It’s been a big week for World of Warcraft. The cinematic trailer for Warlords of Dreanor went live last week, and the usual updates regarding subscription numbers and future plans that we’ve all come to expect have been circulating through our Twitter feeds. On such article by IGN featuring a spread on WoW’s traditional, pre-expansion dwindling subscriber count, Game Director Tom Chilton discusses the plans for future expansions. The interesting thing about this article (listed below) is that Chilton expresses that the plan was for expacs to be released more frequently with shorter gaps in between. We all know that for the past expacs the rollout period has been approximately every two years, with a sizeable patch in between to break up the wait.
I’ve started to utilise the Auction House for the first time in my MMOG history. I’ve always adopted trade skills in any MMOG, to their maximum ability, yet have never actually used it to weigh down my pockets with gold, only to ever benefit myself in the form of potions (for personal use)…
Shame on me. I finally succumbed to purchasing my first Team Fortress 2 item several weeks ago. I justified the transaction by wanting to pad out my Steam wallet with £10 so I could buy A.I. War, while still having enough change left to get my grubby mitts on a vanity item of my choosing. Having sunk hundreds of hours into TF2, absorbing its free content like a sponge in water, I told myself it’s …
It’s difficult to know where to even begin when covering World of Warcraft’s latest expansion set. The game is already so vast as a result of its unprecedented success that to add further content becomes a daunting prospect for anyone wanting to jump in… (warning – may contain spoilers)
Rock, Paper, Shotgun beat me to this story, but our friend Bobby Kotick (the man we all love here at Tap), has been delivering speeches at the (Bank of America) Merrill Lynch Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in California. Evidently not happy enough with the gazllions of pounds Activision already makes, he’s now touting the idea to sell pre-rendered cut-scenes to fans as feature length videogame cinematics…
Well do I remember the first time I met Ben. I’d written an article semi-attacking Roger Ebert for, you know, being Roger Ebert. And Ben, who’d apparently been a fan of my column, forwarded it to the great man, who in turn wrote me directly, politely agreed to disagree, and CC’d Ben on the missive. Then Ben and I got into email and we had a chance to grab some breakfast together at that year’s Game Developer’s Conference. Since then we’ve made a point to get together at any conferences we’re collectively at; I at least have about 450 pounds of fun when we hang out. Ben started at High Voltage Software, (where he produced Duel Masters), and then to EA (where he served as design director for Def Jam: Icon) to Emergent (where he launched demos showcasing the company’s famous engine GameBryo) to Paramount (where he tried desperately to get Hollywood morons to understand the gaming business), finally to 47Games, where he belongs – which is to say, his own company, a consultancy that will soon hire me focused on maximizing the synergy between games and movies.
I mentioned Ben a couple posts ago, when I wrote about Deadly Premonition. And I meant what I said: never have I known anyone who can disassemble a game experience better. To put it another way, Ben knows what the fuck he is talking about. And while we don’t always agree, one of the many things I love about him is that we both share the slack-jawed glee of loving games, even when we hate them. Ben and I have never had the opportunity to do this, but we could sit at a table, drinking and eating, and talk about games for… hell, 20 hours at least before we lost interest. He’s a good friend and a kindred spirit. You should definitely check out his blog .
Today, he’d like to share with you his thoughts on Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, a game some of you might have heard of. Take it away, Ben!
Evil Avatar reports that Blizzard’s just-released Starcraft 2 is getting some heat from consumers, who’ve criticized the game for being “unfinished” – in the sense that this first installment, Wings of Liberty, only represents the human campaign. The Protoss and Zerg campaigns will ship as their own games, at $60 apiece, like this one.
A while ago, Blizzard announced that their Battle.Net and World of Warcraft forums would include the real, full name of the user on every post. And the whole world exploded. According to Blizzard, this is to promote community and friend-making. According to the forumites, this is an unforgivable act of stupidity. And not for the reasons you might think – usually when forum-employing gamers bitch about something, their reasons are foolish. But in this case …
For my third MMOG news piece, Blizzard and the World of Warcraft Armory has finally begun testing the long awaited Remote Auction House for the iPhone, iPod touch and web browser. The free App (and desktop download, available now) allows players to log into the WoW Armory and browse any in-game Auction House that characters on a players WoW account have access to. Once beta testing is complete and the Remote Auction House is truly live, players who …
As the second of my three news items relating to MMOGs (look away now if you’re no fan!) and one which will see Blizzard grinning ear to ear, Chris Hager the producer of Aion: The Tower of Eternity, has announced that server merges are planned for North America and Europe over the coming weeks. As the biggest MMOG to launch in recent years, and what was hotly tipped to ‘de-throne World of Warcraft’ (aren’t they …
Picking out Steerpike’s sentiments of freedom within a videogame, it took me back to when I first started playing online video games. Ultima Online was my first, and a game which at the time gave the impression of unparalleled freedom…