The 5th anniversary press continues — this time it’s a site called Techland, where our friend Tracey John (who also writes for Massively) interviews Jeff Kaplan about his reflections on the last five years of the game. It’s surprising to hear that early on, Blizzard wasn’t so sure of their success. Despite the fact that even before WoW, they had made some of the most classic PC games of all time, they weren’t sure that going the subscription route was a good idea. But one of the companies’ founders stood up and gave a pep talk, and promised a whole million subscribers, apparently. Of course, they’d go on to make many times that, but that was good enough to get the team going again.
Kaplan also says that he is a little bummed that Blizzard didn’t scale back raiding earlier — 40-man raids were a little unwieldy, he admits now, and smaller raids would have meant more content in the vanilla days. But he does say that since the game has been updated so much, most of the stuff they wish they’d done different has actually been done differently. And in the future, he says that better technology will play a big role — bigger instance capacity, and things like cross-server instances and other innovations. The next five years, he seems to hint, should be just as interesting as the first.
gmaxwell World of Warcraft
Monday wasn’t only the fifth anniversary of World of Warcraft, it also kicked off the 15th anniversary of the Warcraft property at large (which makes sense — you might remember that the original WoW intro started off with “Ten Years of Warcraft”). And so Blizzard has created a brand new minisite to commemorate the occasion — they’ve got a full video interview with many of the staff members (no women, though, Blizzard — what’s the deal there?), and there are other Blizzard and community interviews coming as well. They’ve also got a feature called the “Battlecry Mosaic,” in which they’re inviting fans to take pictures of themselves showing Horde or Alliance pride with printable logos, which will then be assembled into a mosaic of up to 20,000 pictures. That should be a sight to see — it’ll eventually all be posted online, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like it at the next BlizzCon also. Neth also says that whoever reaches set limits on pictures will get a faction exclusive piece of art revealed. Sounds fun.
I thought for a moment that this was what the Warcraft twitter account was referring to the other day, but they specifically said whatever they were talking about would be revealed on 11/25, and obviously that’s still in the future. So we’ll have to see what else appears this week. Still, the minisite is an excellent homepage for Blizzard’s look back at their first and biggest franchise. Especially if you’re a Warcraft fan, it’s a must-see.
Castiglione World of Warcraft Blizzard, Interviews
Remember Jeff Strain? His August departure from ArenaNet was big news, and we haven’t heard a lot from him lately. We found out today what he’s been up to, and we couldn’t be happier.
Jeff Strain has a shiny (slimy?) new project just officially announced today. Undead Labs is his new studio, which is already at work planning a zombie MMO — more specifically, a zombie-console-MMO. To quote the Undead Labs site, “Zombie MMO! Hell yeah!” Of course, we already have a million questions, but he was kind enough to answer many of them well in advance. (Points to him for anticipating them and spelling it out right up front, and for making us laugh.)
It’s early days yet so we don’t have a laundry list of specific details and screenshots, but the site already shows a departure from the traditional way of doing things when it comes to MMO development. A look around Undead Labs sets the tone right off, beginning with the aforementioned answers to questions, and continuing with a fairly amusing etiquette guide. Strain and Undead Labs look to be off to a running start with things, and we are going to be keeping a close eye on the impending zombie apocalypse.
Koeningsmark MMOPRG News
Earthrise fans will still have a bit of a wait ahead of them in terms of getting into open beta, but development and improvements are ongoing through the current closed beta. Masthead Studios CEO Atanas Atanasov was recently interviewed by MMORPG.com’s Garrett Fuller, updating Earthrise fans on the game’s current status and details of some of the game mechanics of skills and tactics. Noteworthy — Atanasov discusses why Masthead Studios chose to develop a sandbox MMO and foster a player-driven setting, rather than a more typical game where players move quickly through the content and then wait for the next expansion to release.
“The sense of involvement and power to create and change can invigorate and keep players glued to the game for years to come,” says Atanasov. On that topic of sandboxes, the interview also discusses how MMO titles like Ultima Online and EVE Online have been part of the inspiration for Earthrise.
Atanasov also explains some of the challenges of open PvP game design, how he envisions player guilds forming, and the game’s reworked combat system. And about that open beta or a release date? Atanasov tells MMORPG.com, “We don’t want to rush Earthrise to the market so we are working hard to deliver a game that players will enjoy for years to come.”
Castillans MMOPRG News Earthrise, PvP
Simple true statement of the day: Patch 3.3 will not be released Tuesday November 24th, 2009.
Zarhym hopped on the fourms earlier this evening and said that the patch will not be dropping tomorrow, and that they don’t consider dropping a patch before a long holiday weekend something they want to do. We agree.
Zarhym goes on to say that he doesn’t prefer his day-after-thanksgiving turkey with cranberry sauce on it. That, ladies and gentleman, is a travesty. A total slap in the face to all us cranberry loving mortals out there. Is Zarhym really against cranberries because one day he ate too many cranberries, abused them, and then went on a cranberry induced rampage killing off entire swaths of AV players with his Martin Fury, only to laugh at and teabag everyone who tried to stop him?
