China is finally getting Wrath of the Lich King

by Michael Sacco Aug 10th 2010 at 7:00PM

It's been a long, hard, ridiculous road for Blizzard to get the Chinese government's approval to make Wrath of the Lich King content available to their citizens. So ridiculous, in fact, that it's difficult to nail down just which related stories are the most important. We could tell you about:

How it was reportedly ready to go in early 2009, but Blizzard's Chinese then-distributor The9 was released from its duties after poor management;
How WoW China's new distributor, NetEase, had to get the entire game re-approved, and upon its relaunch, it faced heavy censorship not requested under its previous owners;
How the entire re-approval process may have been politically motivated due to US-China trade relations;
How Wrath's content review by the government was halted due to collecting subscription fees being "illegal" and creation of new accounts was suspended pending investigation;
And how Burning Crusade was only just approved a few months ago.

And there's a ton more to it. But we might finally be nearing the end of this sordid story, according to the Wall Street Journal. Wrath of the Lich King is set to launch in China next week, barring any more instances of draconian politics, censorship, or mismanagement. Let's just hope that nobody in China wants to play as a death knight.

Tags: china, chinese, expansion, wotlk, wow-china, wrath, Wrath-of-the-Lich-King

Filed under: Wrath of the Lich King

Reader Comments (Page 5 of 5)

arawn.chernobog Aug 11th 2010 7:52AM

WotLK released for Chinese people: All "Bare-bone" units have been replaced by Ice Troll models.

Lich King Artha'zin Gold'athin is waitin' for choo, mon,

edersons Aug 11th 2010 10:06AM

Yay for Censure, and Government restraining people liberties. ¬¬

MrLee Aug 11th 2010 2:22PM

I'm surprised anyone would still care to play on the Chinese servers by now considering they can just go and play on the Taiwan servers instead and be up to date with the rest of the world

Claire Aug 11th 2010 2:48PM

My question is, how good are Blizzard's translators? Do Chinese players roll their eyes at hilarious mistakes the way we roll our eyes at "Engrish" and such?

AwesomeGuy! Aug 11th 2010 5:28PM

I sort of think those undead models look better than the ones we have. Assuming armour actually looks like armour on them unlike the undead we have. Which in turn is assuming blizz didn't do a total hack job of re-modeling the undead to fit with the Chinese guidelines. Which itself is assuming a lot.

greathl Aug 12th 2010 7:20AM

one thing im glad is that i'll finally stop auctioning gear from BT, SW and stuff to alts who goes with gold raids and be able to do some new raids.
one thing im not glad is that world first titles are taken already. all of us in china may never have a chance to compete for world first in wotlk, nor in cataclysm.
well good luck to the rest of the world competing in cataclysm, im gonna enjoy wotlk the best i can.

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