Wrath of the Lich King 14-Day Trial
So Wrath of the Lich King, the World of Warcraft expansion, has a 14-day trial, wherein you can temporarily activate an old account for 14 days. It has the side-effect that your account gets upgraded to the new expansion, so there's no going back. I had activated my old account, and was poking around a bit - created a Death Knight, played through the new content for that class, and then, on arriving back into Outlands at level 58, decided I'd go poke around in more new areas on Wormson.
I like a lot of the stuff in Wrath. The achievements feel like Blizzard completely missed the point, but the new content feels solid and interesting and not nearly as mechanical as that in The Burning Crusade. They're doing interesting things with pets and vehicles. I love the Forsaken architecture. Even the crafting, normally a low priority in an expansion, already looks good.
And then I discovered that the trial upgrade can't get to level 71. You stop gaining XP at one short of level, and stay there. Now, I can see, I think, why Blizzard are doing this; they don't want people to get the trial, play through ALL of the content in the expansion in one manic rush of 18-hour play sessions over two weeks, and then not buy the expansion. But here's the thing - my interest in WotLK, which was rising steadily on the back of good content and the prospect of interesting crafting and so on, completely died when I realised I couldn't level in the trial. I've felt no urge to log on to WoW at all since.
I can't even pin down exactly why it happened like that, but a restriction like that seems to instantly kill the fun.
Posted by Drew Shiel at January 19, 2009 4:24 PM
