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BlizzCon Overview, Page Two
MMORPG.com Community Manager Richard Cox attended BlizzCon over the weekend and today presents us with this overview of the event including announcements from all of your favorite Blizzard games.
There was also a bit of talk about raiding. Basically from the sounds of it, they want to make it less confusing and more fun overall; less emphasis on consumables and buffs, more on skill. They're also looking at ways to make things easier for dual spec classes.
The PvP panel primarily talked about the arenas and battleground, as well as Wintergrasp, coming in the expansion. The arenas definitely sound cool, and different from anything currently in the game. There was also a little talk of changes coming down the pipe not related to the expansion. Though, it is pretty easy to see what brought these changes on... The ability to queue up for scenarios from anywhere in the game has been hugely popular in WAR, and it seems Blizzard has noticed, as in the future you'll be able to queue up for battlegrounds from anywhere. They're also strongly considering the ability to gain experience in battlegrounds, much like you do in scenarios in WAR, in the future. There were a couple other panels that I missed because they overlapped with other things I attended, or I was standing in insanely long lines at the time. But overall from what I've read and heard from other people I knew there who attended them, nothing really new was talked about, so not much missed.
StarCraft 2:
Well, this is an easy one to cover the news of the convention on. There was really only one big announcement, and if you're anything like me you won't like it. StarCraft 2 is now a trilogy of games. That's right, three separate products, three separate SKUs, three separate price tags, spread over a three year window. Each race's campaign is being fleshed out to "full game length." While a small part of me is a little happy about this news, it is a VERY small part. Sure, 26-30 missions per campaign instead of 10-12 sounds great. But paying $50 (plus tax, and this figure is pure speculation on my part as no price point was announced) three times just so I can play all 3 campaigns does NOT, in ANY way, make me even remotely happy. And it really hurts people like me more than anyone. I don't play RTSes for the multiplayer, which for the record, if you do; you'll be fine as all three products will ship with all three races fully implemented for multiplayer skirmishes. I play them for the story, for the campaign. And I really feel sorry for the hardcore Protoss fans; their campaign is dead last, so welcome to your 3+ year wait.
;)
Diablo 3:
Several bits of big news on the D3 front. First and foremost is easily the announcement of the Wizard as the third class in the game. So now we have a main tank, a glass cannon and umm... a freak. There was also a bit of rumoring going around the convention about them monetizing Battle Net in some manner, but no details were released, other than confirmation that D3 would not be a subscription based game like WoW.
The Diablo 3 class and skills panel talked mostly about the Wizard class, but also touched on the Barbarian and Witch Doctor a bit. They discussed how they came up with the current skill system in Diablo 3, while reiterating many, many times that it was in no way a final product and still very subject to change. They showed a slide show ticking off all of the discarded failed ideas for skill systems, including several radial systems, stuff involving beads and wheels and even two versions of the 'Horadric Skill Cube' which the crowd went crazy about. Their goals when creating the skill system for D3 were to keep it simple, compelling at both early and end game, allow for a lot of character customization and differentiation and support around six active skills. One thing they really wanted to do was get back to the system from the first Diablo where skills were dropped from mobs as books, or at least something along the lines of that system. They wanted Diablo 3's system to incorporate both randomly dropped skills, and ways to enhance skills through looted items.
The second part of that is achieved through the rune system. When exploring the D3 world you'll come across runes in your loot quite often. Those runes can be attached to a skill to alter not only its functionality, but also its appearance. Some of the examples they gave were with the Wizard's teleport and electrocute spells and the Witch Doctor's flaming skull spell. They showed the base teleport spell, which functions the same as it always has, just jumps you to a different area on the screen. Then they added a striking rune to the spell which caused the Wizard to do damage to mobs in the area where she appeared. And then they added a multi-strike rune to it which caused the wizard to teleport around the screen hitting multiple enemies kinda like Nightcrawler does in the Marvel Alliance games. With the flaming skull spell, when they added the multi-strike rune to it, it caused the skull to bounce damaging multiple enemies in a path, the farther you threw it, the more bounces it took. They also added a power rune to it which caused the skill to leave areas of fire on the ground that would damage any enemies that wandered into them. They also showed the Wizard's electrocute spell, which works kinda like chain lightning in the previous game. By adding multi-strike to it, it caused the lightning to bounce to more enemies. They also showed it with a lethality rune which caused any enemy hit to explode doing radial damage. Overall I think the system looks to be very well done and interesting, definitely leading to some high levels of customization and differentiation.
;)
There will also be a respec ability of some form in Diablo 3, so if you don't like how your character is progressing, you can always wipe it clean and reassign the points. The details of how it would exactly work weren't available since it's not implemented into the game yet. The gems you use to upgrade your socketed weapons and armor from previous games are back, functioning pretty much exactly as before and even looking pretty much identical. The inventory works a lot like it did before, it just isn't grid based this time. You have X number of slots for items, regardless of their size. You also have 4 bag slots where you can add bags of varying sizes to increase the number of slots in your main inventory, kinda like the bank system in WoW, but free.
I played through the entire demo segment on all three available classes. Of the three I definitely preferred the Wizard. I will admit though that that isn't entirely fair. The Wizard was the only one of the three with the rune system implemented. Also when I was playing through as the Barbarian, my mouse was acting up, making targeting a huge pain in the rump. All that being said though, I absolutely loved the Wizard's disintegrate spell, as well as electrocute, which is just a beefed up version of the old chain lightning spell. Disintegrate was just way too much fun to use though. Basically you fire a line of fire out from you, the longer you hold it on a mob, the more damage it does to them as they 'heat up'. You can also swing the mouse around and move it from mob to mob, keeping it going, until you run out of mana of course.
