Blizzard Entertainment has finally lifted, albeit partially, the shroud of mystery covering the intriguing new World of Warcraft class, the Death Knight. In an elaborated Death Knight-dedicated page over at the MMORPG's official website, bits of info regarding the necromantic hero class surfaced in the form of a design team interview and a lore post.

According to the design team, as scary as the runeblade wielding class may seem (you can't have the word "death" as part of your name and be anywhere near nice), Death Knights actually have a rich history of blind heroism. This is the main reason why Blizzard decided to introduce them as WoW's first hero class. Here's what the design team said:

...the expansion is set in Northrend and you’ll be fighting the Lich King, it makes sense to add a class that is directly connected to the coming conflict. The death knights you will be able to play are no longer allied with the Lich King; instead, they have joined forces with the Horde or the Alliance to fight against Arthas. So by playing a death knight, you’re engaged in the story of Wrath of the Lich King right from the start, which makes the death knight a logical class choice for the expansion from a lore point of view.

As stated above, the page also gave light to the dark story behind the grave origins of Death Knights. WoW lore is already one of the richest, if not the richest, in any existing video game/MMORPG today, and the Wrath of the Lich King expansion promises to bring more to the table. We won't be making any spoilers here, it's best to go dig for the info yourself over our read link below. We'll leave you with a teaser though:

Years after the destruction of Draenor, the immensely powerful Lich King created a new breed of death knights: malevolent, rune-wielding warriors of the Scourge. The first and greatest of these was Prince Arthas Menethil, once a mighty paladin of the Silver Hand, who sacrificed his soul to claim the runeblade Frostmourne in a desperate bid to save his people... In the years since Arthas shattered the Frozen Throne and merged with the Lich King, the power and fury of the death knights has only grown. Now these unrelenting crusaders of the damned eagerly await the Lich King's command to unleash their fury on Azeroth once again.

That should make any WoW player's keyboard-tapping, mouse-wielding hands itch for a quick Azeroth Northend (featured here) trek using a Death Knight.

For us gamers, playing our favorite games is bliss. What could be more cooler than a day on a comfy chair with a bag of chips sitting on our lap while raiding or PVP'ing in Azeroth in World of Warcraft? Answers to that would be few but we bet working behind the scenes of the world's most popular MMORPG is among them.

Blizzard Entertainment has put up a post in their official site announcing their plans of holding a mini job fair at this year's Games Developers Conference in Austin, Texas. They're giving individuals with enough background on the technicalities involved in creating games the opportunity to be among the backbone of the industry currently populated by more than nine million MMORPG players. Here's Blizzard's exact pitch at the WoW's official site:

Do you have the passion to create great games? We're always looking for skilled individuals willing to challenge themselves to achieve excellence. This year at the Austin Game Developers Conference, members of Blizzard's global recruiting team will be on hand to answer all of your job-related questions. Bring your resume, demo reel, or business card -- our recruiting team will be happy to receive all your materials and talk to you about opportunities at Blizzard.

Among the WoW development team slots Blizzard hopes to fill are the following: Senior Graphics Programmer (Next-Gen MMO), Senior Tools Programmer (Next-Gen MMO), Senior Tools Programmer (Next-Gen MMO), and Lead 3D Environment Artist (Next-Gen MMO). If you're interested and living within that area, brush up those interviewing skills, prep those resumes, and head on to our link below to review each job's description.

(Editors Note: Welcome to our 9th ish! I won't be spoiling anything here, dig on all the news below. One request though: Quickjump QuickPeek is here to stay, and we would appreciate any kind of ideas you have on improving it. Are four articles per blog enough? How should we select top stories? Do we need polls for the comment of the week? Do tell us!)

New week, new breakthroughs, new issue. The last week was one of the most monumental so far, so if you've missed checking our sites, you're a goner. Nah, we're just messing with you. That's what QuickJump QuickPeek is for, to provide you guys with the week's top events. Sure, nothing beats being among the first to read about newsbreakers once they hit our pages, but the QuickPeek experience is close enough. On to this week's issue!

The full issue awaits after the jump!

The boys of South Park will once again team up with the orcs, elves, and humans of World of Warcraft with this Comedy Central offering. Unfortunately, no, we're not talking about a followup to the Emmy-nominated South Park episode, Make Love, Not Warcraft. What we have for you is word about a free 14-day trial edition WoW DVD-ROM, which you can get when you purchase the South Park: The Complete Tenth Season DVD.

This offer, to be made available on August 21, is being peddled by Comedy Central Home Entertainment, which currently airs episodes of the said cartoon. South Park: The Complete Tenth Season DVD is an exclusive three-disc collector's edition comprised of all 14 top-rating episodes, including the aforementioned paradoxical take on the popularity of the massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft.

No word yet on its pricing, but if it's got a 14-day free WoW trial it's gotta be worth the price right? Who knows, they might actually decide to throw in the Sword of A thousand Truths as a bonus.

 

Nine million World of Warcraft users equal nine million potential buyers of Wrath of Lich King expansion. No wonder online retailer GameStop is trying to beat the competition to the punch with this very early preorder offer for Blizzard's latest expansion of their highly successful MMORPG. Here's the website's decent deal enclosed in very comic description:

Official price and release date have NOT been announced by Blizzard. In this case, the price and release date were determined by the GameStop e-commerce staff, (comprised of overpowered warlocks), using a combination of 6 and 20-sided die.

Important: If the price decreases between the time you place your order and the release date, you will receive the lower price. Woot! If the price increases you will be given the option to either pay the higher price or cancel your order. However, if the price increases by more than $1,000, many of us here at the corporate office plan to retire and purchase a small Caribbean island. You are welcome to visit us at any time. Please bring pizza, chocolate and cold beverages.

