Believe me or not but end of last week, I missed one of the greatest events of the year as far as games are concerned… The release of the 2nd extension of World of Warcraft : Lich King!

For those who did not know, I once created and maintained one of the biggest Role Playing guilds in the French servers of the game called “Ordre de Titania”. We had around 135 real players and a total of 210 characters and our goal was to create a parallel story on top of the Warcraft background.

I’m using the preterit because I stopped playing the game a few months after starting to work on CITIES XL as it was asking me so much time than otherwise, I wouldn’t sleep at all.

So, missing such an event is somewhat strange… Did I got totally unaddicted to this game so that it just doesn’t affect me anymore?… Unfortunatelly not, the real reason is I got sick and my fever didn’t allow me to get a copy or even play the game at all.

The goods

On Sunday then, I found an open store and got my hands on the game. As usual, it’s a total pleasure to install: no issues on upgrading my account and everything is straight and forward.

There are a lot of things coming with this extension (a new continent, new max level pushed to 80, new quests, etc.) but my first real interest was on the newest class introduced by Lich King: the Death Knight! I just got the time to level up my character to lvl 60. It could sound a lot however it is not as the Death Knight starts at level 55 which is a good thing as you don’t have to get again through the first quests

This class background history is currently quite good and very impressive as you learn your path near Arthas, the forever Warcraft Darth Vador

And actually, the 3 first levels are also impressive and epic. I have to admit that Blizzard knows how to give the player a feel of power! I never felt that powerful in a RPG: the Death Knight has some impressive black magic and combat technics which makes any other class feels weak. And to make sure you get even more this feeling, Blizzard had this great idea of putting you in certain quests in a war field fihting against 20 or 30 ennemies around you powered up by Morgrain, one of Arthas servants…

The bads

The only real thing that annoyed me once I finished this first introduction to the Death Knight class is that I was then back to my own to get my quests with no other choice than going back to either Kalimdor, The Eastern Realms or the Burning Crusage continent. I would have preferred getting directly to the newest continent and continue discovering new quests, places and characters.

But well, I do understand Blizzard willing to reserve this new continent to the 68+ characters so the oldest characters are not totally replaced by the Death Knights. It’s currently funny because everybody is trying this new class and you end up in the different 58 to 68 level regions potentially finding 15 or 20 other Death Knights playing with you.

Am I addicted to this game? I don’t think so as I can stop it after a short hour of play which I find enough in my evening. So why am I getting back to it? Maybe just because WoW is more than a commercial succes and a very good game