Tag Archives: wrath of the lich king

Of all the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King launch events in the UK, we’re pretty sure we picked the right one.

According to a report by Eurogamer, the midnight launch at HMV’s Oxford Street location was the most jam-packed ever seen – smashing the UK’s previous record of 1,500, held coincidentally by WoW: The Burning Crusade’s launch event last year.

At this point, HMV reps estimate that roughly 2,000-2,500 people attended last night’s blowout, though official numbers haven’t been tallied. Even so, however, HMV has a good feeling about this one.

More through the link.

By Nathan Grayson

Wrath of the Lich King launched in London last night, and we decided to forego on sleep and get busy with the rusty old lenses. The results are after the link.

HMV witnessed by far the largest game launch it had ever seen, as you can see in the shots, and Blizzard COO Paul Sams and associate producer Lee Sparks turned up to do some crowd-whipping for the game’s midnight release.

Our full coverage of the event’s here, and the first news stories from out interview with Paul and Lee are here and here.

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Blizzard’s released a final set of Wrath of the Lich King images, with the game now live across the US and currently about to launch in California.

Check out our launch coverage from the London event here.

World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King has launched in London to a heaving crowd at Oxford Street’s HMV.

Thousands queued outside the store to welcome in the second add-on to the world’s favourite MMO – find our gallery from the night here – with the usual assortment of cosplayers, children, grey gamers and the core in heavy attendance.

Full article and loads more photos after the break.

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Speaking to Videogamer in London today ahead of the launch of Wrath of the Lich King tonight, Blizzard COO Paul Sams categorially denied the firm was looking to exploit StarCraft II will it’s three-pronged release strategy.

“The fact of the matter is, it’s absolutely, positively untrue about us trying to stretch it out and milk it,” he said.

“People think that it was a monetary driven decision. I can absolutely, positively tell you, with 100 percent certainty, that that was not part of the conversation.

“I guarantee it. I give my word. There was never, ever a conversation where we said, ‘let’s do this because we’re going to make more money’. I guarantee it. As a matter of fact the sole reason we did it was because we thought it was going to be a better experience. Anybody that says otherwise is not correct. It is absolutely not what we did it for.”

Clear enough? More through there.

Blizzard COO Paul Sams said today that growth was still important to World of Warcraft, and that the game is still seeing “meaningful” increases in subscriber numbers.

“I think growing the subscribership is important,” he told VG247, speaking in London ahead of tonight’s launch of Wrath of the Lich King.

“People leave. Taking a moment to talk about things from a company business perspective, continuing to grow is important if we want to maintain our subscribership.”

Lich King would mean higher figures, the exec said, but he refused to predict how many would be added to the game’s current 11 million players.

“I don’t know where we’ll land, but I do think the subscribership will go up,” he said.

Sams went on to say that Blizzard is working on a number on plans to make WoW more attractive to new subs and those considering leaving, including major upgrades to the game’s customer services.

“Ultimately we’re trying to do a lot of different things to refine the experience.

“We have a variety of other initiatives that we’re working on, trying to evolve the service to hopefully cause people to want to stay.

“We have some big initiatives that we’re working on with customer service, to try to deliver best of class customer service as well, which I think we do pretty good today, but not anywhere near where we want to.”

The boss conceded that WoW’s growth had slowed, but was still going North. Expansion releases, he said, provided a big boost.

“We have a variety of things that we desire to do, and as it relates to growth, yeah, it isn’t growing today as fast as it was in the first year, or something, but we’re still continuing to see meaningful growth,” he said.

“When we launched Burning Crusade we saw some pretty significant amount of growth because a lot of people returned and we found that a lot of new players came as well, interestingly enough, so we continue to see growth product by product.”

Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft’s second major expansion, launches globally tonight. Keep watching for updates from the flagship London release on Britain’s happening Oxford Street.

Speaking ahead of tonight’s launch of WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard COO Paul Sams has told VG247 that its second major MMO – already in development – is going to be a “next generation” title that sounds like a substantial departure from World of Warcraft.

