Blue's News state that Blizzards paid faction changes are now underway.

The World of Warcraft Forums have word that paid faction changes are now underway. Blizzard Support's Faction Change FAQ has all the details, and word is: "After purchasing a Faction Change for a character, a player can choose any race of the opposite faction that is compatible with the character’s class." They also say that they will also be offering a paid race change service going forward, and more details on that will be revealed at a future date.

Blue's News rounds up the details on WoW's incoming patch.

A post to the front page of the World of Warcraft Website has more information about the upcoming version 3.2 "Call of the Crusade" patch for Blizzard's MMORPG than you can shake an orc at. They outline the content on their Under Development page including info on Crusaders' Coliseum, Isle of Conquest, Argent Tournament updates, along with a look at future of Battlegrounds and new cat and bear looks for druids. They also direct us to a Call of the Crusade Q&A a Class Q&A Series and posts with details on upcoming emblem system changes, mount system revisions, epic gems, a new Shaman totem bar (hic!), and last, but not least, the latest updated to the PTR Patch 3.2.0 Notes.

Blizzard's new battle.net account system is working in europe.

The Battle.net Account features are now completely live in Europe! Starting today, World of Warcraft players in Europe can merge their World of Warcraft accounts into their Battle.net Account, enabling them to log into the forums, the Armory, and the game with their Battle.net account! The Battle.net Account also allows quick and easy access to all World of Warcraft accounts merged with it as well as providing access to StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo accounts associated with it.

Additionally, by merging their World of Warcraft Account into their Battle.net account, European World of Warcraft players may now participate in the Beta Opt-in, giving them the chance to join in the StarCraft II Beta test if their account is selected!

Head over to Battle.net and create your account or merge your World of Warcraft account in now.

Ryan Laverick writes his second WoW raid guide at Eurogamer.

Dragons. Wise, majestic and graceful beings entrusted by the Titans to watch over Azeroth in their absence. If you have even a cursory knowledge of World of Warcraft, you'll know that dragons frequently play an important part in events. However, today we come not to praise them but rather to bury them, for majestic they may be, but all too often they're either irredeemably evil or completely insane (usually both) and, more importantly, they tend to carry a fabulous amount of gold and loot on them.

While there are scores of dragons in Northrend, there are currently just two top-level raid encounters available for players looking for a change of scenery from Naxxramas. - Sartharion, in the Obsidian Sanctum, and Malygos, in the Eye of Eternity. We'll look at both in their 10-player incarnations.

Blizzard release infomation on their latest raid dungeon.

Ulduar clearly illustrates the new design challenges and innovations that come with the bigger scope of this expansion's raids. In order to make raid content more accessible, a raid has to offer a lot of variety, but it also needs to include a very granular means for players to adjust the raid's difficulty. This concept was first realized in The Burning Crusade with the introduction of Heroic mode, and Wrath of the Lich King is developing the idea even further with new Hard Modes.

Boss fights that have a Hard Mode are affected by certain variables that players can control and that change the encounter's difficulty. For example, spread throughout Ulduar's vehicle section are four Defense Towers you can destroy. The more Towers you leave intact, the harder the encounter with the Flame Leviathan will be, but the loot will also be better.

Ulduar isn't the first dungeon to include Hard Mode, but it certainly makes the most use of it. Out of 14 bosses, 11 will have a Hard Mode that offers additional challenges and rewards. Ulduar will appeal to a wide range of play styles, and the dungeon also has great longevity and high replay value.

Oli Welsh informs on the recent WoW patch while WoW Insider are calling the patch a disaster.

The release of yesterday's WOW patch hasn't gone as smoothly as Blizzard would have hoped, with headline changes not working properly, major player-versus-player game features disabled, and bugs and lag apparently worse than before.

WOW Insider has listed some of the issues, judging the patch a "disaster".

As we reported yesterday, the Wintergrasp PVP zone had to be disabled after it was found to crash the game servers. No sooner was this fixed than Arena battles had to be removed due to bugs in the ranking system.

The unavailability of account-wide Death Knight creation servers - one of the main features of the patch - is being fixed through rolling sever restarts. Several other changes and fixes in the patch are simply not working as intended, and animation issues appear to be rife.

If you're crazy about The Wrath of the Lich King you might like this new offering from Blizzard; a softcover artwork book with 200 concept art drawings, a 12 page storybook and 2 art cards. A preview of this can be found at Blizzard.

