World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Today is the release of Blizzard's latest expansion,World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, which meant that last night was the midnight launch of the game; Europeans had a head start on the Americans, and as a result, those realms are likely to already have some level 80s running about.

In the Bay Area, the official event was in San Francisco's Powell Street Gamestop, which had about 200 gamers showing up; in my opinion, the real crowd was at the Fry's in Sunnyvale further down the peninsula, which by all estimates numbered well into the eight hundred plus mark.

The game is estimated to sell approximately 5 million in the first month of release, a phenomenal number of copies, given that most PC games are lucky to sell even a quarter of that number in the first year of release.

My own experience with the game has been one of installing and patching -- after installing from the DVD, a process which took for me about an hour, one must download a 390 MB patch to update from 3.0.1 to 3.0.2, and then one smaller 20MB patch to go from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3. Those with the patches can supposedly jump right in after filling out their account keys.

The Collector's Edition of the expansion set includes an art book, which while nice, isn't as nice as their previous Art books included with the Collector's Edition. As always, the CE comes with a special in-game pet, a CD and a behind the scenes DVD.