Blizzard Unveils Wrath of the Lich King Cinematic

Today at the Leipzig Games Convention, Blizzard released the opening cinematic for the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft. The cinematic is available on the official site via streaming video or the Blizzard downloader. There's a mirror over at 1Up. As with all Blizzard cinematics, it looks fantastic.

Comments

wrong king

[philspear]

I want the "wrath of the lion king" That's what I originally read and was very excited. Now I'm back to dissapointment.

Warcraft Cinematic

[GearheadX]

Previous trailers for WoW have been longer than this and showcased a bunch of different classes looking awesome.. but I daresay neither of them have been as awesome as this. This is the first serious Warcraft trailer I've seen for this game.

It focuses attention directly on the central figure of this expansion: Arthas the Lich King.

Arthas is your problem. Arthas is the central figure of the conflict. No matter who you are, your entry into this expansion's content will immediately involve Arthas meeting you at the front door and welcoming you to your untimely demise.

I love it.

Re:Warcraft Cinematic

[jeffasselin]

You haven't done the same quests I have. In Borean Tundra, specifically, the quest line leading to "Last Rites" is very, very good. In Howling Ford, you can also meet the Lich King and get killed by him in your 3rd quest or about. And he speaks to you in meaningful ways.

Re:I can wait.

[dtml-try MyNick]

The story doesn't end, ever.

Although..
10 million paying customers and then suddenly a last final patch... "The destruction of Azeroth"
"Sorry guys, the story ends here, game over, you won!"

That would be awesome *eg*

Re:Plain .torrent?

[skeeto]

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extorrents - Perl script that extracts the torrent files from all Blizzard Downloader clients in the current directory
biz-extorrents.py - Python script to extract torrent files from all Blizzard Downloader clients in the current directory
web app extractor - Web app to extract torrent files out of any Blizzard Downloader EXE linked online

Source

Re:Unimpressed

[bigstrat2003]

Off the top of my head (I'm level 73 or 74 in the beta):

• Arthas
• The Cult of the Damned infiltrating an Alliance town
• Malygos, and his assault on magic
• The Ashbringer
• The continuation of Tirion Fordring's story
• The evolution of the Scarlet Crusade
• The continuation of the Infinite Dragonflight story (including the revelation of who their leader is)

...and that's just off the top of my head. WoW is chock full of story, you just have to pay attention. If all you really bother knowing about the story is what boss you're killing (which is all most players do), you've missed 80% of the story.

Re:I can wait.

[Goldberg's Pants]

That'd be awesome if they did that. One thing that has always pissed me off is how nothing ever changes in the game. Those poxy gnomes have been running out of Gnomeregan for 3 goddamn years now! The big thing they did, with the pyramid things outside the cities (I completely forget what they were now) would have been awesome, except they HYPED IT UP before it happened. (And completely bollocksed it when it came out.) I think it's far better to spring huge stuff like that as a surprise. Stuff to make people say "Holy shit!" and think anything could happen. Even hardcore addicts I know begrudgingly agree with me that, despite Blizz claiming it's an "ever changing world", nothing ever changes, and it's by and large the same crap for years.

I don't know what other MMORPG's are like in regards to changing the game world. I remember Matrix Online offed Morpheus in the game. Anyone care to make a comparison? Because I like WOW (most of the time) but nothing in the world ever changes. There is no random element to it to imply a living, breathing world.

Awesome cinematic... Cool to see Sauron... I mean Arthas... (Peter Jackson has a lot to answer for.)

Re:I can wait.

[edremy]

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they *do* do this someday.

WoW is not going to last forever- looking at the player growth curves it's been leveling off for a while. Someday, eventually, it will begin to decline no matter how many expansion packs they manage to make. Lots of MMOs keep running at this point- you can survive with 10k subscibers if you don't bother with new content.

But WoW could be different: Blizz is smart enough that they should have something ready to go when this happens- World of Starcraft, WoW2 in a new area, something. Once that game starts off the ground, announce end of life for vintage WoW in six months time. Script an invasion of horrible baddies and follow through, with various zones falling to them while the horde and alliance frantically try to hold on. Make it so defended areas fall more slowly and let players see how long they can hold out, then burn Ironforge and Org a few days before turning off all the servers.

Follow that up with some free play time on The Next Great MMO for existing WoW players, maybe some sort of character transfer where you can move a "child" of your toon to the new world if it's WoW2.

You would have *legions* of retired players come back for this- most of the folks who have left WoW were just bored with the same old content, and frankly watching the sand castle get kicked down would be great fun. Get them excited again, get a ton of quick cash, give the players a reason to move to TNGMMO and not your competitor's and get rid of all your legacy support issues in one huge ball of fun.