With a score of 3 out of 5 cowbells Gamers Creed presents their review of Wrath of the Lich King.

For me, I enjoyed the new content a lot. I found the quests types to be more varied and not just the same basic quest archetypes I played in the past. I also found the expansive, story driven quest chains to be a more immersive, compelling experience. I enjoyed the changes to the talents and abilities to my characters. But, all that changed once I hit the level cap. It immediately felt like the dreadful grind that burned me out a couple of years ago. I'm not interested in seeing the zones I haven't visited. I don't really feel like leveling my professions. I don't want to run another character through the content I just played through. I don't feel like getting my character raid-ready. I've already cancelled my subscription, one month after the expansion hit. I'm sure in six months I'll come back to visit, but at the moment, I'm already burnt out. I guess the honeymoon is over.

Opinion piece from The Register on why WoW still rules the roost.

Another year gone, and Blizzard's World of Warcraft remains the unrivaled champion of the massive multiplayer online (MMO) genre, and - in many ways - PC gaming in general.

At its feet lay 2008's pile of would-be "WoW-killers" left charred, battered, and wondering what Blizzard's four-year-old creation has that they lack.

"WoW-killer" is the marketing kiss of death in this town. Just as sure as "iPod-killer," or "Google-killer" is for digital music players and internet search. But the money's too good in the MMO genre for there not to be a constant stream of challengers. And there's profits to be had by owning the number two - hell, the twenty-second-best selling MMO out there.

But why can't anybody beat WoW after all this time?

Ryan Scott rates WotLK an A-.

The most negative criticism that I can really level at Wrath is that it's essentially one giant carrot to the rest of WOW's stick. With Northrend's far-superior content, a newly accelerated 60 to 70 leveling curve, and Death Knights starting out at level 55, Blizzard's essentially holding up a neon sign that says "levels 1 to 54 don't matter anymore." With the leveling grind becoming more tiresome with each expansion, and with so many perks -- PVE-to-PVP server-switching, name changes, and even gender changes -- slowly implemented over time (each for a small fee, of course), I have to wonder how long it'll be before Blizzard offers race/class changes or flat-out level 55-plus newbie characters of all classes for lazy players with cash to spare.

I honestly wouldn't rule that sort of thing out, as Blizzard's even gone so far as to promise a dual-spec system (allowing players to shift roles with what I can only assume will be considerable ease) in a future patch. And like Burning Crusade, Wrath is essentially a year-and-some-change-long project with at least three or four major updates over the course of its lifespan. Heck, we won't even get to go toe-to-toe with the Lich King himself for a while yet; his home turf, Icecrown Citadel, will be Wrath's ultimate raid dungeon, and part of the game's final content patch. That's fine by me, though -- Wrath features more than enough content to keep me busy for a while yet. And if WOW's current track record maintains, things can only get better with time.

Gamespot like Blizzard's phasing technique in WotLK 9/10.

New in Wrath of the Lich King are numerous quests in which you complete objectives at the controls of a mount or vehicle. Quest-specific rides include dragons, mammoths, airplanes, bipedal mechs, and even a giant. The controls are slightly different for all of them, but they're never complicated and they're always clearly displayed onscreen as soon as you climb aboard. Another gameplay mechanic that's used frequently in new quests is phasing, which lets you see areas of the world differently from other players. Similar to how the world appears in gray scale when you die and have to run back to your corpse as a ghost, phasing quests often apply some kind of visual filter to the environment and let you interact with NPCs in different ways. Wrath of the Lich King takes this idea to a whole new level. By completing certain quests, you trigger dramatic changes to the environment that are the same for all players who have completed said quest, but for players who have yet to do so, the world still exists in its original form. Whether this is achieved though technical wizardry or just straight-up magic is unclear, but its integration is seamless, and it's incredibly satisfying to feel like your actions are having a significant impact on the world around you.

Highly regarded once again with these closing comments:

With Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft's play style has been tweaked to be more accessible, addictive, and deeper. Any longtime player is sure to be pleased with what Blizzard's done here since it gives the higher level population a wealth of new content for play as well as improves the overall look of the world. And let's be honest, if you're going to spend hundreds of hours in a virtual space, it helps if it's pretty. It's an MMO system that works, as the game's success underlines, but you've got to ask yourself after four years how long this kind of momentumcan last. Perhaps within the next two years, or by the time the next World of Warcraft expansion is released, there'll be a clearer answer.

