Wrath of the Lich King released this weekend

Initial impressions of Wrath of the Lich King

For those of us still interested in this MMORPG megalith, the release of the 3rd expansion to World of Warcraft has been greatly anticipated since it was publicly announced in August, 2007. I picked up my copy of Friday and I've been playing all weekend watching massive crowds of players leveling and questing together, mostly peacefully.

I had not expected to be playing WoW for this long when I first tried the game. It's been 4 years since I rolled my first WoW toon and during that time the expansions have kept me interested and hungry for new content.

There are some fun new environments and dungeons, great looking in that simplistic, low poly WoW way. My initial reaction is it's more of the same level grind formula, but that isn't really all that surprising as it's an approach that's done well for Blizzard in the previous two WoW releases. I've seen a few players reach the level cap (80) today (they've played non-stop and gotten to the highest attainable level) and I've heard rumors that one Guild of "hard core" players has completed and cleared all of the currently available dungeon content already. Mad.

Server stresses started showing the day after the release. Many servers have seen a massive population boom, dragging server login queues to a halt. The queue on a few of the world servers I tried yesterday was around an hour. I left the login screen going and went out for coffee, and when I came back to it I still had time to read the paper before finally being let in. From what I've seen this weekend many servers were locked at their maximum populations for extended periods of time. I'm guessing that means they've sold a few copies.