“We want to create a great game,” he said. “Something that’s cool, and new, and different, and kind of next generation in terms of look and feel and gameplay. That’s a challenging endeavour.”

Sams indicated that the project is in the very early stages of development.

“We’re definitely at the beginning, in the first half of development,” said the exec, explaining that Blizzard tends to work to a two-half process when creating new games.

“When we’re building a new game from the ground up, what happens is that it’s slow going for the first bit, while the team goes round and round and round figuring out how it’s going to look and feel, what the player experience is and what the differentiators are, and then the speed at which we then bring in the contet and polish and actually get to the finish line… I think the second half of the process is always substantially faster than the first half of product development,” he said.

Sams said when we’re going to see first mention of the game.

“I don’t know yet,” he answered when asked for an announcement date.

“For us, we want to make sure that the gameplay and the experience that the players are going to have is fleshed out quite a bit.

“The last thing we want to do is say, ‘Hey we’re doing this,’ and everyone says, ‘Oh cool,’ and then we change things completely. We want to have a level of confidence that the direction we’re going in the right one, and that it’s polished enough to be able to show something, also. And we’re not in either of those places yet.”

Sams said he expected the process of getting the new MMO into the public domain would be challenging one, but growing WoW has taught the company a huge amount.

“I think we’re going to get a lot of bumps and bruises along the way,” he said.

“The good news is that we’re been able to do this with World of Warcraft, and so we have a lot of experience, so hopefully we’ve learnt a tremendous amount.

“Not to mention that before WoW launching we were the world leader in online gaming with Battle.net. We have a lot of experience, and so hopefully that’s going to benefit us as [we bring the game to market].”

Wrath of the Lich King is released at midnight tonight. Watch this space from the flagship London launch event.

Wrath of the Lich King launches in the US and Europe tonight, and Blizzard’s shipping in COO Paul Sams for interviews and crowd-pleasing at the London HMV event.

Associate producer Lee Sparks will also be “in the house,” as will thousands of people dressed as blood elves and warlocks.

We’ll be there too. Start looking for updates in the early evening: it sounds as though it’s going to be a bit bonkers, to be honest.

US retailer Gamestop’s released an 80-page PDF of all the stores opening at midnight for the launch of Wrath of the Lich King tonight, as you can see here.

You probably live near one of these if you live in America. The main bashes are happening in Anaheim, CA, and New York.

According to this Shacknews story, World of Wacraft orc capital of Orgrimmar is under siege from the Lich King’s Scourge forces in an event that repeats every 20-30 minutes.

The addition precursors the launch of Wrath of the Lich tomorrow night. There’s a video through there, just in case you don’t believe it.

Blizzard’s put out listings for all midnight shop openings for the launch of Wrath of the Lich King in Europe tomorrow, and you’d be hard pressed to find a country that isn’t involved.

We’re going to be at the London opening at HMV on Oxford Street tomorrow evening, so expect plenty of things WoW-related.

In addition, the game itself is gearing up for launch with the Lich King’s forces now laying siege to the orc’s capital city. More here.

Blizzard bosses Mike Morhaime and Frank Pearce are to turn up at the midnight launch of Wrath of the Lich King in New York this week, which starts at 8.00pm EST on Wednesday at the “Best Buy store near Times Square.”

There must only be one.

“At Best Buy, we’re passionate about helping gamers get the most enjoyment from their gaming systems – from having the latest releases to a full complement of gaming platforms, accessories, electronics and services,” said the incredibly-named Jill Hamburger, Best Buy vice president games and movies.

“Our newly introduced Reward Zone Gamers Club provides additional benefits and amazing experiences for our most loyal customers who love gaming.”

Press release after the link.

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Lord of the Rings Online boss Jeff Steefel reckons Wrath of the Lich King isn’t a problem to his Mines of Moria expansion, despite the fact the two are launching within a week of each other.

“The way that we succeed is by focusing on ourselves and competing with ourselves, and that’s what we’re continuing to do with this,” he said on the subject of feeling pressure from Blizzard’s latest.

