It seems the Achievements that Blizzard implements into World of Warcraft will be retroactive, not requiring the player to go again to parts of the game he has already visited.

Jeffrey Kaplan, who is a designer on World of Warcraft, clearly told MTV Multiplayer that the guys at Blizzard "retroactively track any quest Achievements or any Achievement for an item which is either on your character or in your bank. There are a lot of Achievements based on stuff like honorable kills or reputations. We have all that tracked". So, on the day that the system is implemented a lot for World of Warcraft, players will boot up their computers and, when they log into the game, will instantly see a heap of Achievements accumulating on their profile. We suspect a good day or two will pass with people just comparing them, before anybody thinks about actually playing the game again.

The designer also discussed how they tried to come up with another name for the new feature, thinking that Achievement has already been overused. The company thought of "accomplishments, goals, medals - anything to not call them Achievements", but then decided to stick with the well known name, simply because it would quickly and easily convey what the feature is all about.

Because of the complex stats tracking required for the Achievements system the range of data that the company has on each player's actions and the range of data that a player can see, describing his performance in World of Warcraft, has been greatly increased. A player will be able to see how many rats he has killed in the cities, how much damage his character has ever done in the game or which bosses his character put to death while raiding. Nobody says this is all useful, but it will certainly pique the interest of World of Warcraft hard core players.

Kaplan also says that there will be more than 700 Achievements available in the game when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion ships later in the year.