Icecrown, the home of the soon-to-be-dispatched Arthas, bane of Warcraft players everywhere: A frozen wasteland populated by all manner of twisted horrors, towering structures of blackened steel, and — perhaps somewhat eclectically — vikings. It’s not a nice place, and it’s not supposed to be a nice place. It’s not somewhere that you’d take your family for a summer vacation, setting up the beach chairs on the frozen tundra and basking under the plague-blighted sky. It’s the closest place to hell you’ll find in World of Warcraft — Molten Core excluded, I suppose — and it’s already well and truly frozen over.

This is nothing new, a zone which has been around since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, though recently expanded in the form of three new 5-man dungeons and the long-waited Icecrown Citadel raids. Revisiting this frigid wasteland on my rather unpleasant quest towards Loremaster, I’m struck by a revelation: I honestly believe that Icecrown is the single worst thing to have ever happened to WoW, due to terrible design decisions, and I’m going to tell you exactly why.

First of all, it’s big. Really big. Imagine the biggest thing you can possibly visualise in your mind. Got something in mind? Okay, it’s not quite that big, but it’s close. Getting around this sprawling mass of an area can be tedious at best, even with a fast flying mount, and much of the space honestly seems wasted; it’s as if Blizzard simply tried too hard to provide a grand, epic experience of towering monuments, jagged hills, and sprawling tundra, and simply cranked the experience up to 11. I applaud the effort, but there’s such a thing as “too much of a good thing” — and this is most certainly not a good thing that’s being stretched out from one horizon to the other.

Secondly, and this is my main gripe, phasing. This technology, new with the release of Wrath, allows the world to change dynamically around each player depending on what events had passed in their personal timeline. One player may visit an area and see a village full of happy, innocent fools, ignorant of their impending fate — another player, who has finished the quest chain, may see a burning, ruined wasteland, with skeletons and husks of buildings abound. A great idea in theory, and it can really help bring the player further into the game, enhancing the ‘realism’ of it all; the problem is that it tends to segregate too much. Your friends have all done these quests, and you’ve done these other quests, and you’re all looking at different versions of the world, unable to properly interact with each other. Add to this the frankly abysmal decision to add in 5-man group quests — which are near-impossible to perform alone, and even a challenge for a duo working together — which are also dynamically phased, so you can’t even help out a friend if you’ve finished the quest or aren’t up to that point yet. It’s like playing a single-player RPG, except you can’t complete certain segments without the help of others. Catch 22, indeed.

Finally, the new dungeons — while I haven’t experienced the Icecrown Citadel raids yet, I must express a great deal of displeasure with the direction Blizzard have taken, which is to say, hand out high-level gear for minimal amounts of effort, and then build dungeons around the assumption that everyone is already heavily-geared so artificial difficulty must be imposed. One of the worst offenders is fear — a game mechanic that sends your character fleeing in abject horror, leaving them unable to perform actions, and yet can be countered in many different ways. Not so, say Blizzard, apparently diametrically opposed to such concepts that they themselves invented. Not so, indeed, as any and all fear effects in the Icecrown dungeons — of which there are many, I must add — have been replaced with a similar mechanic which has exactly the same effect, except is now impossible to block or dispel. Add in living bombs and a number of other “forced damage” mechanics and other unpleasant effects — Mirrored Soul and Overlord’s Brand being the sadistic older brothers of King Ymiron’s Bane, while Permafrost is an obnoxious evolution of Keristrasza’s Intense Cold.

Add all these together, and what do you get? You get a zone that hates you; a collection of 140-odd quests and a large selection of dailies, the final “endgame” raid instances before the release of Cataclysm, and a trio of 5-man dungeons, all of which seem to go frankly above and beyond in terms of sadism and artificial difficulty. This isn’t just a place in the game’s world that is difficult, it’s a place where the designers have gone out of their way to force excess difficulty and “challenges” in, using methods that often cannot be avoided or mitigated. This is a place where even the basic mechanics of the game — the rules of the world, as it were — have been twisted and modified, purely for the sake of adding extra forced lumps of adversity. Hell, it seems, truly has frozen over.

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