Silrad has an interesting request for the next expansion: he would like some "good" looking items, please.

No, not necessarily "attractive" items-- rather, he wants some items that look like they could be wielded by someone fighting for right, for truth, and for justice. Since Blackwing Lair in vanilla WoW, most of the higher level items look scary-- they're black and spiky, with dark magics streaming around them. Not exactly the kind of thing that a true worshipper of the Light would want to be seen with. I get what Silrad's saying-- he's not a hardcore RPer, but he wants to look like a good guy, and it's tough to do that when your shield has skulls all over it.

Unfortunately, considering who we'll probably be going after in Northrend, odds are that we're in for more gothic, frosty death armor. But there is good news-- Blizzard has already said that even though we're headed into a place where they have something called the Frozen Throne, it's not going to be all ice and snow. There will be at least one Dwarven instance, and you know those Dwarves are interested in: your regular old shiny, gleaming, good-guy steel.

True, if you're playing a class called a "Death Knight," your armor can't really be pink and frilly-- it's got to have some skulls, black plating, and blue magic on it. But hopefully the artists on Wrath will find a few places to put some good old "knight in shining armor" armor out there for us.

One of the latest screenshots of Wrath of the Lich King shows a pink-colored sky over Northrend, with some possible cloud-moving effect I haven't seen in WoW before. When I look at this screenshot I imagine all those clouds roiling in the sky and I wonder if Northrend couldn't possibly beat Outland in most interesting skies after all.

It's a tough comparison -- Outland planets floating above the horizon are hard to beat, whereas Northrend will be limited to a more terrestrial skyscape. When The Burning Crusade first came out, I remember being impressed that the skies had any animation at all, whereas now, of course, the bar has been raised much much higher. Still, there's a lot that the skies of Northrend could offer us, especially if Blizzard were to go crazy with clouds and colors inspired by the Aurora Borealis.

What do you expect of future WoW skies? Do you hope for ever-increasing complexity, or do you think simple and realistic is always best?