Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

In Lord of the Rings Online we have deeds, on Xbox Live they are called Achievements and in Warhammer Online it will be the Tome of Knowledge. These are all variations on the same theme of rewarding players for doing innovative little things which you would normally only do for fun, such as killing x number of the local bandit population just because, or going off and exploring high level zones, choosing to explore every inch of the world or doing a mass of quests all in one area (something I personally recommend for those who really want a feel for an area…quests should advance lore, if you don’t know a zone after completing thirty-odd quests then something is wrong with the game.)

Blizzard is ever mindful of popular trends so it came as no surprise to me today, though it pleased me greatly to find out that someone with access to Alpha testing of Wrath of the Lich King has leaked some information on WoW’s new achievement system. Here we have those things I mentioned above, along with achieving so many arena wins and so many battleground wins. There’s been no mention of what these points will go toward, though I quite enjoy titles however I doubt that will happen to any great extent due to Blizzard’s reluctance to reward with anything other than coin and/or gear.

I’ve seen some talk of how this will apply to high level characters, of which there are currently a lot. Even when the expansion releases with it’s new class, the lowest level new characters will still be jumping straight in at level 55 so a lot of the ‘level to 10′ and ‘level to 20′ styled achievements could be obsolete if handled badly. Personally I think that with WoW’s extreme levels of data tracking (check Rayda’s listing on WoWArmoury to see the extent to which third parties alone can access character information) it should be fairly easy to implement this, with high level characters simply being instantly blessed with points they would have achieved so far. I can’t imagine there isn’t a database somewhere which hasn’t tracked all this data.

So what could be enough to drag me away from my usual “What do I feel like tonight?” tour of World of Warcraft, EverQuest 2 and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2? (My current new obsession I should add, though to be honest it’s nowhere near as enjoyable as Call of Duty 4 and Gears of War.)

Call of Duty 4 Variety Map Pack. Four new multiplayer maps!

There’s ‘Creek’, a departure from other CoD4 maps with wide open fields and numerous farmhouses in disrepair scattered around. This is the map I’ve had a chance to test and it’s certainly a very different affair to that which I’m used to, it’s open environment has made it fairly easy to get picked off unexpectedly.

Then we have ‘Broadcast’, a multiplayer modified version of the slaughter fest that was the single player map ‘Charlie Don’t Surf’, set as you may have guessed in an Arab TV station.

‘Kill House’ sounds like an exciting change, a small and tight recreation of a training kill house as the name implies, with lots of chipboard walls and mocked up buildings.

Finally the one that really excites me is the import of Call of Duty’s Carentan level. However for CoD4 it’s been modernised with a conversion to a Chinatown theme and apparently it’s set at night…which is also a fun setting.