World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

I reached level 80, got my Explorer achievement, and have been defeating Naxxramas on a regular basis. As for the rest of Northrend:

-Zul'Drak is a shitty troll zone full of shitty trolls.

-Crystalsong Forest is ... why is this here? It's really just an empty space for Dalaran (the new capital) to float on top of.

-Sholazar Basin is like Stranglethorn Peninsula + Un'Goro Crater. With less dinosaurs, and more rhinos.

-Storm Peaks, wintry mountains that were once the home of the titans who shaped the earth, are, well, awesome. THERE ARE ROBOT GNOMES.

-Icecrown is Mordor with snow instead of lava.

Pretty exciting, all in all. There were a bunch of quest chains that I really enjoyed, and the best part is that they were all solo, so I didn't need to wait around for a group before I dove in and hunted dragons or lived through a flashback of Arthas becoming the Lich King. Quests also make gratuitous use of the new siege vehicle mechanics, where you take control of a tank, or dragon, or what have you, and gain new movement abilities and a new bar of skill buttons. It's different from some earlier implementations where you would effectively mind control a different creature- here, your original character is basically locked in a cockpit, and until you eject you can only pull the levers on your vehicle. And the vehicles have their own health, which is usually high enough for you to run through hordes of zombies lobbing bombs and going nuts with a flamethrower.

The dungeons in Northrend are all over the place. There's Azjol-Nerub, which start to finish takes about 20 minutes (and its neighbor, Ahn'Kahet, which is painfully long and mazelike). Then there's the Nexus, which is interesting in that you can tackle it in many different orders. And the Oculus, where for most of the dungeon you ride a dragon (and command it as a siege vehicle rather than use your own character abilities). The Violet Hold is like Burning Crusade's Black Morass, but in a prison instead of a swamp. And the new Caverns of Time instance, the Culling of Stratholme, is a new, frenzied take on the level 60 instance that we'd forgotten how tired we were of. All of these (and the other) five-man dungeons have Heroic modes, which are more difficult and have better item rewards, and unlike Burning Crusade you don't have to grind for anything to attempt a dungeon in Heroic mode.

Raid encounters have been made more accessible, which is cool, but so far the available content is pretty diluted. When your faction has control of Wintergrasp (which is not as fun as it sounds - the open world PvP only really happens for 30 minutes every three hours), you have access to a boss called Archavon, in an Onyxia-like dungeon where you fight some trash and then the boss. There's also a Chamber of the Aspects (again, Onyxia-like), where you can fight a black dragon boss, and have the choice of leaving three, two, one or none of his friendly drakes alive before the encounter - the number of drakes impacting the difficulty of the fight and quality of loot. And then there's Naxxramas, a retuned version of the dungeon no one was able to do at level 60, and a fight against the crazy blue dragon Malygos, which I have yet to do myself. Each of these raids has 10- and 25-man versions (where the 25-man encounters are "Heroic"), and while the Heroic raids are statistically harder, in reality they tend to be easier if nothing else, because of the built-in assumption that your raid suffers from organizational retardation at 25.

I digress; but it says something that I was able to jump right into Lich King's raid content. It was over a year until my level 60 went into the ass of the earth in Molten Core, or learned to exploit line-of-sight mechanics in Blackwing Lair, and I only did Karazhan a few times before I got bored of the Burning Crusade. Yet even having to pick up non-guild scrubs most of the time to fill out a 10-man group, we've had no problem consistently cleaning out Naxxramas. As far as enabling more people to see the end-game, with Lich King's clear path of Heroic badges and 10-man raid content, Blizzard has finally succeeded.

Progress: Level 80