As for now, Blizzard is more than content to build on World of Warcraft's formula, improving and refining nearly every aspect of the game, delivering new quest systems, a better and more focused narrative, loads of new goals to chase by yourself or with friends, and made acclimating to its world's complexities a process generally free of the headaches of something like CCP's EVE Online. Those who've yet to jump in should absolutely do so; it's hard to imagine anyone being disappointed with such a well-run, polished product that offers so many reward strata and diverse styles of gameplay.

A not so gleaming review by Ed Zitron though still prasied with a score of 8.6/10.

This makes scoring this expansion rather painful. There is so much love for the lands, the lore, and the characters in the Warcraft universe, and so many fantastic ideas that exist to go into the Northrend Saga. Somehow, Blizzard managed to take potentially the least interesting idea in history - an entire continent made of ice - and lace it with fascinating ideas, quests, and areas to explore. The problem is that these ideas aren't held together very well, and players have to push through more ho-hum content than we've yet seen from a Blizzard product. I hasten to add that it isn't bad content, but we're now four long years into WOW.

If you're on that boat, and want to continue playing a game that is enjoyable and addictive yet, ultimately, doing the same bloody thing it did on its release, then be my guest. You will love Wrath of the Lich King, because it does exactly what many want it to - it elongates a successful game model in a pleasing, easy-to-consume package, much like each year's new FIFA and Football Manager games. The instanced content is excellent, the Death Knight is a well-balanced war machine that looks good in black, and the storyline - once you hunt it down and wring it out of Northrend - is crafted well enough to sate even the most die-hard lore nut.

But by any standard, this far into the development of an MMO, and with two years since your last expansion, the envelope should be pushed a little. Blizzard could've shaken up the genre here. Wrath of the Lich King has had two years to innovate, build and refresh WOW, but all it seems to have done is prolong the same experience that people have been waiting to continue for years. Whether or not that's a bad thing is up to you.

High marks again for Blizzard's WotLK 4.5/5.

The people who build WoW are more or less unmatched when it comes to world design, and this may be true beyond the MMO genre. But there is a definite honeymoon period with a virtual world that's exhausted after a certain point. What was once magical and elevating becomes staid and routine after you've spent hours scouring its four corners for quests. Wrath alleviates this, at least during the leveling process, by essentially overdoing it on the quest count in every zone. At the start, you have a choice of two zones to visit, and when one starts to get old, you can travel to the second. This holds true as you progress through Northrend on your way to 80 -- you can hit Dragonblight at 72, or hang around the two entry zones. At 73, you can either continue questing in Dragonblight, or you can hit up Grizzly Hills. And so on. In a show of how canny Blizzard has become of our habits, you start to encounter daily quests as soon as you hit Northrend. So if your love of a particular zone is boundless (or if you're simply trying to flagellate yourself in the quest for early achievements), chances are you'll be able to revisit your favorite place at least once per day.

Blizzard announce that WotLK has sold 2.8 million copies in it's first 24 hours of release.

The not unexpected 10/10 review from Eurogamer's Oli Welsh is up.

Wrath of the Lich King ought to be stale - but it inspires wonder. It ought to feel dated - but it makes WOW's newest rivals look clumsy. It ought to seem derivative and formulaic, one step behind the curve - instead, it takes the bar WOW set for quality in MMOs and casually lifts it far out of reach.

Blizzard hasn't repeated the excitable, haphazard and slightly barmy revisionism of first expansion The Burning Crusade. Instead, it has brought to bear every ounce of its legendary perfectionism, craftsmanship and attention to detail. It has made the world's best MMO better, and - here's the remarkable thing - it has done so in a way that works for almost everybody, in almost every situation.

John Funk writes a highly positive review of Blizzard's WotLK.

Wrath of the Lich King is a tremendously more ambitious - and tremendously more successful - expansion pack than Burning Crusade was, and feels like a return to the roots of Warcraft. It's more WoW, but it's a better WoW in essentially every way imaginable. No game is flawless of course, but Lich King is a title worthy of the Blizzard name and reputation. It might just remind people why exactly there are eleven million people around the world playing the game today. The Kool-Aid has never tasted so good.

Long live the King.

WotLK is live on servers, there's a few reports from the successful London launch event around the web. Blues' News has a nice round up of these here.

