World of Warcraft - Wrath Of the Lich King Is In Alpha

simrook writes to tell us that World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, has entered closed alpha testing, as reported by WoWInsider. Wrath of the Lich King, which we've discussed previously, will raise the level cap to 80 and introduce a new class: Death Knights. World of Warcraft remains the most popular MMORPG on the market with over 10 million subscribers. WoWInsider notes, "Various players are being invited to check it out, under a strict NDA."

Comments

Re:No permadeath

[Kenoli]

So you admit you've never actually played the game. Or in other words you don't know what you're talking about, and you're just full of bullshit.

in other blizzard news

[sentientbrendan]

Starcraft II has been delayed indefinitely again so that blizzard can concentrate on it's more profitable World of Warcraft franchise.

Re:No permadeath

[Planesdragon]

Unless you change the core mechanics and introduce a random story generation algorithm, Permadeath would be the single most mind-numbingly annoying thing you could introduce into a modern game. You say that like it's impossible.

Nothing aside from lowest-common-sucker planning keeps a real PvE MMO from doing just this. A very smart system would respond to player action -- a heavily hero-populated land would attract more and stronger villians, who spawn minion-quests and whatnot. You could even have stateful shared quests, where a quest remains active until completed by any character, which then triggers a different quest.

The real problem with MMOs like WoW is that the meat of the game isn't all that fun. Some, like City of Heroes, try and avoid it by purposefully making low-level re-play the focus of the game. Others, like Eve Online, say to heck with PvE and focus on the PvP side.

World of Warcraft is "warcrack" by design. They could make it fun and interesting and genuinely massive, but that'd require real work and wouldn't have the same profit margin.

Re:Time to sign up ... again

[Kildjean]

My x-wife played Wow over 4,335 HOURS in one year.. Tell me that isn't an addiction. So she played half a year of wow... do the math, maybe it is because you sucked in bed? That could only explain why she played half the time wow... now if you had said she played, 8760 hrs, then yeah i think that would be an addiction. Still letting go of a chick that plays the game is kind of lame. Did she beat you at pvp too?

Re:Now that WotLK is in Alpha..

[kv9]

you must not understand the concept of spelling.