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Zombies!

With only 3 weeks remaining until the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard has introduced a fun minigame to World of Warcraft, which appears to have been inspired by the Zul’Gurub plague that spread (unintentionally) a few years back. The basic premise of the game is thus: there are some crates sat on the dockside in Booty Bay (a neutral town), which when examined will infect your character with the plague. At this point you have ten minutes to reach one of the newly-added ‘Argent Healers’, who are dotted around in the capital cities, who can cure you of your plague.

However, that’s assuming you want to be cured. If you allow the ten minute timer to run down, you are eventually transformed into a zombie, whereupon you are given a new small set of abilities in place of your own. You’ll also be flagged as hostile to everyone except other zombies. As a zombie, you can infect others (both NPCs and other players) with the same plague, and if killed whilst infected, these characters will then likewise become zombies and the undead army’s numbers swell. However! As a zombie, your health continually runs down until you die (properly, and can resurrect normally, as a non-zombie); the only way to replenish this health is to attack others and ‘eat’ them (by killing them first).

The really fun part of this is the way that people interact once infected. In my first encounter with other players as a zombie, they instantly began to attack me, but being only low-level players I killed them relatively easily. At this point the first player I killed became a zombie, and immediately turned on his former comrade. The sudden realisation that his erstwhile friend was now hostile and would attack him, led him to attack first. I’m looking forward to seeing whole armies of undead marching on the cities en masse, with the playerbase divided between defending and attacking their former allies. Even more encouraging is that this may just be the start…