World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack

3 comments on “World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack”

1. 75 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

   
   Lich King has much more depth and is a lot more fun than Burning Crusade, December 5, 2008

   By 

   J. C. Amos (Seattle) –
   
     

   Fun: 

   This review is from: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack (Video Game)

   I have been playing World of Warcraft since a month after it came out. Not quite consistently, as I’ve taken a couple of 6 or so month breaks in that duration, but I’ve been there through all the changes. Having started playing the game again 2 years ago when Burning Crusade came out and being pretty disappointed, I have to say that restarting the game again this time with Lich King has been a much better experience. At first, I only got the expansion because all of my friends and all the old folks from my guild were getting back together. So I figured that even though I wasn’t really looking forward to getting into the game again, at least I’d have the fun social aspect of it. But I’m having more fun playing the game with this expansion than I have had since the game started and everything was new.

   So does that mean that the game has totally changed and we’re playing a whole new WoW? Not exactly. It seems that this is the expectation that a lot of people are having. I’m reading a lot of negative reviews saying that this is more of the same. Well, unfortunately for them, it is. It’s the same game, just more of it. There are still plenty of obnoxious people with bad manners and even worse skills in English, still plenty of quests that involve killing mobs and gathering items, still an opposing faction that kills you while you’re questing (for me there is anyways) and so on. But in my opinion, the new content in Northrend has much more depth, much more detail and is just plain more fun than anything I experienced with the Burning Crusade Expansion. It really seems that Blizzard took their time in making the quests much more unique and varied as well as many other aspects of the content.

   A lot of people jump on WoW to plow through the quests and instances and get to level 80 as soon as possible. Why? There probably won’t be another expansion for 2 years, so what’s the rush? That’s my feeling about that anyways. I find that when I play the game more sparsely, I’m able to appreciate the time that was put into it and also prevent myself from getting burned out. I pay attention to a lot of things in games that other may not care about at all, such as environment and music. The new zones in Northrend look really cool (at least by the standard that WoW looks considering the graphics are outdated in general, but with an MMO that’s not really a problem for me.) With the first zone in Northrend, Borean Tundra, I was just impressed by the scope of the place: four flight points, 130 quests, NPC ships raiding NPC towns, undead crawling out of the earth, gnome planes flying all over the place… It was all a little overwhelming. And I didn’t find that much annoying repetition as I did the quests there, despite the fact that there are twice as many quests in that zone as there are in the first zone of Outlands. In fact, some of the quests were pretty innovative. And the environment for the second zone I went to, Howling Fjord, was simply amazing to me. The boat ride into the huge cove with the towering canyons, waterfalls, all around was unlike any WoW environment I had seen. Continually as I go into each zone, everything about Northrend just seems bigger and more grand than anywhere else.

   Another thing that’s impressed me with the expansion is the music. Most of the up-tempo quasi Lord of the Rings style score has been replaced with more mellow and melodic fare. From the first boat ride into Northrend you’ll hear a somber but really amazing fiddle tune and much of the music in the many zones matches that tone. It’s sometimes a little odd to be in the midst of slaughtering enemies to the sounds of fiddle and pipes in the background, but somehow it all works. A lot of the music throughout the rest of the world has been changed and enhanced for the better as well.

   These things aside, everything else about the game seems to be enjoyable. PVP is one of my favorite WoW pass times and there’s no shortage of that here. Admittedly, the Wintergrasp PVP zone isn’t quite as huge and amazing as I’d hoped, but it’s still fun, as is the new battleground. The instances are more attuned for my liking, since I rarely get a time to play video games for more than an hour or two at a time. The new smaller, more easily accessible dungeons are much more fun and like a lot of the quest lines, they’re actually pretty fun and unique.

   So perhaps it was the fact that I bought it with low expectations, or maybe it’s just because Blizzard really put out a good product, but I really like Wrath of the Lich King. If you’re looking for the childish and a**hole players to disappear, looking for less questing to do, less… Warcraft, then you’re looking for another game. This is still World of Warcraft, but now it’s as good or better than it ever was.

   Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

   Was this review helpful to you? 
   

   
   |

    Comments (8)

   Reply
2. 27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

   
   For better or worse, its WoW with a new difficulty curve, February 4, 2009

   By 

   B. Dyer (Atlanta, GA) –
   
     

   Fun: 

   This review is from: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack (Video Game)

   For the most part, this is by far the best incarnation of WoW yet. Northrend is joy to quest in since it looks nice, has excellent lore (at least for the alliance) that involves you like never before, and a new class that is really fun to play. However, after awhile the novelty of all this new stuff wears off and you’re left with the end game content to keep you playing. As someone who can’t raid, I was really looking forward to getting to run the new heroics and things. However, Blizzard’s new philosophy on the “difficulty scaling” of the game has pretty much completely changed the way end game content runs. After less than a month of playing, my friends and I were tearing through the heroics like nothing. Its hard to get psyched for new gear when you can already dominate in what you have. Heroics in TBC were basically hard as heck raids for 5 people, and I miss that. Heroics aren’t the only casualty to the new system: I’ve never seen so many people with the best gear in the game before just running around. My friends that do raid have nothing left to do, and are now just epicly gearing out all their alts. That situation will be fixed with patches, but it stinks to have to just wait for everything. This is basically the first time playing the game I (and my friends) were left with nothing to do except level alts. I can’t really comment on the pvp state of the game since that’s not my thing (bg’s are the most frustrating thing ever… especially on Alliance).

   In summary, exploring the new world for the first time is fun, but that’s about it. If you can’t raid and aren’t obsessed with pvp, find an alt you love or be prepared for boredom.

   Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

   Was this review helpful to you? 
   

   
   |

    Comments (6)

   Reply
3. 33 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

   
   A solid improvement over the core game and previous expansion, November 19, 2008

   By 

   C. Wynes (Dyersburg, TN) –
   
     
   
     

   Fun: 

   This review is from: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack (Video Game)

   This expansion has been out for a week, and there are some who would say you can’t really review MMORPG content until it’s been out long enough to see how it affects the play environment as a whole. There are hundreds of hours of gameplay in this expansion set, and it will be months before anybody has played through the bulk of it. And of course, the release of an expansion has wide affects on style of play, the in-game economy, and the community. Nonetheless, I’ve played through the entirety of the first two zones, a couple of the new instances, and visited a few other zones, and I think I can give a fairly good assessment of this content.

   I’ll assume that if you are a devoted and regular player, you’ve already purchased this or are planning to do so soon. Reviewing the game for them would be pointless. But what about the casual player, or the lapsed player interested in coming back to WoW? For them, this expansion is really top-notch.

   To start with, if you enjoy the questing aspect of the game, you’re in for a treat. Each zone now has more flypoints, the quest hubs are easy to identify, and there are more quests at each hub. There’s less travel time and less hassle keeping track of your quests, which makes the experience of questing much more enjoyable — and rewarding. I was able to reach lvl 74 solely by completing the two lower-level areas of the new continent, Northrend. In general, the quests are designed very well. Where to go and what to do are usually quite clear from the quest description. Quests are also designed to lead you to other points of interest, such as another travel or quest hub or isolated quest that you might otherwise have missed. There’s no more need to grind out part of a level before heading for another zone, the quest experience is more than sufficient to get you prepared for the subsequent zones. This has come quite a long way since the game was released.

   The environments are quite pretty, especially for a game running on a 4-year-old graphics engine. The graphics have reportedly been upgraded a bit, but my NVidia 8800GT is still able to play the game on fully maxed-out settings in the range of 50-80fps in the outside enviroments, and up to 200fps inside. The art design is fantastic, especially on the low level zone Howling Fjord. It’s impressive that these designers and programmers can do so much visually with a game that needs to be able to play on alot of computers, including those without high-end graphics cards.

   If you are one of those casual or lapsed players who are on the fence about this expansion, consider giving it a try. The revisions to the game over the past couple years have really cut down on the things that often gave MMORPG players the biggest headaches. If you have a character at or near lvl 70 and can hop right into the new zones, all the better, as their design seems to be the best yet.

   Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

   Was this review helpful to you? 
   

   
   |

    Comment

   Reply