Blizzard Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan recently gave an interview to wowvault, where he spoke about many of the new features in Wrath of the Lich King, and even revealed a few new things.
He outlined the main features of the expansion, but there were a couple of new facts that emerged:
Dalaran
Dalaran will move to Northrend before the expansion goes live. And he went one step further, giving us info about the move and a nice indication of when we will see the expansion in relation to this event:
There will be some storyline quests here as well to explain what happened to Dalaran, so that new players will understand why this big pit is here.
The change to Dalaran itself, you’ll actually see that in a content patch that comes out directly before Wrath of the Lich King, but you won’t be able to travel to Northrend until WotLK.
It’ll be slightly episodic in that players who are playing the live game will go “Oh my god, the dome is gone, there’s this big hole in the ground, I wonder what happened to Dalaran.”
Well a month later they’ll be able to see what happened.
New Battleground
Kaplan also spoke about the new battleground, which will be called Strand of the Ancients (SOTA). This BG will feature destructible buildings and siege weapons, like Lake Wintergrasp, the new PvP zone in Northrend.
Achievements System Rewards
When Wrath of the Lich King ships, there will likely be around 600-700 achievements. Some achievements will have rewards, such as a special tabard for collecting 25 tabards, a “Battlemaster” title for extremely “hardcore PvP” accomplishments, and a Skunk pet called Stinker for collecting all the existing cosmetic pets.
Raid Instances
There will be 3 raid instances on release of the expansion: Naxxramas, Chamber of the Aspects (Black Dragonflight fight), Eye of Eternity (Malygos).
Kaplan also spoke a little about player housing. It’s not all bad news:
We would love to do player housing, the scope of that project is beyond Wrath of the Lich King, we won’t be able to get in it in for this expansion but it’s something we constantly discuss. We want to get to it eventually, it’s a very challenging and tricky system to write. We feel like we can get something in quick and dirty that would check it off the list and say Hey we’ve got player housing in, but that’s never how we’ve really approached the content. We want it to be a system that interacts with the game as a whole and just what we deem to be the instance shoebox, meaning somewhere there’s an instance portal that you hit, and no one ever goes through it and there’s not much customisation; we really want to do a full-blown system for it…
There are no immediate plans for it. It is a constant topic of discussion on the development team though.
I fully agree Player Housing needs to be done right, if people shall take it as a thing to invest time and money in building and visiting.
Small board games, a "screen" or some way of watching recorded guild raids (fast forward, rewind, pause, change character etc) and see top guild and team in raids (when they allow video to the public of course, so tactics on new raids cannot be copied), in Arenas etc.
A lot of things that a guild can come together around, or friends. A lot of reasons to go there and hang out, instead of standing at a random spot in the world, typing in the chat and no more.
Miniature games such as the small enginering tank, controlled in some kind of "battle" with goals, or things to take down. Or maybe other games.
Just come up with a lot of things like that, and I would happily go there!