Monster deaths provide a lot of varied entertainment in Diablo 3. You have your basic deaths, then your 'epic' deaths, usually for the bosses and mini-bosses. Certain mobs also have their own special ways to die, like the Grotesque that explodes and sends worms/lampreys all over to attack you. Then on top of that there are critical kills, for when you manage to kill a mob with a critical hit, these tend to be especially gruesome and gory; think HUGE blood spatter. AND finally there are skill kills; certain skills kill the mobs differently. For example an acid attack will melt the mob leaving only a puddle, or cold based skills freeze and shatter them.
All in all, it was a great time and a great show. Definitely a big thanks to Blizzard for having me out and I can't wait for the next one.
/ninja
you need a link there buddy
Takes a few seconds for me to get that linked in after making the page :) patience. :)
patience is a virtue young grasshopper!
unfortunately i feel old today...so you get the upptiy old man
Hello,
Thank you for your review of the event. I was there with a friend both days. Although I am a casual game player, I have to admit I found this event some what fun for what it was. I was hoping for something that was more community driven though. Very little of what they did at this show brought the community together. It was a show rather than a gathering. Sure the opening ceremony was nice, we got to listen to the president of Blizzard give his hype about the company and the Con. I found some of the panels interesting. And the closing was very nice with all of the music and comedy.
The only parts of this show that I felt tried to bring the community together were the stage contests... Costume, Dance and /Silly contests.
Other community events I've been to, they've had banquet halls where everyone attending would have the chance to sit down and have dinner with each other while listening to the stage act. They had server gatherings, real live quests (not just visiting shops and standing in hour long lines) and contests (not just for the people that were pre-qualified). And t-shirt was given to each and every one of the guests as well as a bag of swag.
Yes, I know that doing these types of things for the mass amount of people WOW attracts would be very difficult to pull off but I feel there could have been so much more for the community rather than the show we got. Heck, I would have paid an extra $100 for a dinner and a night at Disneyland.
Blizzcon to me felt like a scaled down version of E3 rather than the community event it should have been. Would I go again? Probably, like I said before, I found some parts of it interesting.
~V
What, no mention of the WoW movie? no preview they said could be in this year's blizzcon? no info on even when a preview could be seen? well, another reason Blizzard annoys me of late, saying things are coming, but taking their grand ole time getting it done. The word stagnant comes to mind when it comes to World of Warcraft and this supposed movie. It's why I left and why I'm not coming back until they fix the lack of content over such a length of time.
Oh I definitely agree, some of the other events definitely have a more "community togetherness" feel to them, but that's a lot easier to do when, take the DAoC Roundtable for example, you "sell out" of tickets at around 350 people instead of 15,000. Or even a couple thousand like SOE's events it's still doable, but once you've gotten to the numbers that BlizzCon attracts, you're pretty much forced to let the community come up with their own. I saw lots of big groups of people who met up in the 'Realm Meet-Up' areas who went from there. I will say though, having experience working on that side of the fence, setting up community events, it is very hard to balance the level of community related events versus just free time and options to do stuff. Lotsa people who come out to these things don't necessarily want the entire event to be planned out and scheduled for them, they prefer the looser approach with just optional events and panels. I couldn't imagine trying to do it at this level.
There was one very brief mention of the movie, in the Q&A panel someone asked about it, and was given a very vague "It's going to be amazing!" answer, or something along those lines. But that was it really.
Hey Richard did you hear the Buzz going around that there was some pretty Big Changes to the whole Battle.net Forum system (Including WoWs ) in the works? One guy brought it up...and there was a quick no comment and the music started blaring again...did you hear about any of this?
Nice review.
One question: Did you ask (or was there any mention) of the new secret MMO Blizzard is working on? If it's a fantasy title, I will be especially interested.
WOW is great, but after four years, I'm ready for a new MMO world to adventure in.
Monetizing BNet? Starcraft 2 released as three seperate games?
Apparently Blizzard does not have enough money so they need to milk these games as much as they can. Sad.
There was one very brief mention of the movie, in the Q&A panel someone asked about it, and was given a very vague "It's going to be amazing!" answer, or something along those lines. But that was it really.
I just want to offer to write the final scene in the movie. Our hero gets to level 70, you hear this loud "DING", then music starts to play and the credits begin to roll.
Perhaps the final credits appear something like this:
Girl in Tavern... Lisa So-and-So
Orc #1, Orc #2, Orc #3... The Watson brothers
Gnome in Auction House ... Jimmy LePeters
Shaman Trainer ... William Shatner
Etc..., you get the idea.
Nope, the only thing I heard of regarding BNet is them trying to come up with ways to make money off of it... That may or may not include the forums, who knows. But I will say I don't know how much credibility I put in that report, cause I've never really had anyone from Blizzard so blatantly dodge one of my questions like that. Sure, it may very well be something they can't talk about, but I've never gotten the 'no comment' brush off...
Oh trust me I asked, as futile as I knew asking would be. This is Blizzard we're talking about here, they won't be talking about that project at all for quite a while to come I'm surem specially with all the attention they can milk out of D3 and SC2 for the time being, saving the new MMO for after the hype on those 2 die down is a fairly smart PR move.
The con was a blast, better then last years, better goody bag =P. They did better at having enough merchandise to sell, lots of cool booths, loved the AMD one, those PMS clan ladies are crazy heh.
The concert was amazing, was cool seeing all their games being able to play, they even had a retro gaming area for their old games.
the beta code we got is for starcraft 2 woot! no really big news from them except the new class for diablo. there was just way more to see and do, the year before you could pretty much do everything in one day, this year was much better, the lines to get in seemed huge but it started moving quick.
I'll go everytime they have one, well worth the 100 i spent.