World of Warcraft’s second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, opened to a little less of a roar by the crowd than expected (See our post on it HERE). The forum posts of the world seemed to have removed the hype of this major announcement by Blizzard. The key piece of news that did excite the crowd, though, was the playable version available on the event room floor.

The crowds filled the makeshift rows meant to funnel the audience into a line. A line wasn’t going to stop the army of WoW fans dressed like warlocks, mages or even night elves. Once the line had been braved it was time for the actual show, the new game itself.

In the end, it was really just WoW on a new continent. Located above and between Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms was the new continent of Northrend, shaped like a boomerang facing away from the two pillars of the old World. When a player started up the game, they began outside of either Undercity or Darkshire. Both had been setup as temporary docks for Blizzcon fans to get to the new island.

Playing the Horde, of course, I jumped on the zeppelin and was ushered away to the new island. Blizzard gave everyone a bag full of tier 3.5 gear, below Karazhan, to stock up and begin their exploration. On top of mid-level gear, none of the toons were spec’d so all of the fans were forced to spend 5-10 minutes building their character.

The opening zone the player enters is Howling Fjord. The Horde-only area was run by Undead and seems to be pretty much like a temperate or colder Nagrand. The level mobs were 68-69. The zone was extremely large, at least from the initial running around. It stretched out like a rectangle, with most of the areas to explore coming straight ahead instead of side to side.

I believe Blizzard purposefully didn’t put any trainers in Howling Fjord, so there was no way to see if any new special abilities had been included. Also, the new Death Knight was not available to select either. Instead, the 30 minutes worth of time given to each fan was spent exploring and doing a few quests in Howling Fjord.

Some interesting facts I could gather:

-The current cap to reach level 71 was 814,700 experience required.
-New tailoring cloth was Frostweave
-A new Tauren-looking faction is called “The Taunka”

In the end 30 minutes was too short to really get a massive feel for the game. As the tournament progressed, I got a chance to talk to others about their feelings. One group who managed to organize were able to down the first boss of Utgarde Keep, the initial dungeon in Howling Fjord. However, the second boss was too much with the poorly geared pre-made characters from Blizzard.

The press in the back room had hoped to jump on the computers towards the end of the event once the tournaments were over. The goal was to corpse camp the alliance near their entrance to Northrend, but in the end the tournaments ran too long. All those alliance players waiting to play for an hour in line would have done it to us when we got back home anyways; so why not have a little fun? The spirit of WoW lives on no matter what server you happen to be on: from Blizzcon test servers to your local battlegroup.