World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King [PC]

The second World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, ships next month, and the development team at Blizzard is busy polishing and bug fixing the game before then. But members of the team emerged for a few days at Blizzcon earlier this month, and that's where we had a chance to talk to producer J. Allen Brack about Wrath of the Lich King. (We posted an earlier story that had his thoughts about World of Warcraft in general.)

One of the cool new features of Wrath of the Lich King is the new Death Knight hero class, the first hero class for the game. The Death Knight is something that Brack is definitely excited about, partly because it delves into some dark territory that World of Warcraft hasn't generally touched before. "When you start a death knight, you're under the control of Arthus the Lich King, who is not a nice person. And so it's really neat to see players go out and carry out the Lich King's will and be really bad," he said.

"We don't really have bad things that players do [in World of Warcaft]; players will usually do things to further their own agendas that other people will see as bad, but they're not bad in and of themselves. The death knight starting experience has players doing some things that are actually evil, so that's a really neat thing. And there's a climactic moment where the player actually breaks free of the control of the Lich King and that's really exciting. And then they become a free agent and are very angry at having been made a death knight and want to seek their vengeance."

Another new feature is the inscription profession, which was implemented in the massive and recent Echoes of Doom patch for World of Warcraft. "It's like enchanting for your spells. What you'll be able to do is create these scrolls that have certain talents, certain abilities, like on this one certain spell you'll some kind of additional effect to it," Brack said. "We have major glyphs and minor glyphs. Major glyphs will affect your combat in some way. So, for example, as a priest your greater heal spell costs 20-percent less manna something like that. Then we have minor glyphs which are not combat affecting, like feather fall no longer requires a reagent."

By the time Wrath of the Lich King ships in November, its predecessor, The Burning Crusade, will almost be two years old. When that expansion shipped in January of 2007, the World of Warcraft subscription base experienced a significant bump as former players returned to the fold.

A lot of content in Wrath of the Lich King will appeal to World of Warcraft veterans, and the company does plan on a significant bump in players as fans return to check out the new content, but Brack said that he could see newcomers to the MMO enjoying it as well. "There's not as much content that's brand new for the new player, but I think that the new features that [we] add, or the new systems, always help the new player. The achievement system is a great example of that. A new player who comes into the world may not know of all the myriad dungeons that exist. The achievement system is going to help them track that and maybe say, 'Hey, I want to make sure I go visit this dungeon, I want to make sure I complete these quests.'"

The road to Wrath of the Lich King has been a somewhat windy one, too. "The way Blizzard does things is that we have a lot of ideas, and whenever it's time to make a decision or come up with new ideas, we'll bring out all of the ideas that we've had from the very beginning," he said. "Obviously Northrend [the main area in Wrath of the Lich King] is not a new part of the Warcraft universe. Arthus is a huge part of Warcraft III. So even though we didn't include Northrend at the very launch of the game, we always knew that we'd eventually get there."

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