Wrath of the Lich King Release Date 11/13

Blizzard announced  today that the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft will hit store shelves on November 13, 2008.

That’s great news for WOW fans anxious for another 10 levels of content and the boatload of other changes coming with the expansion.  While there was a lot of speculation of it being released well before Christmas this year, Blizzard has been famous for not having hard ship dates and only shipping a game “when it’s ready.”

In the meantime, Blizzard is still sending out tons of WotLK beta invites to players and the 3.0x pre-expansion patch just went up on the test servers for open player testing this weekend.  Blizzard also just announced that players on PVE servers can, for the first time ever, transfer to PVP servers — so it’s likely some players will be busy moving character to join friends or just try out unrestricted world PVP before WoTLK comes out.

How much has the release this week of Warhammer Online played into all this activity?  Impossible to say, but the timing is certainly very convenient if Blizzard is looking to reduce the attention the WAR launch gets.

But as I commented on Big Bear Butt’s great blog on the subject, a little competition like this may just be good for the players.