Blizzard Entertainment’s $40 expansion pack to World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, is the most hotly anticipated video game release of the year. Blizzard’s servers buckled under the load, with wait times of up to two hours to get into the game. The is the second full expansion of WoW, where players can find more quests, more areas to explore, new achievements and the ability to advance to level 80, among other changes. Furthermore, players can look forward to exploring the frozen wastes of Northrend in 10 new zones. An area of interest is Wintergrasp, a non-instanced completely player-versus-player area for high-level players. The most interesting feature of all, the one that gives the name of the expansion pack, offers players the possibility to interact with Arthas, the Lich King.

Among the improvements, we find the introduction of the Hero class, and its first incarnation, the Death Knight. Players who have a level 55 character or higher can create a new level 55 Death Knight of any race. Afterwards, the Death Knight can gain talent points through quests and grow in its own zone, ultimately joining the ranks of the Alliance or the Horde. However, there seems to be a bug that prevents players from creating characters in the new Death Knight class on European servers. As a temporary solution, Blizzard recommends users to create a level-one character and then attempt to make a Death Knight.

The launch of the Lich King was responsible for freezing up GameStop’s credit card readers. Because of the large number of credit card requests, the retailer’s credit system buckled under the weight. Unfortunately for them, customers from Las Vegas, Kansas City, Madison and Fargo were turned away because of this issue. In London, for example, 2,000 people lined up at the Oxford Street HMV, where Blizzard representative Paul Sams autographed copies of the game. It seems this was the largest turnout the store had ever seen, and that’s because people are very anxious to play the game.