What a great day for World of Warcraft junkies, addicts, nerds, and general players - Blizzard has announced the release date for Wrath of the Lich King and has announced a global ‘achievements’ system. Yes, that means it will be for all Blizzard games, not just WoW. Your Starcraft II, Diablo III, and WoW achievements will all be linked together.

First things first, Wrath of the Lich King is due out between October and December. CEO Mike Morhaime had this to say on the subject,

“We have said that it will be coming out this year… I can tell you it’s not coming in the July to September quarter.”

This is also the first Blizzard release date I actually believe. Despite the fact that it is an announcement made by a CEO, beta testing seems to be going fairly well for WotLK. (god, that’s a horrid acronym) Knowing Blizzard, though, Q1 2009 seems like a more likely guess. Hopefully they make the holiday release.

Achievements:

Considering I have not played WoW in over 2 years, I can only pretend to be excited at an opportunity for the rest of the general population to have their lives sucked away. This global achievements bit, though, has my attention piqued. It’s supposed to be a unique ‘level’ akin to the old Battle.net levels from WC3/SC, but for all Blizzard games, not just one. Anyway, here’s WoW designer Jeff Kaplan

“Your ‘WoW’ score would be just one factor that will go into your Blizzard Level. And rather than call it a ’score,’ we just wanted it to be like you’re leveling up on Blizzard games… You’ll have this Blizzard identity, and you’ll be able to see things like ‘Oh, this guy was great at Diablo III, but he never played Starcraft and he was mediocre in WoW. That sort of thing.”

Yehaw! More of a chance for us to be level whores. Bloody brilliant marketing ploy as well - we have all seen what ‘gamerscores’ did for the 360.

[Spotted on: Kotaku and Shacknews]