Product
Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #593 in Video Games
- Brand:
Blizzard Entertainment
- Model: 020626728195
- Released
on: 2008-11-13
- ESRB Rating: Teen
- Platforms: Windows
Vista, Windows XP
- Format: CD
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions:
1.38" h x 5.31" w x 7.56" l, .45 pounds
Features
- This
expansion pack REQUIRES the original World of Warcraft game and The
Burning Crusade expansion pack in order to run
- World of
Warcraft: Wrath of King Lich expansion pack for PC and Mac opens the new
continent of Northrend
- Death Knight is Warcraft's first hero
class and is available for any player with at least a level-55 character
- Northrend offers new environments, including Dragonblight, Grizzly
Hills, Borean Tundra, and Howling Fjord
- New creatures inhabit
the icy continent, such as Nerubian Viziniers, Plague Eruptors,
Shoveltusks and Flesh Giants
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Product
Description
Fans of World of Warcraft, prepare for Blizzard
Entertainment's next installment -- World of Warcraft: Wrath of King
Lich. In this latest expansion, something is afoot in the cold, harsh
northlands. The Lich King Arthas has set in motion events that could
lead to the extinction of all life on Azeroth. The necromantic power of
the plague and legions of undead armies threaten to sweep across the
land. Only the mightiest heroes can oppose the Lich King and end his
reign of terror.
The tuskarr, a
walrus-like race of nomadic fisherman, inhabit the icy Borean Tundra.
View larger. |
Half-giant
warriors, the vrykul, once inhabited the land. View larger. |
You'll enjoy
exploring Northrend and all its environments and dungeons. View larger. |
Explore Northrend
and battle the Lich King with World of Warcraft's first hero class
character -- The Death Knight. View larger. |
One of many new
environments, Dragonblight is an arctic wasteland surrounded by dense
forests. View larger. |
Many strange and
terrifying creatures inhabit this frozen continent. View larger. |
Enter
the Death Knight
This expansion adds a host of content to
the already massive existing game world. Players will achieve soaring
levels of power, explore Northrend (the vast icy continent of the Lich
King), and battle high-level heroes to determine the ultimate fate of
Azeroth. As you face the dangers of the frigid, harsh north, prepare to
master the dark necromantic powers of the Death Night -- World of
Warcraft's first Hero class. No longer servants of the Lich King, the
Death Knights begin their new calling as experienced, formidable
adversaries. Each is heavily armed, armored, and in possession of a
deadly arsenal of forbidden magic.If you have a World of Warcraft
account with a character of at least level 55, you will be able to
create a new level-55 Death Knight of any race (if on a PvP realm, the
Death Knight must be the same faction as your existing character). And
upon entering the new world, your Death Knight will begin to quest to
level 80, gaining potent new abilities and talents along the way. This
expansion allows for only one Death Knight per realm, per account.
New
Environments in Northrend Await
Journey through the remote,
diverse lands of Northrend and explore Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills,
Borean Tundra, and Howling Fjord. Named for bones of perished dragons
and majestic shrines to the fallen creatures, Dragonblight is an arctic
wasteland surrounded by dense forests.
Not everything is frozen in
Northrend. The lush mountains of Grizzly Hills are the ancestral home
to the furbolgs, who have grown accustomed to relative peace. Although
their tranquility is being challenged by trappers, goblins, and ice
trolls, Grizzly Hills remains a vast and dangerous wilderness.
The
southwestern tip of Northrend is home to the sprawling Borean Tundra.
The Horde has established a dominant presence in this icy portion of the
continent and has formed a bond with the tuskarr, a walrus-like race of
nomadic fisherman. Magical energy is afoot in the region, and it has
caused increased tension.
High above the Great Sea at the
southeastern tip of Northrend lies the Howling Fjord. Ancient mythology
holds that a race of half-giant warriors, the vrykul, once inhabited the
land, founding a prosperous civilization. They mysteriously vanished,
leaving deserted villages and abandoned temples. In present times, the
Alliance and the Horde have come to Howling Fjord to confront the Lich
King. Strangely, this has prompted the return of the vrykul, who are
attacking the Alliance and Horde settlements. Howling Fjord presents a
difficult challenge on two fronts: withstanding the vrykul's onslaught
and battling the evil Lich King.
A Multitude of Monsters
Strange
and terrifying creatures inhabit the frozen continent of Northrend,
such as Nerubian Viziniers, Plague Eruptors, Shoveltusks and Flesh
Giants, to name just a few. Half-spider, half-humanoid, the viziniers
utilize sorcery and high intelligence to emerge as the rulers of
Nerubians' underground kingdom. The Plague Eruptors are walking corpses
created by the Lich King's evil experiments to spread horror and chaos
across the living world.
Massive curved antlers make it easy to
identify the Shoveltusks. These grumpy beasts are very dangerous,
territorial, and best left alone. The Flesh Giants are nothing short of
nightmarish abominations. Cobbled together from the pieces of giant body
parts, the Flesh Giants employ tremendous strength to carry out the
Lich King's wishes.
The World of Warcraft: Wrath of King Lich
expansion pack allows you to engage in epic siege warfare. The pack
presents the first Hero class and allows you to transform your Death
Knight's look with character customization that even include hairstyles
and dances. You'll enjoy exploring the Northrend and all its
environments and dungeons, filled with some of the deadliest creatures
-- and greatest treasures -- on all of Azeroth.
| System Requirements |
|
| Minimum | Recommended |
| Operating System | PC: Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Vista (with latest
Service Packs)
Mac: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer |
| CPU | PC: Intel Pentium 4
1.3 GHz or AMD Athlong XP 1500+
Mac: PowerPC G5 1.6 GHz or Intel Core
Duo processor | PC: Dual-core processor, such as Intel Pentium D
or AmD Athlong 64 X2
Mac: Intel 1.8 GHz processor or better |
| Graphics Hardware | PC: 3D
graphics processor with Hardware Transfor and Lighting with 32 MB VRAM,
such as an ATI Radeon 7200 or NVIDIA GeForce2 class card or better
Mac:
3D graphics processor with Hardware Transform and Lighting with 64 MB
VRAM, such as ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce Ti 4600 class card or
better | PC: 3D Graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader
capabilities with 128 MB VRAM, such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA
GeForce 7600 GT class card or better
Mac: 3D graphics processor with
Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM, such as ATI Radeon
X1600 or NVIDIA 7600 class card or better. |
| Memory | PC: 512 MB (1 GB
for Vista)
Mac: 1 GB | PC: 1 GB (2 GB for Vista)
Mac: 2 GB |
| Hard Drive Space | 15 GB of free space |
| All
Platform Requirements | Keyboard and mouse,
required for controls. Other input devices not supported. Active
broadband Internet connection required to play. |
Customer
Reviews
Lich King has much more depth
and is a lot more fun than Burning Crusade
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.
For better or worse, its WoW with a new difficulty
curve
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.
A
solid improvement over the core game and previous expansion
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.
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