Last week the Wrath of the Lich King information drop really brought Blizzard’s view into focus. I’ve been saying for some time now that they were holding something back - a fairly obvious comment. What I didn’t really appreciate is how informative a news reveal would be when it finally hit. I’d expected some sort of specific feature, like another Hero class or some moderate old world revamping. Instead we got … well, basically a manifesto. In between the back-of-the-box features they’ve let slip, we can see the impressions of a very specific boot tread.

Blizzard is now a company marching to battle with a very specific plan: World of Warcraft is going to be a very, very casual-friendly game. You think it’s casual now, you haven’t seen anything yet. Cameron’s already done a bangup job of commenting on this over at Massively, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t do some commentating of my own. Aside from gross generalizations, I specifically want to address a few things I noticed in the interviews with Kaplan and Chilton … things that made me very curious indeed.

Overall, I love the ideas they’re looking to add to the game with Lich King.

• Death Knights: A good utility class that I can roll at high level, ensuring me the ability to play with friends on other servers? Sign me up. I definitely hope they restrict the creation of these buggers on PvP servers, and (ideally) I’d still like them to introduce another hero class with the expansion. The two most-asked-for class types are tanks and healers. Some sort of DPS/Healer archetype would be a great alternative to an endless sea of DKs.
• 10/25 Raids: Easily the best idea of the bunch, and more than anything else makes me want to push to be ready for the expansion. If I can try the Arthas encounter in a 10-man, I might actually try to do it. Each dungeon is going to be tuned to be just an hour long. An HOUR! There are level 40 dungeons that take longer. Fantastic!
• Air-to-Air combat: Definitely the weirdest of the bunch, and yet so obvious in some ways it could only have come from smarty-pantses. We don’t know how extensive this segment of the game will be, but even just the little bit we see in videos looks pretty awesome.
• Legacy Weapons: Epic weapons your twinks can use? SO FUNNY. A lot of people were qqing in my post about Battlegrounds being ruined, but there’s no way Blizz is going to let unbalanced stuff like this into the PvP game. Expect them to be restricted to PvE situations only.

In an interview with Gamespot, Kaplan and Chilton brought up a few specific themes that extend the ideas they’ve shown in this and previous work; it’s kind of shocking how preceptive these elements are. Like, we all make jokes at Blizzard’s expense and erm … in my case make assumptions that even Blizzard doesn’t get their own game. But some of this stuff? Holy crap it’s good. Like, seriously, top-shelf thinking.

• “Terrain Variation as Rewards”: Changing zones, changing the theming of quests/NPCs/mobs/terrain, are all part of the metareward for leveling up. In a strictly straightforward sense the avatars get stronger, end of story. But for the player, the changing backdrop to his adventuring is what keeps him going. Getting to see new places, new instances, new monsters, is really “what the game is about.” The grind is, for many players, a secondary concern. The fact that they recognize this is fantastic. The fact that they don’t extend this to making the lower level content more compelling, or more meaningful, is troublesome/frustrating.
• “Death Knight Class Introductions”: Instead of just dumping you into the world, Blizz is going to offer up a unique starting experience for DKs. From the sounds of things, they’re going to begin their experience in a unique area, and go through a series of quests that introduces them to their powers/gets them some decent gear/tells a story about where they came from. The level 55-60 experience is incredibly fast now; if I were to follow Blizzs’ line of thought, I’d make this like a half-sized zone that’s for nothing but leveling your DK to 58-59. Then they could hop right into Hellfire and not ever set foot in old world with the intention of questing. What I find compelling about this is this unique starting experience. What I’d love to see is one of these set up for every class, telling you about your classes’ specific role in the game, and in the lore. They could be instanced mini-zones off of the main starting areas, and would perhaps just offer a handful of introductory quests - maybe just enough to get you to level 5 or so. Let’s face it, the generic starter experience in WoW is great (for the genre), but wouldn’t be that much of a loss.
• Temporary Monster Classes: The ‘Raise Dead’  spell that results in a Ghoul is an inroad to bigger, better things. If they can drop you into a temporary class with a different hotbar (ala many things in Guild Wars) what’s to stop them from making that a bigger feature in the game? Monster play was a great idea when it was implemented in EQ, it’s pretty popular in LOTRO, and there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t be a great addition to WoW.

I’ll admit it: I’m excited for the expansion now. This is compelling stuff, and indications of departures to come. Can’t wait to see what else they have up their sleeves.