For years, the heroes of the Alliance and Horde have fought against the evils in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, against the demons of the Burning Legion in Outland, and against each other -- all the while unaware that a threat more dangerous than any they had yet encountered was preparing to make its move in the icy continent of Northrend. Now the Lich King, Arthas Menethil, has emerged from Icecrown Citadel to claim the world as his own. Heroes of the Alliance and Horde gather in Northrend to make a stand against the malevolent being that dares to declare himself Azeroth’s one true king... and seeks to scour all life from the world.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King is now live and available at a store near you. Featuring a massive new continent, the brand-new death knight Hero class, unique dungeons, an open-world PvP zone with siege vehicles and destructible buildings, and hundreds of brand-new quests, Wrath of the Lich King provides a huge variety of content for solo and group players. The expansion is available in both a standard and Collector's Edition; find out more about the latter in our Wrath of the Lich King Collector's Edition Preview. To learn more about what awaits you in Northrend, visit our Wrath of the Lich King Features Page and check out the primer to get you started.

During installation of the expansion, you'll be able to upgrade the World of Warcraft account you play to allow access to Wrath of the Lich King. You can click here to upgrade as well.

Third hands-on preview by Oli Welsh mostly giving overviews of each area of Northrend.

Dalaran is a very charismatic and charming city, much more so than The Burning Crusade's Shattrath. It's quite compact; the main influences are Silvermoon's beauty, Stormwind's homely alleyways and Undercity's efficient radial design. Instead of the baffling division between the Aldor and Scryer factions in The Burning Crusade, we simply get Horde and Alliance districts, each furnished with a huge inn and a full suite of battlemasters and portals to battlegrounds and capital cities. There's also the Underbelly, a shadier underground town located in the sewers, where you'll find another bank and inn as well as the city's new Arena; and The Violet Hold, a high-end prison dungeon, hopefully more interesting than Stormwind's Stockade.

Bluesnews has a nice round up on today's (for Europe) pre-expansion patch.

Today's version 3.0.2 patch for World of Warcraft includes Blizzard's new achievement system, and there's an Achievement System FAQ on WorldofWar.Net with details on how this works. Also, most of the character changes from testing of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion were not included in today's new update, and WorldOfWar.Net has word from Blizzard saying these changes will be rolled out on November 13 with the release of the add-on. Finally, on a semi-related note, WorldOfWar.Net quotes Mike Morhaime saying Blizzard still has a goal of annual World of Warcraft expansions, but they admit they are probably unlikely to be able to keep up with that schedule.

More news creeping in from Blizzcon via Eurogamer & Warcry.

Blizzard has revealed that World of Warcraft will offer some sort of paid character customisation in the future.

Production director J. Allen Brack confirmed the news during a small press conference at BlizzCon 2008, according to WarCry. Details, however, are still being figured out.

Eurogamers build up to WotLK continues with this hands on.

We've already covered the big class changes coming to World of Warcraft in the imminent Wrath of the Lich King - or the even-more-imminent Echoes of Doom patch that will precede it in the next couple of weeks. We've also romped through the incredible Death Knight intro. Over the next six weeks we'll explore Northrend and the expansion's new player-versus-player options - but before that, we have some nitty-gritty to attend to.

When an MMO is updated on this scale, major changes aren't restricted to the headline-grabbing chunks of landmass, reams of quests, swathes of features and millions of unbearably tempting experience points. There are the subtler changes, the options embedded deep in the game that will still rewrite the day-to-day experience, and like as not, have just as big an impact on how you play. That's even more true when a game is as ubiquitous and overwhelmingly familiar as World of Warcraft.

Some of these are coming to all players, regardless of whether or not they buy the expansion, in Echoes of Doom, which is currently expected to hit in mid-October. Most significant of these are probably the new class talents, covered in our Worldwide Invitational write-up. But there are more, some of WOW's most long-awaited features among them.

TenTonHammer has a 20 minute walkthrough video showing off the Drak'Tharon Keep instance from the Wrath of the Lich King beta:

The instance can be completed in a little less than an hour, despite having 3 required boss fights and 1 optional one. This video shows several of the groups of creatures that you fight as you move through the instance and all of the boss fights. It also shows the quest ending cinematic at the end where you get to face Arthas himself.

WotLK to be released on the 13th of November and a collector's edition is detailed here.

