World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Preview
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All WOW's races exist in a moral grey area - the Horde, even the frankly unpleasant Undead, are just misunderstood - so this is the first opportunity there's ever been to go over to the actual dark side. It's a heady experience. You're given quests asking you to steal horses, torture soldiers for information with red-hot pokers, turn an entire navy's cannons against them in a bloody massacre, and kill civilians 10 levels below you who, in any case, are too terrified of you to fight back. If you don't exercise self-control, you will find yourself cackling uncontrollably at your keyboard.
Because this is the only place you can start a Death Knight, you'll be doing all this in the company of many other players, all running amok, lending the whole enterprise a glorious sense of unhinged blood lust, of being part of an evil undead army on the rampage. This brilliant device turns the most serious threat to immersion in the new hero class into the exact opposite. Blizzard has even acknowledged that the first thing most players will want to do is duel each other, by creating a quest which rewards you for doing just that.
There's superb characterisation and an uncommonly light touch throughout the writing and quest design. There are very large helpings of crowd-pleasing and showboating, too, as the WOW team falls over itself to showcase Wrath of the Lich King's new visual effects, physics and interactions. The entire zone is instanced several times over, allowing Blizzard to take you through several stages of set-pieces.