Note: We vehemently oppose “ninja looting” therefore your credit card will NOT be charged until your order is processed for shipping. Pre-order now. Power to the players.

At least the folks over at GameStop were able to infuse humor with their stab in the dark approach with the full details (pricing, release dates, etc.). It's your call if you'll get carried away and book yourself a preorder this early, or if you'll stand up and pace your room the whole day to get rid of the urge - only to visit the same page tomorrow and repeat the whole process all over again.

The Wrath of the Lich King will revolve around the WoW lore surrounding The Lich King Arthas, his attempts to end all life in Azeroth, and the heroes who try to thwart his evil plans.

 

With over nine million users, you could say that the World of Warcraft is having its own population explosion. Although it's the kind the folks over at Blizzard wouldn't mind (I can't picture them handing out condoms and birth pills to orcs and night elves), you can bet they're still bent on looking for ways to make sure everybody's got enough playing grounds. With the new Wrath of the Lich King expansion, expanding maps is a gimme.

This map image of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion shows the new NorthEnd realm sandwiched between Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. A careful look will show that the older continents have somewhat changed in shape and mass. The blue scribbles in the picture above outline the original land mass of the continents, and as you will see there have been some considerable map changes done. Thankfully, the folks over at WoWInsider have already listed what the noticeable exactly changes are:

• Kalimdor changed in shape significantly. No longer looking quite so much like a penguin, it now has a more crescent-shaped profile.
• Two new islands off the southwest coast of the Eastern Kingdoms.
• New bit of land north of Westfall, west of Stormwind on the west coast of EK.
• Islands Northwest of Tirisfal removed, and two small ones added north of Scarlet Monestary

Knowing how deep the WoW lore goes, it's easy to speculate what implications these changes could have in the game and its story. Of course, this could also be as trivial as a minor oversight by the Blizzard artists. What do you guys think?

(Welcome to the first issue of QJ.NET's weekly feature, QuickJump QuickPeek! This weekly-updated spot will run the top news of the past week, think of it as your own directory of sorts to the week's news breakers in our second home we like to call video gaming industry. This page could contain something as trivial as Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft bigwigs gathering together for an afternoon teaparty or as groundbreaking as that teaparty turning into a free for all, take-out-as-many-gaming-execs-as-you-can brawl. With that, we take you to this week's mover and shakers...)

We weren't treated to news of filthy rich gaming execs going at each others' throats this week, but we did have an equally gory debacle with the Manhunt 2 and Red Ring of Death bad rap. There's also the groundbreaking release of PSP homebrew hero Fanjita's Illuminati exploit (via Lumines UMD) that later on brought us the highly anticipated 3.50 downgrader. Throw in the talks about Nintendo's WiiWare and the PS3 firmware update and we have a really interesting week. Now for the QuickJump quick peek to the week's top stories...

The QuickJump QuickPeek awaits after the jump!

Tab this one under humor. Stone Falcon Productions, the same crew that bagged the most recent Xfire Summer Movie Contest (for their Ballad of the Newb project), is bringing us another one of their machinemas oozing with the "cool" factor. Snacky's Journal Episode 1 (we're guessing the folks over at Stone Falcon is planning a series of Snacky-themed movies) revolves around the story of the gnome Snacky, and well, his journal.

This particular Jun Flakenstein creation shows where Snacky's journal originated, the people he'll be interacting with (at least one of them), and gives us a glimpse of Snacky's personality or in World of Warcraft terms, gnomality. Go have fun with Snacky and his Night-elf friend Angie as they go murloc tipping and find out how lines such as "Rrroberrrto" and "Dear dumb journal that dumb Angie gave me" can be great tummy ticklers.

While the World of Warcraft servers, along with the official threads, are down for Blizzard's weekly maintenance tweaks, what can we Warcrafters do? Well I know you can always browse through the halls and realms of our QJ WoW blog, but we all yearn a little more interaction right? That same urge made us visit the WoW European forums bringing us upon this pretty interesting post by Black Horde member Kazuum.

Basically, he's complaining about the challenging task of looking for nodes to mine. According to him, most of the time he's having a hard time tracking his progress and his minimap isn't providing any help at all. Anyway, to get a clearer picture, here's a copy of his post in the WoW EU forums:

Riding/flying around looking for nodes to mine is somewhat boring/dangerous at times. Navigate terrain, keep track of your direction, avoid pesky elites etc. Most of the time Im not even looking at the minimap, and never know when I fly right past a node. So my question to you skilled AddOn-makers out there: Can a mod be made that Pings the minimap or makes somekind of alert when a node appears on my minimap?

We sometimes are having the same dilemma so we're gonna repeat his plea: "Can a mod be made that Pings the minimap or makes some kind of alert when a node appears on my minimap?" We know we've been hosting a lot of cool mods here, but we still haven't got across anything that could help us with node tracking. Do you have something that can help Kazuum?

The Shadow Syndicate guild of Mug'thol is documenting their World of Warcraft adventures/ exploration/ pwning of opponents left and right, so everyone would see just how a "normal" day goes for serious WoW players. In this one, they're featuring their exploits over at Terokkar forest, within the Auchenai Crypts.

After 13 minutes (although we bet it's much longer than that as the clip's on fast forward mode) of dizzying flurry, we're left with an area littered with dead bodies and a group lording over them all. Shadow Syndicate may have finished this one but they're admitting it's no easy feat (two boss battles). I'm ending my random descriptions here, the gore and violence in the vid is just too much it's just not right to put it in words. Seriously though, I'll let the vid do the talking and let Blizzard do the explaining.