I ran across a neat little feature for the new expansion at the Blizzard site today. While looking into the upcoming Brewfest event, I stumbled across their new interactive map of Northrend and man is it cool. Take a look at this worldmap .

The winners of Blizzard's Opt-In drawing to buy BlizzCon tickets have been selected. The 1,500 chosen ones received emails yesterday, notifying them of their status. If there are still tickets left after this round, another round of winners will be selected. Blizzard will announce on their websites when all tickets are sold out.

If you have any questions about the process, you can read the ticket drawing FAQ here .

And it is hot! Or cool? Anyway, it's awesome!

Check it out!

Blizzard official annoucement: Five years have passed since Arthas released Ner'zhul from his icy prison and merged with him, claiming the Frozen Throne of Icecrown. Now the heir of Lordaeron has risen again, and soon the world will learn what it means to incur the wrath of its one true king.... The opening cinematic for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King is now available for download or streaming from the official Wrath of the Lich King website.

 Visit our forums to discuss it.

There’s no denying that the new Death Knight class is one of the major selling points of the upcoming World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King expansion. And I guess as far as marketing goes, it worked pretty well, because the first thing I did upon getting into the beta was to create my own Death Knight and fool around. So here’s a brief overview of what’s in store for those of us who try out the Death Knight (referred to as a "DK" from now on) when the expansion comes out.

But there is a catch! Yup, you heard me, a catch... a lottery actually . Good luck!

Blizzard Gamers,

On behalf of everyone at Blizzard, I want to apologize for the challenges and frustrations you experienced while trying to purchase BlizzCon tickets on Monday and Tuesday. BlizzCon is about the positive experiences you all have had with Blizzard games. As a result of this week's events, the excitement that many of you felt about the show has turned into dissatisfaction and disappointment.

Due to these circumstances, we've reevaluated our convention hall space and come up with some solutions that will allow us to offer 3,000 more tickets for sale. We know this will not be enough to satisfy the very high level of demand for tickets this year, but we want to ensure that BlizzCon remains a great experience for those of you who are able to attend. To avoid the issues many of you faced this week, we'll be selling these 3,000 via a lottery. We'll post further details once our plans are finalized. Please note that the lottery will only be open to those with an active Blizzard Account as of 9:00 PM PDT on August 12, the time that the "Sold Out" notice was posted.

I, and everyone else at Blizzard, share the frustration and disappointment that many of you have expressed as a result of this process. We'll do what it takes to avoid this type of situation in the future.

Sincerely,

Mike Morhaime

BlizzCast 4 was released yesterday, but with all the Blizzcon ticket nonesense, it kinda got ignored! So here it is, transcripted even !

BlizzCast episode 4 brings us several new perspectives on World of Warcraft. Starting us off is an interview with Russell Brower, director of audio and video, about the process of creating music for World of Warcraft to be a part of an evolving, epic experience in the world of Azeroth. Next we interview World of Warcraft game designer Jonathan LeCraft about professions, covering both what we have learned from them in the past and where they are going in Wrath of the Lich King. We finish up the episode with our Q&A segment, which features developers answering a variety of questions from our communities.

Lots of interesting stuff, with a mostly WoW based theme! Hope you guys got your Blizzcon tickets yesterday, because the site is apparently down.

With every expansion comes lots of changes. Wondering how talents will change the release of Wrath of the Lich King? Worldofwarcraft.com has updated their talent calculators to include the additions and tweaks that will come with Lich King's release later this year.

Blizzard announced today that on August 6th both World of Warcraft and its expansion, The Burning Crusade, will be released in Russia. These new versions will be fully localized, and Russia-dedicated servers will open with a Russian-language customer-support team. This marks the fifth European language release of World of Warcraft, with English, French, German, and Spanish versions already in place.

"The launch of the Russian-language version reflects our continuing commitment to make World of Warcraft even more accessible for gamers throughout the world," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment®. "We also hope that providing a fully localised version of the game will further enhance the gameplay experience for our enthusiastic Russian community."

Current European players can download the Russian language pack at www.warcraft.ru . After the release, realm transfers will be available for a limited time, and European players will also have the option of converting their accounts to Russian accounts. You can read the full press release here .

Project Lore continues with their delving into Heroic Mechanar for episode 3.3 and faces Gatewatcher Iron-hand, boss #2 in this instance. Will the guys crush this hammer-wielding menace or will they get pounded by his giant fist? Watch the strats and follow the fight as Project Lore takes on Iron-hand in Heroic Mechanar...

Blizzard announced today that tickets for its highly popular BlizzCon, held in October, will go on sale August 11th. Can't make it?  Subscribe to DIRECTV? Then you can catch the whole shindig on pay per view!

IRVINE, Calif. - July 29, 2008 - Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced that tickets for its third BlizzConTM gaming convention will go on sale August 11 and that live coverage of the event will be available as an exclusive DIRECTV pay per view event. BlizzCon is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding Blizzard Entertainment®'s Warcraft®, Diablo®, and StarCraft® game universes. The event will take place at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California on October 10 and 11.

"Meeting and interacting with our players at BlizzCon is always a great experience for us," stated Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We're also pleased to be working with DIRECTV this year to bring the show, for the first time, to those players who are unable to attend."