In the frozen wastes of the north, the Lich King Arthas Menethil rallies his undead army and schemes to bring an end to all life on Azeroth -- and in a couple of months, you'll begin your epic journey into Northrend to confront the Lich King and his minions yourself. Blizzard Entertainment's second expansion to World of Warcraft -- Wrath of the Lich King -- will be in stores on November 13 in North America, Europe, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Russia, and on November 14 in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. The expansion will be available in Korea and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau on November 18, and the launch timing for China will be announced at a later date. For more information, read the press release or visit the Wrath of the Lich King website.

Wrath of the Lich King will be available in both a standard edition and a special Collector's Edition (in select areas). The Collector's Edition will contain an art book, behind-the-scenes DVD, exclusive in-game pet, and more. For pictures and a complete list of contents, check out the Collector's Edition website.

Retailers in North America are currently taking pre-orders for the game. Reserve your copy now online!

As pointed out by Maylander on the forums, the cinematic for Blizzard's WotLK is available for viewing here.

The editors at Gamespot (Ricardo Torres, Kevin VanOrd, Shanker Srinivasan, Bethany Massimilla, Stanley Lin, Joe Dodson, Jim Maybury, and Lark Anderson) will be playing some hours of WotLK live shortly.

The Lich King Arthas has set in motion events that could lead to the extinction of all life on Azeroth, and we're all like, "Nah brah, nah." Join us as we explore the beta of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King for a live, multihour gameplay-session marathon!

We'll start off by creating a group of Horde Death Knights, those fallen Paladins who pledged their souls to the Lich King in exchange for the promise of immortality. We will be roaming around The Ebon Hold and its surrounding areas while performing quests, so be warned that there will be spoilers! Afterward, we'll be heading to the frozen realm of Northrend with our Level 70+ Alliance mains to show off some of the new zones and quests. Our marathon will end with a run through The Nexus, an ancient ice fortress found in the center of Coldarra in the Borean Tundra. All GameSpot members will be able to tune in to this special event, and GameSpot subscribers will be able to chat with one another as the marathon moves along.

So be sure to tune in this Friday, August 15 at 11 a.m. PT to watch our crack team of World of Warcrafters raid, wipe, and L2P. Oh, and we'll be answering a ton of your questions, too! For those of you unable to catch the live broadcast, be sure to check out the highlights reel and archive!

Ellie Gibson interviews Hank Kanalz & Jon Buran of Wildstorm on the 2nd WoW Graphic Novel.

Eurogamer: Do you have big plans for when Wrath of the Lich King comes out?

Jon Buran: Yes. There's a lot of stuff with this, and also the Ashbringer series Ludo Lullabi's doing, that's going to be tied in heavily. The stuff we're doing in the main story arc ties into it. There will be a lot of payoff for fans who are reading this story then pick up Wrath of the Lich King; you're really going to feel rewarded for paying attention to the lore.

Hank Kanalz: The Ashbringer series is four 40-page comic books telling the story of Ashbringer. It'll tie into the Lich King release as well. A lot of what we've been doing in the comic book, you can see the results in the beta right now.

Another hands on with the Death Knight class, this one by Demian Linn.

As you may be aware, DKs don't use mana. Many of their spells consume Runes, and they've got two blood, two unholy, and two frost Runes, which refresh on what seems to be a 10-second cooldown. Orginally, the plan was to let players decide how many of each rune type they wanted inscribed on their Runeblades, but that's been ditched due to balance concerns. Then there's the Runic Power bar, which increases as you do damage, much like rage. So far, the only spell I have that uses Runic Power is Death Coil, but with a full bar, I can crank out two of those back-to-back and unload a lot of damage. Finally, DKs also have a system akin to Warrior stances, called Presences. I've only got the Blood Presence right now, which boosts damage and provides some passive healing. I think at level 57, I can learn Frost Presence, which is like an instant tank button: +45% armor (!) and +45% threat.

That's a lot of stuff to keep track of, but in practice it's not too difficult. I usually open up with a Death Grip (especially if I'm worried about adds), then Icy Touch and Plague Strike for the debuffs, then Blood Strike when my Blood Runes refresh or Death Coil. Stuff dies fast. DKs look like they're going to be a monster soloing class, with all kinds of passive healing based on damage inflicted (depending on how you spec, of course) with little downtime, considering you don't have to worry about mana. I haven't done any tanking yet, but Blizzard has said they want all Death Knight talent trees to be viable for tanking, which I was surprised to hear. Looking over the talent trees, it seems like DK tanking is going to be less technical than Warrior tanking, at least pre-Wrath Warrior tanking. And by less technical, I mean easier and (arguably) more fun.

