Though I was away this weekend, I still managed to squeeze some hours into Wizard 101′s Test server to check out the latest changes. And there’s a LOT of them. This next update does not just introduce the world of Grizzleheim into the game, but a whole laundry list of things players have been begging for (aside from appearance slots, which haven’t made an, um, appearance).

Grizzleheim opens, a new world of Viking Bears, Ravens and Wolves.

Ah yes, Grizzleheim. The whole new world that pretty much has nothing for max level characters. You can do the next Zeke collection quest, which continues its classic rock theme this time with The Yardbirds, rather huge, wooden birds that look suspiciously like Mr. Lincoln’s less mobile cousins. But no new levels and gear that is no upgrade make this an excuse to haul out the lower level alts rather than to progress your main.

Grizzleheim works alongside your normal leveling path. The parts I saw were crowded with Rank 3-4 critters, which would place it next to Krokotopia in difficulty. And by the parts I saw, I mean with my level 30 Balance wizard, Allison Goldtalon, as I found certain quests were not offered to my level 50 Life wizard, Tara Mythcrafter. There were parts of Grizzleheim that only Allison could get to, though I could teleport Tara to her. This is the first time Wizard 101 has made content that can be out-leveled, and I have no idea why. Perhaps to give high level wizards a reason to befriend lower level wizards?

In the picture above, Tara stands before a Teleport Stone. You’ll find these throughout Grizzleheim; once discovered, you can teleport instantly between the stone and the main teleport hub in your region. Very handy, and I hope to see this brought to the other worlds of the Spiral.

We’re introducing a Bazaar that lets players buy and sell items they’ve earned or found in the game.

Yes, you can finally sell stuff to other people through the Bazaar. You can find an outpost of the Bazaar in at least Wizard City (in Olde Town) and Krokotopia (on the mysterious fifth island, before this unused, and no, I don’t know how to get to it, but it’s on the map, and before you say anything, it’s not the hourglass secret island).

The Bazaar is not an Auction House, like WoW, or a broker, like in EverQuest II. You don’t get to choose a price for your item. To find a similar scheme, you have to go all the way back to the original EverQuest, where people would sell things to NPC merchants, which other players could then examine and buy from the merchant’s inventory. You sell an item and get the cash, and your part in this is done. Your item appears immediately in the Bazaar and can be bought at that fixed price like anything else.

Can you buy something at an NPC store and then place it in the Bazaar? Sure, all but one of the pets for sale in the Bazaar when I looked could be bought in shops. Buyer beware.

Those hoping to avoid camping bosses for the best dropped gear will be disappointed — the very best gear cannot be sold in the Bazaar, thanks to the new “No Auction” tag. However, the Bazaar is an excellent place for finding crafting reagents.

Crafting lets players create their own equipment and Treasure Cards.

MMOs tend to go one of two ways when they add crafting. Either the crafted gear is superior to that found in boss drops, or it isn’t. Wizard 101 has gone this second way.

Crafted items require recipes (bought from various vendors throughout the world, including in dungeons (there is a Myth robe pattern vendor in Krokosphinx’ Hall of Champions, for instance)), reagents (some bought, most harvested in various places throughout the game), a crafting station and a crafting time slot.

Eudora Tangletree in Olde Town will have your very first crafting station for you once you bring her three Mistwoods, a fairly rare harvest. Find a place for the crafting station in your home, then return to Eudora for her very first crafting assignment: Five athames. This will require an astonishing amount of harvesting both the mist woods and cattails (found near water), and for all that work, the athames you make are nearly useless. In fact, as you look through her recipe book in despair, will it be worth the grind to become a master craftsman for *this*?

Well, hold on, Bucky. After you get your novice crafters badge (and here I was helped by a GM who was dumping crafting reagents on the Bazaar), you’re sent to Krokotopia for whole new quest, where you make five really disappointing rings, which for some reason, take large quantities of parchment and stone blocks. Parchment seemed fairly common in the dungeons, but stone blocks — seen only as a blue sparkle — were somewhat more rare. Crafters had cleared out all the GM-given items from the Bazaar, and an hour or so doing quests in the Krokosphinx only yielded enough blocks to make two of the five rings.

Why level? Well, crafted items are made instantly — click and done. To slow you down, your crafting station has a small number of “crafting time slots”. Your first athame takes up a slot for an entire minute. You earn additional time slots as you finish each tier of crafting — the Krokotopia ring takes up a slot for seven minutes. So mostly, while crafting, you’ll be waiting for a time slot to open. You can see your time slots via a new tab in your character window.

Eventually, you’ll be able to craft furniture and other house items, and I’m hoping that will make the grind worthwhile. I’m hoping, in fact, that top crafters will be able to make Grizzleheim homes, since Grizzleheim doesn’t appear to have a builder turtle of its own.

We’ve added Grouping that allows players to team up with friends.

Grouping is pretty clever. You get a group-only chat channel and a group list, and that’s handy stuff just by itself. But you also get a reserved spot in a dueling circle. You can make out a red sparkly person next to the wizard in the dueling ring above — nobody but a group member can take that spot. If you have a group of four wizards and one of them starts an encounter, no wizard not in your group will be able to join.

This is a godsend for people with full friend lists — people popping in all the time could ruin encounters. Now they can only take up spots on the duel circle that are left over after your group gets theirs.

And last but not least the introduction of Chat Channels and Open Chat.

