United Gamer Online (UGO)

by Gordon Cameron
The Cataclysm is coming.

In their ongoing quest to keep "World of Warcraft" fresh, the game-crafting geniuses at Blizzard Entertainment will soon be presenting the third retail expansion for their mega-successful online game.

Players who purchase the expansion will be able to create new characters from two new playable races: Goblins, a diminutive, green-skinned race of mercantile swindlers, and Worgen, humans who have been infected by a lycanthropy-like disease and are doomed to live as feral, wolflike hybrids. In addition, the game’s maximum level cap will be increased from 80 to 85, further raising the power of the game's players, and the number of spells and special abilities available to them. New high-level zones and dungeons are being added, including the airy, cloud-ringed Skywall, and the long-hidden Mount Hyjal.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. Whereas previous expansions have focused on adding new geographical zones, Blizzard’s designers have decided this time to completely overhaul the original gameworld, which has remained largely unchanged since Warcraft’s debut in 2004. Thousands of new quests are being added, and the landscape itself has been altered – justified in story terms as the result of a rampage by the mighty dragon Deathwing. For example, the once-tranquil savannah known as “The Barrens” has been sundered by a massive lava-filled chasm, and the formerly dry-as-a-bone desert of Thousand Needles is now largely submerged underwater.

The expansion is designed both to attract new subscribers and keep current Warcrafters happy, according to Blizzard designer Tom Chilton. “People that have played the game in the past [that] stopped playing because they did everything there was to do, might feel more interested to come back and play the game once again, because … they get to go through these significantly new zones, this redesigned [level] 1-60 experience,” Chilton says.

A key priority is to bring the design of the original game up to the standards achieved in the first two expansions, “The Burning Crusade” and “Wrath of the Lich King.” “You can only go through the content so many times before it starts to feel a little bit stale,” Chilton notes. “We felt like it would be really nice to finally redo a lot of that... When you compare the more recent stuff to the older stuff, there’s a pretty big difference in quality. We want to try to equalize that quality a little bit better.”

On a technical level, graphics will also get a moderate facelift, with greatly improved water and atmospheric effects. “Changing out the graphics for [a massively multiplayer online game] is a lot like changing out the engines of an airplane while it’s flying,” Chilton laughs. “But we’ve gotten pretty good at knowing what we can do to incrementally evolve it over time without causing problems.”

An official release date for “Cataclysm” has not yet been announced, but speculation is that it will hit stores sometime this fall. More information will be forthcoming at Blizzcon, Blizzard’s annual convention, in July.