The World of Warcraft (WoW) latest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, provides further proof of developer Blizzard Entertainment's commitment to both quality and quantity. Lich King adds vast new swaths of content to suck away hours of gamers' lives. The add-on succeeds because of the unparalleled level of polish Blizzard gives all its games, and at $40, Lich King is also the best dollar-per-hour deal you're likely to find in any new video game.

Blizzard's famous attention to detail has helped draw 11 million players to Warcraft since the Burning Crusade edition 2004 launch. They've spent countless hours questing, socializing and slaying monsters and wildlife in the expansive fantasy world.

These players will thoroughly enjoy Lich King. The content additions are far too numerous to list here, but every segment of the WoW fan base will find something to enjoy in the expansion pack.

Those who like player-versus-player combat will adore the new battlegrounds and the addition of vehicular combat. Those who spend their days in Azeroth as pacifist craftsmen will be pleased to hear that every single profession has been granted a wealth of new recipes and abilities.

More broadly, all the gamers who have been stuck at level 70 since The Burning Crusade expansion will be happy to have an additional 10 levels of experience to work through and a huge new landmass to explore, complete with hundreds of entertaining quests and lore. The Blizzard writing team has truly outdone itself with the new quest lines: Almost every goal in Wrath is entertaining and often quite novel.

I could go on for hours about each of the individual additions to the game -- I haven't even mentioned the surprisingly unique Death Knight character class -- but it's more important to specify why this expansion is Blizzard's finest Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) release to date.

To understand why Blizzard is so successful and so adamantly beloved by fans, one needs only look at the company's competition. Age of Conan, for instance, was widely voted as the first real competitor for Blizzard's game since 2004, and gamers had extremely high hopes that the game could deliver something innovative and new. Though the title promised many novel ideas, when it finally hit shelves, gamers were disappointed by the overall level of the quality-assurance work that went into the game.

In the early days after release, you literally couldn't walk more than a few feet without seeing someone's character vanishing into the side of a building or losing track of a quest goal due to your target disappearing at random. Even now, six months after release, Age of Conan remains a disappointing mess of half-fulfilled promises and bugs that may never be fixed.

By comparison, Wrath of the Lich King is practically flawless. No large MMO releases will ever be completely bug-free, thanks to the sheer amount of content contained in these games, but Blizzard's quality control is miles ahead of its competition. In the nearly 100 quests I have run since Wrath's November thirteenth launch, I have only encountered one bug that prevented me from finishing a task.

It's certainly impressive that Blizzard has released an expansion with thousands of hours of additional content, but even more impressive is that all the content is present and functional on launch day.