World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King2009-10-09In 2004, World of Warcraft effortlessly recast the MMO genre as something that "normal" people all around the world would want to play. What it did was radical: It unpacked the fussy mechanics that relegated the genre to the domain of the expert-obsessive and created an audience for every online RPG that followed. But what was once forward-looking is now starting to seem a bit long in the tooth. WoW has supplanted EverQuest as the blueprint for MMO developers to embellish. These days, MMOs that don't allow you to quest your way to the level cap (as opposed to straight-up grind) are the exception. For the most part, MMOs now earn their distinctions in the small ways in which they differ from WoW.So it's really no surprise that Wrath of the Lich King tweaks WoW's fundamentals in only the most subtle ways. Wholesale change just isn't Blizzard's style, at least not when it applies to an expansion...