What better time to visit Blizzard HQ to see the new World of Warcraft expansion than the week right before the Electronic Entertainment Expo? We hit the ground running toward the Irvine, California-based studio to try out Cataclysm, the new expansion for the massively addictive, massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft. We got a hands-off demonstration of some of the game’s new features, and we also got a chance to sit down and play with some of the new content ourselves. Please be advised that this story contains minor spoilers.

Watch Cataclysm in motion.

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Cataclysm will add an enormous amount of new playable content to World of Warcraft (the previous expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, launched with about 1,000 quests; the pre-beta version of Cataclysm already has more than 3,000), including lots of new places to explore, new high-end “raids” for ambitious adventuring parties, new high-end competitive player-versus-player, and greatly revised versions of existing in-game geography. This will reflect both the game’s ongoing story and encourage new and returning players to try out the game’s lower-level content again or for the first time.

In the wake of the previous expansion’s events, which included a destructive rampage by the elder dragon Deathwing the Destroyer, the face of World of Warcraft’s realm Azeroth has been forever changed. Key characters central to the game’s lore have been defeated or gone missing, such as the orc chieftain Thrall, while several notable geographical locations have been altered dramatically to accommodate the ongoing story, as well as the ongoing needs of players. For instance, Deathwing’s raid on the Alliance hometown of Stormwind has left the once-pristine park district a smoking ruin (fortunately, the druid trainer escaped and has relocated), while both Stormwind and the Horde hometown of Orgrimmar have been rezoned with additional trade districts, as well as secondary player banks to help manage overcrowding. Orgrimmar has also been rezoned to allow for separate districts for the tauren, troll, and new goblin races, while the undead starting area of Silverpine has been changed to indicate the faction’s new designs on conquest. Once it was just the site of a few moldy, old graves, but now Silverpine’s forest is full of war machines for churning out disease-ridden abominations to take over Azeroth, while the tauren starting areas of Thousand Needles and Shimmering Flats have been flooded and changed from desert mesas to rocky riverbeds.

Numerous other minor and major gameplay systems are also being revamped for the expansion. The user interface is getting tweaked to give better alerts (such as a reminder to train new skills your character has earned). Other gameplay additions that had been tossed around at last year’s Blizzcon event have also undergone further consideration, and some won’t make the cut. The previously announced “path of the titans” feature, for instance, is being scrapped in favor of enhancing the game’s glyph system with a third, “medium” glyph to help players further customize their characters. Cataclysm will also offer a new trade profession, archeology, which will tap into the game’s lore and backstory by letting players dig up and assemble common artifacts or occasionally find rare ones. These artifacts will primarily be cosmetic accoutrements or “toys,” though the Blizzard team suggests that a few may be extremely powerful weapons, armor, or other stuff.

In addition, the “guild currency” system suggested at Blizzcon will not make the cut, though Cataclysm will offer new interface elements that are more supportive of guild members, such as the ability to directly find craftsmen who have the recipes and skill level needed to concoct whichever weapons, armor, or other items you’re after. The expansion will also have a new guild advancement system that will let your guild gain “levels” that unlock new global abilities for the group, as well as special guild-only items that can be purchased if you’ve gained enough faction standing with your guild to unlock them with such activities as raiding and doing well in PVP competition. Guild advancement will come with a new guild interface that will let you more easily call out notable news and achievements, as well as an achievement list that will record who completed which raid or attained which battlegrounds rank and when.

We were then shown some of Cataclysm’s new zones, which include “Uldum,” a huge outdoor expanse that bears a striking resemblance to ancient Egypt, including pyramids, palm trees, and a Nile-like river. According to the game’s lore, this zone houses “titan machines,” ancient magical weapons of great power and was previously hidden by illusions, though the illusions were disrupted by Deathwing’s attack. And now, exposed area’s weapons and quests represent juicy targets of opportunity for both factions. Other zones include various elemental planes presided over by powerful beings known as elemental princes. The plane of air, for instance, appears in the clouds and has the dreamy, hazy look of a grand Arabic city in the clouds, not unlike the palaces in the Disney movie Aladdin. The plane of earth, however, is a gigantic crystalline cave suspended between time and space, in which Deathwing incubated for many years before emerging.