Blizzard has unveiled a plan that will see the upcoming World of Warcraft Achievement system expanded to its other new releases, letting players build a “Blizzard Level” covering a range of the company’s titles.
A report on MTV Multiplayer says the new Blizzard Accounts will add players’ World of Warcraft scores to the Blizzard Level, a system which the game’s lead designer described as “basically a gamerscore.” In the future, Achievements from other Blizzard titles will be factored into the score as well, including StarCraft II and Diablo III. “Eventually, our plans are for the Achievement system to become an account-based system,” he said.
“For now the points are just a WoW character score. As we graduate to that Blizzard Account system, which is right on the horizon, it will switch over to a Blizzard Level,” he continued. “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.”
The Achievement system will launch with the Wrath of the Lich King update, and while the Achievements are currently character-specific, Kaplan said he hopes to see the addition of account-specific Achievements in the first Lich King patch. “Things like, ‘I have a Horde and Alliance character at maximum level,’ or ‘I have three max-level characters,'” he explained. “For WoW, it’ll let us do a lot of really cool Achievements, and we can start doing this once Achievements exist at the account level.”
Wrath of the Lich King is currently in closed beta and is expected to launch by the end of 2008.
