2008 brought new features, however, still fell short.
The Bad: New content is felt mostly by high-leveled players; The difficulty of the game feels dumbed down; PvP combat is highly unbalanced.
Note: "OH! A GIANT LANDMASS ABOVE US ALL! How'd we not notice before?"
Back to Azeroth adventurers go as the Scourge becomes a growing threat. Arthas, the Lich King, has built his army enough to threaten the rest of Azeroth. In a mild attempt at a temporary truce, the Alliance and the Horde looks to the content of Northrend to battle the Scourge army. Joining their side is the Lich King's own minions, the Death Knights.
So what's new? Well, besides a pretty well made content (thankfully it was not ALL the same climate), and new raids, Blizzard released their first added-in class. With this, a hero class, the Death Knight, was born. Starting at level 55, with a questline for decent gear, and mounts, these animated minions come into alliance with the two playable factions. They gave players a chance to make an alternate character without having to go through the same Azeroth period again. This was a nice benefit for players. (I personally hated them, not just playing them, but playing WITH and AGAINST) The class was also rather powerful, and useful.
What about this new content? Well, Northrend, located (you guessed it) north of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, is a (mostly) snowy content, with the exception of a few areas. In total, it featured 10 new zones. While it was nothing truly exciting, its still new, and with it, came new dungeons and raids.
The dungeons were, more or less, boring. Most of them were extremely easy, but you have to consider, they're really preparation for raids. The raids, however, were very nicely done. Lich King brought back two older raids (Naxxramas, Onyxia's Lair), and brought six new raids (Obsidian Sanctum, Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader, Icecrown Citadel, Vault of Archavon, and Ruby Sanctum). These raids were not hard outside of heroic, and even then, they were mainly scaled to fit better geared players. In a way, this meant skill was not completely necessary for all of them. However, they all were very well scripted out to have different possibilities, and achievements added to replay value. They looked pretty good, but not good enough to keep players going to them when gear was not necessary, and achievements were not wanted. For the most part, previous Expansions had better raids.
Achievements gave players a goal, especially ones with titles, or items, but really did nothing more than that.
Dalaran finally served a purpose, but was not as unified as it could have been if they had added in extra features.
All in all, vanilla WoW, and the Burning Crusade did better, but Lich King was still pretty playable. However, it got very boring, very quickly.