By Jim Rossignol on October 22nd, 2011.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that WoW’s pandas look quite good in motion, but, well, they do. You can see them frolicking in their Asia-themed themepark world below in the Mists of Pandaria trailer. Cute hot air balloons, too.
These Panda types will apparently be a neutral race, with players deciding between alliance and horde once they get past the starting stuff. The pandaren starting area is, also, on the back of a giant turtle. Hmm.
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By Jim Rossignol on October 21st, 2011.
(Seriously? Pandaria?) Ok: A new race, the Pandaren, a new class, the monk. All that within a new Chinese-styled continent, Pandaria. There will also be a new level cap of 90, new PVE scenarios, a new pet system, and a new talent system. That’s a lot of new! They’re also going to renew the Horde Vs Alliance war somehow, and that will take place on this new continent.
That’s it for now.
By Jim Rossignol on October 21st, 2011.
The big news from Blizzcon is starting to pour out of the holes in the internet, and the biggest news is that Diablo III is going to be free to annual World Of Warcraft subscribers. Signing up for the annual pass gets you Diablo III for nowt and new in-game mount for WoW, Tyrael’s Charger. And there we were thinking WoW subs were going to decline. Clever boys.
Check out VG247′s liveblog for loads more.
New-fangled barter system
By Alec Meer on October 11th, 2011.
The day has come. Pack your children into a suitcase, sell the dog, flee to the countryside and put all your energy into growing giant marrows. The end times are coming. The Great Doom has begun. The last bastion has fallen.
World of Warcraft now allows you, in a roundabout sort of way, to officially swap real money for in-game gold. RUN FOR THE HILLS.
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By Jim Rossignol on September 1st, 2011.
World Of Warcraft lead Tom “Kalgan” Chilton has been talking to PC Gamer about the recent decline in World Of Warcraft subs, which are down to 11.4m worldwide compared to a 12m high. What is interesting, however, is his citing of “complexity” as a reason why PCs might be “re-emerging” as a platform, suggesting he sees a shift in developer attention back keyboard-baring beast.
“In a lot of ways I see the PC as potentially a re-emerging sort of platform,” said Chilton. “I think that the PC has always offered ways to approach games that you can’t necessarily approach on console, even if it’s just because of UI restraints. Keyboard and mouse opens up options that you can’t get replicate as easily with a controller in RTS games like Starcraft 2. If you look at the way we do an MMO like World of Warcraft, our communication method and all that kind of stuff, it kind of implies a level of UI complexity that would be really hard to pull off on console.” Chilton’s focus on the PC has been continuous, of course, but it’s interesting to see so many developers now expressing this sentiment. (Basically: Devs are so hot for hotkeys.)
By Alec Meer on July 15th, 2011.
It would be simply rude to say ‘isn’t this the kind of thing that every MMO in its right mind should have at launch?’, so instead let’s just celebrate that, finally, friends from different World of Warcraft servers can band together to give some sort of huge boss with a repeating attack pattern what’s coming to him/her/it/them.
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By Jim Rossignol on June 30th, 2011.
Gamasutra reports that Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia claims [PDF] that Blizzard’s next big MMO project, Titan, will be a “casual MMO”. Now, in my head at least, “casual” is Zynga, or maybe PopCap. Games with a shallow learning curve, and limited endgame complexity. Now Blizzard games might not be ultra-badcore brainburners, but they are also not casual, and I don’t expect that to change. Quite what analyst means by this term, of course, isn’t clear. Perhaps it was a slip of the finger. Or maybe he is so l33t that anything less ‘core than Darkfall doesn’t stand up in his book. Whatever it means, it paints what I think is an inaccurate picture.
My prediction? I say Titan will be an action MMO, probably an MMOFPS, with a sci-fi setting. It’ll aim wide, be accessible, and snare millions of gamers, but “casual” won’t be a word we use to describe it. Let’s come back here in two years and see who is right.
By Jim Rossignol on June 29th, 2011.
Yesterday I was wondering out loud about whether World of Warcraft was being significantly worried by the free-to-play revolution, and now they’re expanding the trial to have no time limit on the first twenty levels (which was my favourite bit of the game.) They’re calling it the World Of Warcraft Starter Edition, and it’s still limited by other trial aspects, such as not being able to use the auction house, and suffers a few other caps such as a limit of 10 gold. If trialees get to level 20 and want to open up their game and keep playing then it’s possible to to purchase the Burning Crusade for $20 and subscribe for the normal amount. The Burning Crusade has also now been unlocked for free for anyone who owned the original game.
There’s a detailed FAQ about the Starter Edition here.
By Alec Meer on June 15th, 2011.
Yesterday’s denial of service attacks on Minecraft, Eve Online and League of Legends do not appear to be the end of hacker collective Lulzsec’s attempts to force online games offline. Heroes of Newerth’s login server was named a victim around an hour ago, shortly followed by the group declaring its intention to target Eve again tonight. That may of course be a double-bluff, but keep it in mind if you’re intending to play tonight.
Then, just moments ago, they stated that they were now rerouting calls to their ‘requests’ phone number to World of Warcraft’s customer support line. They claim their line, alleged by some to be a premium rate number, receives between 5 and 20 calls a second at present. Whether this signals an impending attack on WoW itself remains to be seen, but the group currently appear to be focusing efforts on phone rerouting.
By Quintin Smith on May 26th, 2011.
This one’s a little disturbing, so if you’re in a good mood then proceed with caution. The Guardian has spoken to a Chinese man by the pseudonym of Liu Dali who claims that during his spell in a prison in North-East China, among the traditional back-breaking labour of breaking rocks and “whittling chopsticks and toothpicks from planks of wood”, the guards also made him and the other convicts play massively multiplayer games in twelve hour shifts, in the interest of selling the gold online. I’ve never bought MMORPG currency online, but I imagine if I had I’d currently be feeling quite ill.
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By Alec Meer on May 18th, 2011.
Splitting players into different servers has always been one of the strangest decisions an MMO can make, even if it’s obviously an entirely practical one. We hear all about WoW’s 11-odd million subscribers, for instance, but it’s not like it’s a virtual world populated by 11 million people – instead, it’s a series of clone-worlds with a few hundred thousand folk trotting about. A few games have, of course, gotten around it in various ways – most famously and effectively Eve’s division of system in shards, but others have various instancing or the option to switch between servers on the fly. It’s perhaps too late for WoW to do that, but what it has now introduced is the option for players from different servers to meet for the same dungeon. No matter where you’re from, no matter who you are, you’ll be able to beat up trolls skeletons together. Join hands across the worlds, everyone.
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