14 DAY TRIAL // World of Warcraft is the most popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) out there, with over 11,5 million monthly subscribers. It took Blizzard from the status of pretty successful company to hugely successful corporation, prompting big gaming name Activision to merge with it.
Despite having been launched in 2004, the game is going as strong as ever, especially after the second expansion, entitled Wrath of the Lich King, was launched last year. The new content, consisting of a brand new continent, Northrend, and hundreds of new quests and missions, made everyone reactivate their WoW accounts and start leveling in order to hit the new limit of 80. But one of the most important additions was the new class of Death Knight, which brought new powers to players.
However, it seems that the Death Knight was pretty lucky to be featured in the expansion, as the Blizzard team, through the voice of WoW's lead designer, Jeff Kaplan, has revealed that two more classes made it to the final alongside the Death Knight. These three were selected from the 29 original ideas that the team had created.
“The class choice was super hard and eventually we had it down to three front runners,” said Kaplan. “We were talking for a while about a Necromancer. He would kind of be a range caster, do a lot of corpse explode, that sort of thing. Things we ended up incorporating into the Death Knight. We also had a cool idea for a Rune Master. That was going to be more of a melee type - think rogue or monk type character. But Death Knight ultimately fit.”
Although almost all of us took for granted the Death Knight class as intertwining seamlessly with the whole Northrend continent, it seems that it wasn't such a sure thing to appear. Let's hope that Blizzard will keep those ideas and that it will implement them in future expansions for the game. Until then, happy leveling in WoW.