“It’s going to be interesting. It’s not just us and Lich King: there’s an EQ2 expansion coming out, there’s an EVE expansion coming out. I think it shows a change in the market, right? I think it’s going to be happening a lot now.”

Steefel added that Lord of the Rings Online is a very different beat to World of Warcraft, and that the modern MMO market’s mature enough to support both.

“The interesting thing about the MMO space now is that it’s got diversified, and our game is extremely different from other games,” he said.

“The kind of players that play WoW regularly and the kind of play LotRO regularly, and the kind of players that play Warhammer regularly are different. We have a market now where people tend to move around between games.

“We’re less concerned than we would have been than we would have been in the days where there was one game out there and everyone played only that one game.”

Mines of Moria, the second major expansion to Lord of the Rings Online, launches on November 18. Wrath of the Lich King launches this Thursday, November 13.

Janco’s Mike Hickey has predicted that WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King will sell through around 5 million copies in its opening month.

The add-on goes on sale next week.

“We expect the upcoming release of WoW’s expansion pack… would yield a sell-through of roughly 5 million units in the first month,” he said, as reported by Gamasutra.

“We believe current product sales performance and pre-order activity at key retailers like GameStop has likely illuminated sufficient predictability to the ultimate performance from key game releases to maintain performance projections and articulated conviction,” he added, talking of other Activision big shots such as Guitar Hero World Tour.

The analyst was also “impressed,” he said, at the increase in WoW’s subs based to 11 million users amid economic anxieties and two recent major releases, Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, neither of which have appeared to slow the game’s momentum.

More through there.

Blizzard’s announced the closure of the Wrath of the Lich King beta in preparation for the add-on’s launch next week.

“We would like to thank everyone who has participated in the Wrath of the Lich King beta test,” said a staffer on the official forums.

“We greatly appreciate all of the feedback and you have given us during this critical phase of World of Warcraft’s development. In preparation for the launch of the game next Thursday, November 13, we will be bringing down our beta realms at 12:00 AM PST. Thanks again, and see you soon in Northrend!”

We’re off to the game’s London launch, so keep an eye out for pictures of 3,000 people dressed as orcs and elves.

Eurogamer reports that the world of WoW is currently undergoing a zombie invasion which is all part of the up and coming Lich King expansion’s imminent arrival.

From the article:

Infected crates in the town of Booty Bay give players ten minutes to be healed by one of the healers of the Argent Dawn faction – who have conveniently appeared all over the world – before they’re turned into a shambling Ghoul.

If you fail (or succeed, depending on your viewpoint), you’ll be hostile to everyone and everything in the game except other zombies, and you’ll get a new skill bar with zombie abilities, including the ability to spread the plague to other players.

Sounds great. Any VG247 readers turning into zombies? No. Don’t answer that.

By Mike Bowden

World of Warcraft patch 3.0.2 has now gone live in Europe, following yesterday’s launch in the US.

The update is the main content push in preparation for Wrath of the Lich King next month.

Get details on what it contains here.

It does according to this Massively piece, anyway. This is Patch 3.0.2, the pre-release content patch for Wrath of the Lich King, which itself is due out next month.

Euro subscribers are going to get this tomorrow morning. Hit the link for more detail.

Gamespot’s got a bunch of new Wrath of the Lich King art, which you have to look at because it’s Wrath of the Lich King. That’s it, Jethro. See it.

Speaking to IGN at BlizzCon 08, World of Warcraft production director J Allen Brack’s said the WoW team has been humbled by the success of the game, and that the initial benchmark for success was 1 million subscribers.

“Our big thoughts about what the game would eventually be internally was, ‘Well, one day we might have one million subscribers,’” he said. “And that would be just really successful; [the] pinnacle of success with one million subscribers. Now we’ve got more than ten times that.

It’s really forced the company to change, the team to change… it’s really humbling.”

Blizzard is on the verge of releasing Wrath of the Lich King, the MMO’s second major expansion.

More through the link.