I’m not saying he did, I’m just asking a question. Zarhym hasn’t given an answer, and without one, well… well, what can consider to be the truth then? I think you know the truth my beautiful Azeroth. I think you do. /tear.
Update 7:50 p.m. EDT: We’ve placed a red phone in the WoW.com HQ. It’s sitting right here. We’ve given the number to your chief of staff, Zarhym. You can call it and refute your Martin Fury incident anytime you want. Azeroth is waiting.
Update 9:45 p.m. EDT: WoW.com would like to apologize for its use of cranberry pictures from other, more popular, cranberry related events. We agree with Zarhym when he says that this is the time to put aside differences and put gravy on our turkey sandwiches, of course as long as the turkeys come from Azeroth. No Draenor turkeys for us.
MMOvalue World of Warcraft
The celebrations have started in Europe and Oceania, anyway! Players in these regions have started to receive their Onyxian Whelps in the mail, along with a letter welcoming them to a new year in Azeroth and a feat of strength upon logging in. This probably means that those of us in the United States (and Canada and whatever other magical lands are in the region) will be getting ours tomorrow. Considering Pilgrim’s Bounty also starts tomorrow, it’s kind of exciting! It really is a holiday in Azeroth.
The screenshot above comes from Enduser of Ghostlands EU. Since most of us here at WoW.com are US players, we’re in dire need of screenshots! If you have any, please send them our way along with your character name (if you want credit for it) so we can add them to a gallery!
Castro World of Warcraft 5th anniversary
Around the feast areas, at least on my own server, I’ve seen the same questions keep popping up about the new holiday, Pilgrim’s Bounty. I thought it might be helpful to try answering them here. By necessity, these are a little general; if you want a closer look at getting the holiday achievements, please read our updated guide to Pilgrim’s Bounty achievements.
Help! Where do I go to get started?
Go to any of your faction’s major cities and find the feasting area. For Alliance, head to Stormwind, Ironforge, or Darnassus: for Horde, head to Orgrimmar, Undercity, or Thunder Bluff. While you can start the holiday in either the Exodar or Silvermoon, it’s a little faster to start in any of the “classic” cities because you don’t pick up any quests in their BC counterparts.
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Castiglione World of Warcraft Achievement, Events
A new patch for an MMO is a bit like a present. At best, it can provide a number of new opportunities for fun and enjoyment. At worst, it can break several things you already liked and now have to replace. Aion has recently deployed the new patch 1.5.1 and, as could be expected, fan reaction is somewhat split on whether it’s a nice present or the immortal pairing of socks and underwear. Certainly there isn’t a major content influx, and the often-requested reduction of the game’s grind has yet to be implemented, but there are still a number of nice updates and additions.
Leaving aside the bugfixes and optimization with only a mention that they should help the game play more smoothly all around, several instanced dungeons have been adjusted somewhat. Nearly all of these changes look beneficial to players — reductions in difficulty and increases in reward, as well as added UI displays for important objectives. They’ve also added stealth-detecting NPCs to starter areas and increased several NPC health totals in an effort to curb destructive PvP tendencies. Quest experience at mid-to-high levels has been adjusted upward, rewards have been slightly improved on several quests, and level-difference experience penalties have been reduced. Last but not least, there’s now more incentive to hold a fortress in the Abyss and work to defend it, as rewards are offered for defending players. Aion’s fans aren’t all happy about the changes, but it’s best if you take a look at the changes yourself. Just remember that even if you don’t like it, this present is unreturnable.
MMOvalue Aion
It was announced some time ago that Square-Enix would make it easier for Final Fantasy XI players to get married in-game, with the vague insinuation that the feature would go live at around the same time as the version update. Sure enough, the new wedding system is now in place, and it makes the entire procedure so much easier that it’s almost trivial. After all, you already get to avoid meddling in-laws, reams and reams of wedding invitations, and the joy of finding a caterer who won’t server your guests microwaved dog food.
The official page offers all the details you could want on the wedding system, including the procedure for crafting all of the wedding items if you prefer that option to purchasing them. It also offers traditional Vana’diel wedding vows, a nice touch for a roleplaying event, especially one supported by the game’s official systems. So go ahead and tie the knot in Final Fantasy XI, free and without the bulky and restrictive system of the past. No rumors yet of a messy and acrimonious divorce system being added into the game, but now that marriage is simpler, perhaps it’s in the cards.
Kiuperli World of Warcraft
Wrath is almost all wrapped up, and while we didn’t know much about it before the expansion, we’ve all certainly experienced the token system that Blizzard implemented as they went along, where early instances drop one kind of badge/token, and then the newer instances offer up new tokens, which can then be exchanged back for the older ones and their rewards. Now that we see the big picture at the end of the expansion, it’s pretty ingenious, actually, and it even allows Blizzard to beef up other parts of the game, as they did with the rewards in the new Dungeon system.
