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Second World of Warcraft Expansion Launched, Conquered
The much-anticipated second expansion to World of Warcraft, entitled Wrath of the Lich King, launched on Thursday, introducing a new continent, raising the level cap to 80, and bringing a wealth of new items, spells, dungeons, and monsters to the popular MMO. Crowds gathered and lines formed outside stores around the world leading up to the release. Massively has put together a series of articles for players wishing to familiarize themselves with the expansion, and CVG has a piece discussing the basics as well. It didn't take long for the first person to reach level 80; a French player called "Nymh" reached the level cap on his Warlock only 27 hours after the expansion went live. Not to be outdone, a guild named "TwentyFifthNovember" managed to get at least 25 raiders to 80 and then cleared all of the current expansion raid content less than three days after the launch. Fortunately for them, the next three content patches are each expected to contain new, more difficult raids.
hate to break your heart sweetie, but that one has been down for a while.
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking
So the Lich King didn't have to twiddle his thumbs for long...
And there's also a Ctrl-Alt-Del "silly" on the new WoW expansion.
They didn't demolish new content. They demolished content they've been playing for months on the beta server.
The raids aren't anywhere near as big a part of WoW as you make it seem. The reason they get so much attention, I think, is because Blizzard's done them so completely and well, unlike other mmorpgs.
New Quests: there's about 1000 across Northrend. (and fyi, the last big patch before WotLK content - 2.4 - added about 50, 30 of which were repeatable every day.)
New Mechanics: that's an incredibly vague term, but there are the new phasing and knockback systems, and the new inscription profession. Also, Blizzard doesn't have a design philosophy that lends itself to including large amounts of whatever to the game. They add in consistent stuff that works with the rest of the game.
The new expansion also adds a new class, revamps two others, adds ten more levels (and corresponding new abilities) for all characters, an entire new continent to explore and see new things in, more crafting options.
And the design on all of this blows away what's come before. The new zones feel really alive - they look fantastic, sound wonderful, and offer interesting and new ways to get around them. Everyone who got off the boat or zeppelin just stopped and went "Wow." for a few minutes. And then we hit the dungeons - the third of the starter dungeons, Azjol-Nerub, has to be played to be believed. It's half an hour of terrifying beauty, of wriggling mummified *things* laying between two golden mushrooms in caverns man was never meant to see, had never seen. You look down vistas swarming with spiders crawling over the most beautiful architecture yet - and then you jump down to join them. It's lovecraftian and slasher-esque and Indiana Jones all at the same time. It's fantastic, and probably the best experience I've had ever in WoW, and one of the best in a game, period.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
This story is not news.
TwentyFifthNovember is a guild made up of Nihilum and SK-Gaming (aka Curse). Both guilds had members that experienced Naxxramas at level 60 (when it was originally released), and most of the bosses in Naxxramas (retuned and re-released for level 80) are largely unchanged since that time. Both of these guilds had very significant presences in the Closed Beta, where this raid content was available for anyone who could gather enough players. Many of them killed these bosses for weeks and months, before the game went live. The slight differences between these bosses at level 60 versus these bosses at level 80 is minor enough that even those who DIDN'T see the retuned content would still know how to get past it.
Raiding in World of Warcraft is more about skill than gear (although there are a few hard gear checks, such as needing 8.5k HP to survive Naj'entus area-effect nuke). These guys certainly are skillful, but there was never any doubt that they would steamroll all of this content as soon as they hit 80. The slightly bigger concern is that they managed to get 25 members to level 80 in ~65 hours of gameplay. Still, with the first 80 after 27 hours, it wasn't unexpected. People were hitting level 70 in Burning Crusade in about the same amount of time, and once the strategy for doing so was optimized, anyone (with a lot of time, and/or friends) could grind out the levels.
One thing to note is that these guys don't yet have the ultra-rare achievement awards, for example:
http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=2138
Heroic Glory of the Raider involves a series of moderate to very hard challenges in Naxx, with the reward being an exclusive Proto-Drake mount. Until they get that, it's not news.. and even if they do get that, they've STILL got the qualifiers mentioned earlier.
present day... present time... hahahaha...
Mod Parent up. For whatever cracked reason, these guys took their guild to the beta server and spent hours and days learning the content and getting them cleared. To say they conquered all the raid content in 3 days ignores that they already knew how to do it, they just repeated it "live". Anyway, good for them, with the completion of all the starting raid content by unrealistic obsessives, we can now start paying attention to the progression of the guilds that still live in the real world and started learning the content from live release day.
Seconded on Azjol-Nerub. The first of them, aptly titled "Azjol-Nerub: Azjol-Nerub", is a 15 minute instance (!) yet so much effort and work has gone into the detailing of the level. It's a surreal vertical adventure. For half of it, think of a dungeon. Now, have a mass of spider webbing totally mess up all the paths, corridors, pits and doors to create a completely different spacial structure: you walk on suspended webbing rather than the dungeon paths. This was best demonstrated to me when walking along a bridge above a huge open pit, then hitting some steep webbing in the middle of it. Unable to proceed forward, I noticed.. that the steep webbing covers slopes down the pit. We slid down it and walked around above the sprawling dungeon below us. Truly surreal and the awesomeness is difficult to convey in text.
The second, which I forget the name of, is some sort of deep "open air" city with a babylonian flavour to it, inside a gigantic abyssal cavern. Within 10 seconds of walking in you can see the entire thing. Everyone on ventrilo simultaneously went "whoa."
Blizzard has really delivered.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
the "Quest Helper" addon from wow.curse.com will make sure that you spend less time finding where things are, and spend your time for experiencing them instead.
Read radical news here
Most popular game of all time? Not even close. Most popular COMPUTER game? Perhaps. Depends on what you count. I doubt it, but it is possible. The Sims sold 16 Million. Wii Sports has 31 million. And the grand champ? Super Mario on the NES with over 40 million. And that's computer games, none can come close to Monopoly (pushing 1 billion players).