With Wrath of the Lich King, it seems Blizzard is taking a very iPod-esque approach to development.
Instead of drastically innovating and introducing new ideas to the MMO field, the company's latest World of Warcraft expansion cribs the best ideas from other games and its own community and simply does them better than anyone else could have.
The result? Wrath's beta feels like an elegant, more intuitive version of the current World of Warcraft universe, filled to the brim with ideas that, once you've experienced them, make going back to the regular game an exercise in frustration.
The first addition long-time, hardcore players will notice is the game's inclusion of an Achievement system.
Like the system employed by Microsoft for its Xbox 360 games, Blizzard's attempt rewards players for fulfilling certain in-game objectives with an arbitrary, yet addictive, point collecting meta-game.
Far from a simple rip-off though, the system currently has 532 separate Achievements to earn, and meticulously tracks a player's progress towards the various goals, including the nearly four years of gameplay prior to the next expansion's release.
As a result I now know that my main character has completed 1,424 quests; a number just shy of the 1,500 quests needed for my next Achievement.
The other key addition is the in-game calendar now attached to each player's mini-map.
By opening the calendar, players can find listings for all of Blizzard's upcoming in-game events, as well as create their own events that can be edited with a minimum of mouse-clicks. These events can then be shared with any player or group you desire.
It seems like a small change, but for those guilds that need to plan raid times among 100+ people, it makes life much less complicated.
Gameplay in Wrath has seen very minor changes from the tried-and-true WoW formula.
Combat remains largely the same, and the 10 additional levels of skills players now have access to seem (mostly) balanced. Since it's still a beta there are a few skills that are vastly overpowered, but minor tweaking before the expansion's holiday release should amend those flaws.
Graphically the beta continues Blizzard's streak of using gorgeous, if unrealistic, graphics. All the characters and locations in the beta's newly added areas are more detailed than those found in the old world, but there is a clear lineage present and none of the new enemies look out of place in the game.
This added level of detail will require more computing power than the original game, but my laptop, which runs Burning Crusade content at a minimum of 40 frames per second on full detail, never once choked on the additions. Even in the most impressive new areas, frame rates never dipped below 20 frames per second.
Certainly this is good news for those who were turned off by the heavy system requirements of WoW competitors such as Age of Conan.
Problems owing to the game's incomplete state still abound though. More than a quarter of the expansion's planned content is still inaccessible, and reports of frequent crashes are common (though I've yet to experience any).
As usual with these betas, all of this is subject to change. I'm only a few hours into the thing, so expect more comprehensive impressions once I gain half a dozen more levels.
If there's anything in particular you're curious about, post a question in the comments and I'll do my best to dig up an answer.
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