According to Blizzard's Warcraft series, there are three continents in the planet of Azeroth, named the Eastern Kingdom, Northrend (the world polar cap) and Kalimdor, all of which are separated by a giant ocean called the Great Sea. Actually two of them have already appeared in the MMO version.

Apparently this new landmasses will be the third continent, Northrend. It is the northern polar cap of Azeroth and is the primary stronghold of the malevolent Undead Scourge. Northrend is featured in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion set Warcraft III: Frozen Throne, and, as we known now, will be featured in World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion pack to World of Warcraft.

"We actually already have ideas on how we're going to expand on that in the future," Chilton said when asked if more land was going to be added to the game.

"Certainly, [a lot of] the major landmasses that we talked about heavily in previous WarCraft game have already come to fruition, although there are still areas of the game that we've talked about and set up story-wise that we haven't revealed yet. So there's definitely more to go."

And "No date as yet".

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But playing on US servers has serious downsides. One is ping, the time between something happening on the server, the information getting to you, and your reaction travelling back to the server. I have no actual measurements for WAR, but for other games I observed about 50 ms ping to Europeans servers, and over 200 ms ping to US servers. Okay, that's only fractions of a second, but in a heated PvP battle fractions of a second can make all the difference.

The other big downside is time zones, I blame Copernicus. WAR, much more than WoW, is a social game. You *want* to be online when everyone else is online, be it for public quests or for PvP. Europeans live 6 to 9 time zones ahead of the US, so unless you play day and night anyway, you're not going to be online much during US prime time. Your US guild plans a big keep raid event, but they'll schedule it for the time when they are all online, which is 3 am in the morning for you. Been there, done that, it's not a good idea.

Of course for me it is easy to be confident that WAR will run on launch day in Europe, as I have that free US account as backup (Side note: Anyone noticed that I'm the only one reporting to have got one? I can't believe Mythic created that service just for me. There must be lots of game journalists and maybe even bloggers out there who also received one of those and kept mum.). But I'm really hoping that the European launch goes well, even if the open beta didn't. I want to play on European servers, not only for the ping and time zone, but also because my guild and all my friends will be on the Euro servers.

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