Oli Welsh with an upbeat hands on for WotLK.

As beautifully orchestrated as WOW's best dungeons are - not to mention the fantastic Draenei and Blood Elf introductions from the Burning Crusade, spanning 20 levels apiece - Blizzard has never attempted such a concentrated and extravagant piece of staging, of high showmanship, as this before. It's startling, spectacular, and most surprisingly of all, it's consistently, laugh-out-loud funny. It even makes a great virtue of having dozens of freshly-minted Death Knights in identical armour running around.

The first shock is landing straight in front of the expansion's star and ultimate end boss - Arthas, the Lich King himself - and seeing the quest-giving exclam above his head. You've been resurrected as part of his undead army, the Scourge. You begin by learning your way around the floating necropolis of Acherus, The Ebon Hold, and learning how to Runeforge your weapon. Runeforging does not, as previously thought, allow you to change the combination of runes Death Knights use for spellcasting - now it's essentially a free and endlessly modifiable enchantment, complete with pretty glow.

 Blizzard announce beta opt-in for WoW's second expansion.

Today we opened the Wrath of the Lich King Beta Opt-In program, which gives players a chance to win an invitation to the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King beta. For The Burning Crusade beta, we randomly invited players from the entire World of Warcraft community. With the Opt-In, our goal is to strengthen the beta-testing process by inviting only those players who have expressed active interest in participating.

Keep in mind that opting in doesn't guarantee you'll be selected for the beta. And players who've previously been promised beta access through a promotion or contest (such as by purchasing the Dell XPS M1730 World of Warcraft Edition notebook) don't need to worry -- you'll still be entered into the beta automatically when the time comes.

To opt in to the Wrath of the Lich King beta, visit the Beta Opt-In page. 

 Oli Welsh gets some hands on time with WotLK.

There are some sensational new abilities coming for most of World of Warcraft's character classes in second expansion Wrath of the Lich King: of course there are. As much as every player of Blizzard's massively multiplayer monster can't wait to tear across Northrend, delve into its dungeons and batter its new battleground - all of which we discussed in detail in last month's preview and interview - there is a part of you that cares about nothing more than new toys to trash with.

The level 70-80 skills themselves are still largely under wraps, but we did get to explore the new talent trees at Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational event in Paris this past weekend, and some of them made our eyes pop: Fury Warriors dual-wielding two-handed weapons and a breathtaking demon form for Demonologist Warlocks in particular. Deeper changes were discussed at a developer panel, including a complete revision of the Hunter pet system that gives pets their own talent trees. More on these later. But there was one skill that, for us, eclipsed even these, and it doesn't come at level 80, or the top of a maxed-out talent tree. It comes at level 55, for a freshly-minted Death Knight, Lich King's unholy new hero class: the Death Grip.

 Alex Sassoon Coby gets some hands on with the new hero class.

PARIS--We've seen a fair bit of what's to come in Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion to Blizzard's mammoth MMO World of Warcraft; we've slain foes in Northrend in a recent visit to Blizzard's southern California offices, run through the Howling Fjord at last year's Blizzcon, and heard all about the changes to the raiding system. We'd also heard a lot about the game's new class, the Death Knight, but hadn't been able to actually play with one—until now.

Before we get into the heart of the matter, let's recap. When you get into the expansion, you will be able to create a Death Knight if you have a character of level 55 or higher, but you will only be able to have one per account per server, according to the latest information from Blizzard. They can, unlike other classes, be any race you wish—which is likely to annoy those who take their lore seriously.

On creating a Death Knight you are dumped into in the middle of the Plaguelands, the scourge-ravaged area home of the ruined city of Stratholme, to the east of Tirisfal Glades, home of WoW's undead.

 Eurogamer have a bunch of screens from WotLK up here.

CVG previews the upcoming expansion Wrath of the Lich King for World of Warcraft and talks about trolls:

The real problem, though, for players and the Grizzly Furbolgs, is the trolls. To the North of the fallen World Tree is a troll temple, Drak'Tharon Keep. It's a two-wing dungeon meant for players between level 72 and 76, a strange place filled with dinosaurs and lizards, and teeming with undead. Its final boss fight takes place on raised terraces, where the wizard will bounce players from platform to platform. You're sent in to discover just why the Trolls are leaving their home zone of Zul'Drak. That's the next stop on the tour.

