Oh boy… If World of WarCraft wasn’t already a massive drain on your free time, then Wrath of the Lich King will make things significantly worse.  Not only will the expansion add Death Knights and an entire new continent, but it’s also bringing with it Achievements, which you earn by doing a myriad of quest-related and pointless things alike.  With examples like Town Crier, which I assume involves /yelling a lot, and another one for giving out 10 hugs, I expect my fellow denizens of the World of WarCraft are about to get a whole lot more annoying.

Blizzard’s official site for Wrath of the Lich King has a list of some of the achievement categories.  Lucky for you, I won’t make you waste the energy involved with going to the site, as I’ve listed them here:

• 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.

Did you read that last one? That’s right, there will now be a beauty salon/barbershop (presumably with no Ice Cube or Queen Latifah, at least I hope not) where you can alter the appearance of your character.

Your character panel will have a tab that lists all of these achievements, and they will show up on your page in the Armory as well.  Rewards for certain achievements include non-combat pets, tabards, and other non-game-altering, purely cosmetic prizes.  Perhaps you can unlock more hairstyles?

Unlocking the Achievements triggers an Achievement animation and “unmistakable” sound.  A message will pop up letting all those around you and everyone in your guild know what you just achieved.  As if trade chat spamming wasn’t bad enough, now we’ll have fifty other messages from people jumping off of Thunder Bluff to get the “Jump from really high” Achievement.  Glorious…

Oh, and these achievements will also have a points value and add to your running total, called your Gamerscore.  Wait… it’s not called Gamerscore?  Oh, my bad.  Seems they haven’t revealed what it’s named yet.  I have a suggestion, though: Gamerscore — let’s just call it what it is.

With things like this and Microsoft’s Avatars, it’s a wonder anything new and innovative is ever created.  What’s next?  Marcus Fenix isn’t original either?

Tags: achievements, Barbershop, beauty salon, Feed me Seymour!, Gamerscore, Microsoft, warcraft, WotLK, WOW, Wrath of the Lich King

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2 Comments » HyruleGangsta on July 18, 2008 9:03 pm that marcus pic is scary. who is that other guy? Dan Landis on July 19, 2008 8:45 am Tom Berenger’s character from the movie Platoon. RSS feed for comments on this post. Comment Now Note: Commenting on Ripten does not currently require registration, however to be eligible for contests on the site, you must be a registered user. Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Commenting Rules: No hate speech allowed. If you must argue, please debate intelligently. Comments containing selected keywords or outbound links will be put into moderation to help prevent spam. Ripten reserves the right to delete comments and ban anyone who doesn't follow the rules. Thanks. Notify me of followup comments Tired of the Goomba? Upload your own custom comment avatar.