World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Preview
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Of course, I can't forget to mention arguably the most exciting part of the new expansion - a new class to play: the Death Knight. However, this is a new class with a twist. For one thing, you can't play as a Death Knight from level 1, one of your other characters has to be level 55 or above. You can then create a Death Knight as a separate entity from your original 55+ character, meaning you don't lose access to any of your existing characters. You start as a level 55 Death Knight in Archerus, the Ebon Hold within the Eastern Plaguelands. The Death Knight is the first 'hero' class within the game. A plate-wearing DPS based tank character; the class uses a new resource system based on cooldowns. Instead of using mana or rage like other classes, you can carve runes into your character's weapons and then use those runes to power abilities. The initial few opening quests teach you all of this as well as help you acquire and learn to use your new skills, which include your own skeletal Deathcharger mount. The early stages of playing as a Death Knight are cleverly scripted in a manner that quickly grabs the player's imagination, drawing you into the world of the Death Knight very well. In a strange sort of way, the scripting added a bit of morality to the character, pillaging villages felt so easy in early quests; it felt cruel on these simple NPCs, they didn't stand a chance against the might of my Death Knight. This seems to be the exact reason why the early quests are so tightly scripted, they are meant to make you realise just how powerful your character is and it adds a nice role-playing element to a game that is often lacking in 'true' role-playing. Plus it's just plain fun to feel quite so incredibly powerful, even if these villagers are just minions in the grand scheme of things. Most of the early quests are reasonably entertaining, and are even fairly humorous in places such as one quest involving stealing a house being called Grand Theft Palomino, a nice homage to GTA.Spotted on Blue's News.