There are plenty of Troll temples and dungeons in World of Warcraft, but never a Troll zone. Zul'Drak is a homecoming, then - a sprawling mass of ruins and broken stone temples that serve as home to the Ice Trolls. The good news is that the Ice Trolls are the first to have any real success against the Scourge. The Alliance and Horde are sending heroes to their zone to discover what weapon or magic they're using to push back the Scourge.

There is bad news, however. At the very centre of the zone is a vast pyramid. It's where the trolls previously worshipped their animal gods. When the Scourge invaded, they stopped worshipping their gods, and began sacrificing them. It granted them just enough power to repel the undead. But now the gods are angry.
Rather than stay and watch the fireworks, our tour moves west, to Dragonblight. For many races, Northrend is their home. For the dragons, it is their funeral home.

Seems that the Alpha Leak Wiki has been shut down for legal reasons according to Massively.

The Wrath of the Lich King Information Wiki, the primary source of leaked information from the friends & family Alpha, is currently not hosting any information on its site. Reports say that the WotLK Wiki team has been served a Cease & Desist order by Blizzard's legal team and given stringent restrictions on hosting Alpha information. A brief message on the site explained how the site administrators were contacted by a legal firm. The issue dealt with a few key points, such as the site referring to themselves as the "Official WotLK Alpha Wiki" despite not being endorsed by Blizzard; not having a copyright on any of the information, necessitating the inclusion of a copyright line to the main pages; and an order to remove all of what Blizzard considered "over-the-line" content such as leaked screenshots.

CVG have brought to light a /achievement command in the alpha of WotLK suspect much like LotRO & WAR's.

The achievement system can be accessed by typing in '/achievement' into the Wrath of the Lich King Alpha test, according to blog Death Knight, who also took the screenshots you can see below.

The images seemingly reveal that players will gain achievement points for doing a variety of tasks that range from completing 2000 quests to exploring the whole of Azeroth.

The MMO Gamer have visited the new headquarters of Blizzard in Irvine, California and during that trip had some hands-on time with the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King:

Final Thoughts

If there is indeed any one thing I can fault Blizzard on, it would be their staunch conservatism.

In my interviews with Jeffrey Kaplan and Tom Chilton, the questions, “Have you thought about doing X, Y, or Z?” were invariably answered with some rephrasing of, “Maybe. We don’t want to rush things.”

If this were May 2005, a few months following release, such caution would be well warranted. You don’t add new and untested features to a game relatively untested itself.

But, now we’re coming up on four years and counting. These are intelligent people; I refuse to believe that they are incapable of anticipating how a new addition would affect the game, having four years of experience with it under their belts.

Admittedly, such conservatism has served the company well in the past—StarCraft would never have become the national sport of Korea if they went around changing the rules and adding five new units every month—but, MMO players are among the most fickle and impossible to please people on the face of the Earth.

WoW has so far largely gotten a free pass in this department (board warriors on the official forums notwithstanding) for two primary reasons: It is the first MMO for the majority of its playerbase, and their average user is a casual player.

Some screenshots of the upcoming expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King for World of Warcraft have been released at GameInfoWire.com.

Offical site updates with Death Knight info.

We’ve just updated the official Wrath of the Lich King web site with new information about the upcoming expansion. Visit the new death knight class page to learn more about the death knight’s class role, and make sure to check out a brand-new wallpaper featuring the expansion’s titular villain. Also, the new gameplay features page offers a preview of some of the quest, dungeon, and faction innovations going into World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.

Oli Welsh has a long interview with Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton (Designers), and J. Allen Brack (Producer) about WotLK, upcoming MMORPGs, new classes, raiding etc etc etc. 

Eurogamer: You've got a couple of fairly heavyweight competitors launching this year - Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. Those games both have a heavy focus on PVP in the endgame. Do you think you might lose quite a few PVP players to these games?

J. Allen Brack: We don't really think about it like that. We don't make games in a vacuum, we don't just play World of Warcraft, I love online games, I play a lot of online games, and I'm really excited about those games coming out because I want to play them. I think that's fairly common across the board.

I think there's room for all three of those games to be successful. I mean, the worst thing for our industry is for online games to come out and fail. They cost so much money to develop, and it's so difficult, and it's such a huge labour of love to launch an online game, for it to fail is sad for everybody.