Not that he needs to, but Bornakk steps up on the forums to justify exactly this kind of tiered system. Players complain that Ulduar is “useless” now that you can obtain its badges from lots of different places, but Bornakk says this system is definitely preferable to what Blizzard did in vanilla and BC, which was requiring new raiders to run through all of the old content before seeing the new and shiny stuff. They don’t want the old content to sit useless (and it’s not — lots of guilds are still running Ulduar and even Naxx for the hard modes and achievements), but after the high-end raiders have their fun, it’s important to get everyone else up to speed as well.
Bornakk admits it’s “a tough line to walk,” divining which of the two systems (straight raiding vs. badge earning) works better in which places. But Blizzard will never make everyone completely happy, and I think they’ve done a much better job this expansion in terms of balancing the need to show off all of their content against the need to get players working in their own ways towards gear rewards. In Cataclysm, it certainly seems like endgame won’t be as big a focus — in the beginning, anyway, we’ll all be looking at the old world and what’s changed back then. It’ll be interesting to see if they incorporate the tiered badge system in the rest of the game as well.
gmaxwell World of Warcraft bosses, raiding
Back in the day, there were two ways to play most MMOs — you could form a group with other players, or you could stay inside the cities and wait. Those days are long gone, of course, and it’s a rare game that doesn’t allow a player to do quite a bit without the support framework of a group. But there’s a point to be made about what’s been lost in the process, and We Fly Spitfires has an interesting take on how we now have to be pushed and prodded into grouping. There was a time when people were expected to group to complete tasks, but players are increasingly opposed to the idea as more and more becomes possible to solo and we grow less and less patient for finding a group.
Unsurprisingly, Game by Night brings up the obvious counterpoint: that evolving game design has relegated forced grouping to the past. There are more MMO players now than there were back then, and the majority of them started on games such as World of Warcraft or City of Heroes where grouping was only occasionally necessary, and even then only for specific tasks. By removing the requirement, player expectations become different, and there’s no longer a sense from most of the playerbase that soloing should be possible for a majority of tasks. It’s a debate that’s been had over and over through the years, but as the solo play model becomes more and more expansive, it no doubt will be revisted time and again — and attitudes toward it will shift as the playerbase does.
Castillans Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft
So, wait a minute. If Strength on leather gear is going away in Cataclysm, how are feral druid tanks going to be itemized? Ghostcrawler’s got it handled.
We talked about druids in bear form also getting AP from strength. Strength won’t appear on leather and no piece should have Str and Agi together, so it’s not like they would really double dip. That lets us still have tanking necks, rings and cloaks with strength on them that are attractive to all 4 tanking classes.
Ghostcrawler, you machine, you. First you tell us that all of these stats are just plain goin’ away in Cataclysm, and now you give us specifics? Such an industrious crab. But how is this change going to be carried out? Turns out he’s got something to say about that, too.
Almost all the items in the game are going to have to change. In many cases this is just a sweeping pass we can make on all gear, such as replacing the Agi + AP on leather with just Agi. So don’t worry too much about what happens with old gear and talents mixed with the new stat system. The gear and talents in many cases must change.
No kidding! Looks like a lot of thought is going to have to go into re-itemizing the game. Hopefully the same amount of attention goes into our talents to go with this expansion; I can’t wait to see more “fun” talents like they’ve been promising, stat changes notwithstanding.
Before you go, though — a brief moment of silence for “of the Tiger.” You were there when we needed a suffix, any suffix, for our DPS alts. Godspeed, you green emperor.
Kanghi World of Warcraft
According to Eyonix, the background downloader for patch 3.3 will begin its work soon. There were some reports that it was turned on yesterday for a short time, when it began to deliver a roughly 450mb pre-patch file. However this time, Blizzard is turning it on for good.
Eyonix points out that the background downloader should provide a faster download than normal. Go into the preferences of the downloader and check “Don’t throttle background download” to see the new speed in action. However, this option has often been known to interfere with WoW and other applications accessing the intertubes, so I recommend you only turn it on when you’re not going to be doing a lot of online activity.
This does point to patch 3.3 coming soon. Whether or not that soon is next week is too early to tell, but usually Blizzard runs the background downloader for a couple of weeks before rolling out a patch. But who knows — we haven’t heard anything yet on (or off) the record.
Mustapha World of Warcraft
The latest patch 3.3 build on the PTR has yielded tier 10 purchasing information. When players were purchasing tier 9, they had to to use badges to pick up the item level 232 iterations. But to get the next rank up, they needed badges and a token. When purchasing tier 8, all you needed was a class specific token which dropped from different bosses.
That will not be the case here. Tier 10 purchasing has been streamlined further, and I think this is the best solution as it contains elements of both tier 8 and tier 9 models.
Now when you want to buy tier 10, you have to use Emblems of Frost to purchase the item level 251 variants. This is the lowest version of tier 10 you can get. In order to get the next level which is item level 264, you’ll need to get a class specific token which presumably drops from Icecrown Citadel on 25. It could drop from Icecrown Citadel 10 after taking down Arthas or doing some heroic versions of bosses. We have no idea yet.
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Castille World of Warcraft wow-patch-3.3, wow-patch-news
