Second World of Warcraft expansion released

Blizzard Entertaiment today has released the second expansion pack for its indomitable World of Warcraft massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Naturally, it's an excuse to throw a big party.

Called Wrath of the Lich King, the game pack adds new zones, dungeons, skills and abilities to the nearly five-year old World of Warcraft realm. Last year, Blizzard announced that the game had more players than the entire population of New York City after the first expansion pack Burning Crusade, was released. In a single month, it sold 3.5 million copies.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King is available in North America, Europe, Russia, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile today for Windows XP/Vista and Mac with a retail price of $39.99, and will come to stores tomorrow in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau will get the title on November 18.

Blizzard threw midnight launch parties at four locations, two in California, one in New York, and one in Texas. In the OC Register's Blizzard Blog, blogger Joe Simmons reported the Anaheim midnight launch had an "insanely long" line of more than 1,000 people.

There were launch events in Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, Madrid, Mexico City, Taipei, Seoul, and London as well. Apparently the WoW frenzy was going on in London also, as UK newspaper The Guardian reported the line outside of the downtown HMV stretched more than 2,500 fans in length.