Wrath of the Lich King Gets Achievements

Scribbled on July 17th, 2008 by Jonathon Howard
Filed in Achievements, MMO, PC, Press Release

Blizzard is announcing that one of the new features in the soon-to-be-released expansion for World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, will be Achievements! That’s right what Microsoft started as a gimmick to get people signed up for Xbox Live has become a regular bullet-point on every “great” game’s feature list. Blizzard joins Steam and Sony on the Achievement bandwagon still being driven by Microsoft. This is probably in response to the Achievements already in Lord of the Rings Online: Shadow of Angmar and the upcoming Warhammer Online.

One of the Achievements is “City Defender”, and its description is more than a little ominous: Kill 50 enemy players in your faction’s capital cities.

So what are achievements in WoW and what do they get you? Well, there are all types of Achievements many of which will be applied retroactively to your character, so here’s the list straight from the Horse’s mouth right after the break.

Player-vs.-Player: This includes arena, battlegrounds, and world player-vs.-player objectives. A few examples:

Hot Streak: Win 10 ranked arena matches in a row.
Alterac Valley All-Star: Capture graveyards, towers, and kill the enemy leader all in one game.
City Defender: Kill 50 enemy players in your faction’s capital cities.

Dungeons and Raids: Every end boss of every raid and dungeon in the game grants its own achievement. Future achievements in this category may include ones for completing a run without any player deaths, with fewer than the maximum number of players, or within a certain time limit.

Professions: Advancing to each tier of mastery in a profession earns you an achievement, and there are specific achievements for secondary skills (with major professions to follow).

Quests: Quest-based achievements include completing a certain number of quests and completing specific quest lines. This category contains zone-specific subcategories.

Events: Seasonal events such as the Midsummer Festival, the Lunar Festival, and Hallows’ End have specific achievements of their own.

World Exploration: You’ll earn achievements by exploring each zone in the game — and get meta-achievements when you fully explore a continent.

Reputations: This set of achievements includes attaining exalted reputation with each faction in the game.

General: These achievements tend toward the whimsical, including getting a shave and haircut (a new feature of Wrath of the Lich King), obtaining a certain number of tabards and vanity pets, falling from a great height, and more.

What do you get for doing all these tasks? What possibly could motivate you to do some of these things? Bragging rights mostly. Yup, that’s it and for your own personal feelings of superiority. Every time you gain an Achievement you’ll see a custom animation and hear a special sound and announcements will go out to your guild and those nearby and that’s it. Not that it needs to be more; WoW is already fairly amazing (despite the fact that it’s one giant fetch-quest timesink). Finally, at least their achievement system will tell you everything you need to do to unlock each achievement, which is more than I can say for the ones on Live…

So now you have one more reason to get excited about Wrath of the Lich King, and one more reason to activate that account you’ve been neglecting!

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