Along with the group chat comes the dread General Chat (“All”), where wizards anywhere in the game can chat with each other. Since this chat channel follows the same rules as the existing Dictionary Chat, you can’t be too explicit, and the chat was fairly helpful — but we’ll see how it is in the live game. There’s a limit to how many people can be in a chat channel at the same time, and the chat system will start new general chat channels as needed.

I don’t know if the chat channels are cross realms yet.

If you have a wizard leveling through the Spiral, you are going to want to be spending a lot of time in Grizzleheim. If you are a max level wizard, now’s the time to start an alt — the Bazaar makes alts easy to gear up, and Grizzleheim is full of things you’ve never seen before. Grouping is a huge win, and chat channels should build the elusive Wizard 101 community we’ve been wanting.

Crafting, as far as I have seen it, is somewhat of a disappointment. Huge costs in time and gold to make garbage items, and the Bazaar, which doesn’t take scarcity into account when setting prices, won’t let reagent prices rise to a level where they would be attractive for wizards to harvest for sale at premium rates to crafters. I have no idea at this time if crafting will ever be worth it, but I’ll give it a shot when the game goes live.

Grizzleheim is now live on Wizard 101′s test server! If you’re a subscriber and want a peak at the next world, download it and check it out! Unfortunately, right at this moment the servers are down — but they should be up soon!

Grizzleheim and many other Features are now available to preview on the Test Realm.

To find out what features are being added to the Test Realm, please consult our Update Notes Page.

To participate in the Test Realm, please visit our Sneak Peek page.

IGN has the scoop on Wizard 101′s next expansion, Grizzleheim. The article goes into a little detail about the three main clans of Grizzleheim, the war-like Bears, the cunning Wolves and the mystical Ravens. And as a tidbit, at the very end, it looks like Thomas was right on the money, as the article mentions that Grizzleheim goes live on Test today.

Wizard 101′s sixth world, Grizzleheim, has been announced, and it already looks like it will be a real departure from the other worlds of the Spiral.

Quantize believes, from the announcement, that Grizzleheim is explored parallel to the other worlds as you play through the game.

The announcement seems to (aheam) BEAR that out:

Players will first encounter the Viking Bears of Grizzleheim, great traders with the ability to travel the worlds of the Spiral, in the free-to-play areas of Wizard City.

As student wizards adventure through subsequent worlds, Grizzleheim will offer new quests, new locations to explore, new opponents and new Viking-themed decorative housing items interspersed throughout the mid and higher levels of the game.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be material for high level players, but it probably does mean that to experience all of Grizzleheim, you’ll likely want to be leveling up a new wizard from scratch. Which is a good reason; until now, Wizard 101 has been so linear that there hasn’t been much reason to play through the game more than once.

Nonetheless, I expect an additional five levels in the game to give those who choose not to restart something to look forward to. Though the previous level cap was 50, until Dragonspyre, it was VERY difficult to advance much past level 45 in Moo Shu unless you had done so early enough to exploit higher level instances for quick, combat-free, mega-experience, before they nerfed repeat instance experience.

Dragonspyre, then, was the first post-nerf expansion that raised the effective level cap from 45 to 50; and Grizzleheim will likely do something similar, allowing wizards to progress to level 55, and perhaps earn an additional skill point, though likely no additional spells for their main school.

Grizzleheim’s “parallel path” will likely delay, for awhile, W101′s problems with fight duration. Dragonspyre yard trash was often more difficult than most Moo Shu bosses, and any fight could be expected to take a significant amount of time, and yet give only a small amount of experience and gold. Compared to the previous four worlds, Dragonspyre was often a relentless grind.

Now, they can add easier, more casual encounters tuned for lower level wizards.

These are things we can guess from what we see in the screenshots and read from the announcement. But every MMO expansion has something special in it, something that will give people who have left the game something to pull them back.

Here are my not-so-humble suggestions:

• Appearance slots: I’ve been wanting these since forever. KingsIsle used to offer statless costumes on holidays for Crowns, but without special slots where you could wear this clothing without sacrificing the stats of the clothing you need for adventuring, it was near useless. KingsIsle hasn’t offered statless holiday clothing since their winter celebration. This would be a boon for the game, the players and KingsIsle itself (as it could once again sell holiday outfits), that I would be shocked if appearance slots were not a feature of the Grizzleheim expansion.
• House pets: Unlike appearance slots, I’ve seen nothing from KingsIsle that would lead me to believe that Wizard 101 is about to get house pets. Anyone who has played the game for any length of time has gotten several pets; I’ve got at least a dozen. Some I’ve sold, some I’ve passed to alts, but most of them I have kept. I have a room in my bank that REALLY needs a good cleaning. I should be able to free my pets from the vault and let them roam (or even just stand) in my home. I have a bunch of dark nooks that would be perfect for a bat or spider. Krokotilians who could walk slowly up and down my street. Let me put my pets in my home, and I’ll definitely be more interested in playing more to get more pets. As it stands now, my level 48 life pet is too useful for battle to not equip all the time.
• Auction House: The Grizzleheim bears are traders? And they may appear in every world? Would it be wrong to think that these Viking bears might sell items on your behalf through consignment? Wizard 101 has thus far lacked an economy, though you can see crowds of people trading Treasure Cards, the one item in the game you can barter, in the Shopping District. Wizards playing through the game are drowned in cool gear they cannot wear or give away, and can only sell. Why not put it on the market? Someone gets something they really want, you get cash you can use to improve your house (or buy something YOU really want). Wizard 101′s rare item grind becomes optional. Another total win.

What sort of things do you think Grizzleheim will bring?