Offical site updates, info on new dungeon.

The dungeons section of the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King web site has been updated with a new dungeon from the upcoming expansion. Learn more about the blue dragonflight's home base in Northrend, the Nexus.

Check out the new Nexus page now!

Q&A with Jeffrey Kaplan.

Earlier this week, Blizzard invited members of the media from the world over to visit their Irvine, California headquarters, spend some quality time with Wrath of the Lich King, and speak with a few of the key figures in its development.

Today begins the first in our Behind the Blue Curtain series of articles stemming from this visit, an interview with Jeffrey Kaplan, one of WoW’s two lead designers. For anyone interested, you may also read a prior interview we conducted with him back at BlizzCon.

Batch of articles at Gamespy.

When Blizzard announced that it'd be briefly opening the portcullis to give some brave souls a sneek peek into the new continent of Northrend, GameSpy answered the call. We outfitted some of our bravest editors with the requisite equipment (mosquito netting, mukluks, a packet of Life Savers and a six-pack of Mountain Dew) and shipped them off for an expidition to darkest Azeroth. They came back with amazing tales of massive contents, walrus-men, giant Norse warriors, towers of dragons, and the powerful Death Knight. Check out our impressions of all the cool stuff awaiting gamers in Wrath of the Lich King!

Ricardo Torres hands-on.

While we weren't able to play the new class, we were treated to a brief demo showcasing the Knight's finer aspects. The standout elements of the Knight are its rune powered spell system. A series of six rune slots will rest beneath a Death Knight's life bar and hold any combination of the three rune types needed to cast spells or power their unique abilities: unholy, frost, and blood. The exact configuration of runes is customizable by players, although doing so will require you to go to a specific locale. We reckon this will work something like talents, in that you'll have to visit a trainer of some kind to let you respec your rune set up. It also seems like a player's rune configuration will vary based on the spell and ability types they favor.

Oli Welsh hands-on with WotLK.

Flying out to Blizzard's California headquarters this week to see the second World of Warcraft expansion, we felt neither apprehension nor any great excitement. After the reinvention and reinvigoration that was first expansion The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King seemed a more workmanlike sequel: ten more levels, a new continent, a new profession, a new class, a new battleground, all as expected, little of it pulse-raising. Fine; Blizzard had earned the trust that it would get it right, and the right to stop driving itself so hard.

We should know better. A lot more detail and a little more time on Lich King remind us that laurels - and Lord knows there must be a mountain of them stored somewhere in this clean white campus - don't get rested on at Blizzard. A stunningly brave revamp of raiding is the big surprise; every raid dungeon in the expansion will be playable with either 10 or 25 players, opening the full sweep of the game to far more people.

WoW Insider reports that the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, has begun closed alpha testing:

We had some hints that this would happen soon and now WoW Insider has confirmed through anonymous sources that the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, is in closed alpha status, and that various players are being invited to check it out, under a strict NDA.

The bestiary on the official Wrath of the Lich king site has been updated with the Iron Dwarf:

The Explorers' League has scoured the far corners of the world, seeking to uncover the truth behind the origins of the dwarves. Now it seems they may be one step closer to unlocking the secrets of the past.

The latest clues come from ancient dig sites within the Howling Fjord, where the iron dwarves were first encountered. Etched with runes of power - and with lightning pulsing beneath their thick, metallic skin - they may represent the missing link between the dwarves and the legendary titans of myth. Unfortunately the malevolent iron dwarves have openly defied the Explorers' League and seem intent on destroying any and all artifacts connecting them to the shadowed recesses of history

Offical site updated.

The environments section of the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King website has been updated with new information about the vast arctic wasteland of the Dragonblight, one of the many new regions you will be able to explore in the upcoming expansion. The update also includes a fly-through movie, new concept art, and new zone screenshots.

Blizzard has updated the Wrath of the Lich King site with a new bestiary section. 

Jeff Kaplan chats to CVG about PvP in Wrath of the Lich King.

A "cool part of Northrend is new big PvP zone. It's about the size of Westfall, and will be all-PvP - in no way, shape or form will we support PvE players in it", the developer's Jeff Kaplan has told PC Zone.

He continued, "It'll be optional, but it'll be completely non-instanced, have multiple objectives, siege weapons and destructible buildings". 

GameInfoWire has posted a number of new Wrath of the Lich King screenshots.