat. When your character hops onto a combat mount, they become the mount. This means they have none of their own skills anymore, only the skills that are available to the mount.

Death Knight – This new class is called a hero class, since it only becomes available after the account has a level fifty-five character on it. The new Death Knight starts life in Azeroth at level fifty-five. A far cry from being a helpless babe, the Death Knight spends his first few levels rampaging through a special Death Knight only starting area.

And so much more. Really at this point the game has such a vast amount of content to offer its amazing. But the fact that The Lich King expansion has sparked my interest to play again really is a testament to how fun the game really is.

World of Warcraft has weathered its growing pains well.

Things that bothered me
-There seems to be something morally off with this expansion.
I’m not sure if this expansion is different then the others, but it has definitely struck home more this time around. Some of the quest that I have done just seem in very poor taste.

Examples: poke baby monkeys so their angry mother will come out to protect them and you then proceed to slaughter her; there seem to be lots more torturing for information quests; killing whale quests; abducting young pups from their mothers and deliver them to their mortal enemies; take your orphan, whom you are supposed to protect, into a fierce battleground, where everyone is slaughtering each other; killing of helpless civilians that do not fight back and shout things like “don’t hurt me”.

I could go on, but that’s a good general idea. Stealing or killing of innocents or endangered species doesn’t make me feel much like a hero and in general doesn’t sit well with me. Frankly, I have plenty of grey area IRL, can we get back to honest to good black and white, good vs bad. Thank you.

-Vehicle combat
Here is the thing about vehicle combat, I have just spent hours/days/probably months leveling my character, figuring out how to play optimally, pimped them out with equipment, gems, enchants, and glyphs. As soon as my character jumps into a vehicle, all that gets taken away. My character essentially turns into the vehicle and I have to learn a whole new way of playing.

Its not a terribly fun experience being given a whole new set of skills but not given any real time to practice or figure out what those skill are. I tend to avoid the vehicle combat and so do most of the people I have talked with about them. Have yet to hear a good thing about them.

-Even more complexity.
Another layer of complexity was added to refining your character. Picking talents, gems, and enchantments wasn’t enough. They added glyphs, which are enhancements to your talents. The chasm between the newbie and the hardcore just got even wider.

-Dual talents
Anyone that has read this site for a while (or knows me IRL) knows that I am the worst at picking talents. Now I have two entire different sets of talents to create. It might seem like this would make it easier, but it doesn’t. More limited choices are never better for me. What I really need are more talent points to spend in a single talent spec.

It helps that I don’t play any classes that need to have a specific set of talents for raids and a totally different set for playing solo. Meaning that switching back and forth is not really required, so I can avoid having two sets of talents quite easily.

Time played
As long as it’s been out. I probably average around 10 hours a week. =)

Rating

Mood Progression

Last Thoughts
With the fine-tuning that they gave the BC features, actually making them fun, and all the brand new stuff they added, this expansion is by far the best World of Warcraft game to come out thus far. Plus, I’m l33t now.

Tags: adoration, cooperative, guide, levels, loot, mac, mmog, online, pc, skills, world of warcraft

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Computer Games, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.