Here's the short list of what's been announced at BlizzCon 2008 this year:
A few years ago, when the first BlizzCon was hosted at Anaheim Convention Center, it took a few days to sell out; At $100 per ticket, people were rather unsure whether the convention would be worth that kind of money. Last year, at the second BlizzCon, I think people decided that it was worth the trip to Anaheim, if only for the cool factor of the Murloc Suit in the goody bag; this year, the goody bag includes a polar bear mount with a flag waving murloc, and apparently that's a good enough goody that some ticket scalpers are already selling their extra BlizzCon tickets for $400.
Consider for a moment that people were going nuts for the Murloc suit, an inventory item that gave no stat enhancements, but did change your avatar into a flag-waving Murloc. Murlocs are the love-hate villain of World of Warcraft -- you fight them as a newbie, all the way up to the high level undead murlocs -- I often joked that WoW really should have been WoM - World of Murlocs, just because of the sheer number of the amphibious reptile men that need to be slaughtered in the name of the Horde (or the Alliance). Mounts, even after all this time are still one of the most desired items in WoW -- they look cool, and are sure attention grabbers (especially if you have one of the ones that you can ride at any level, but may not necessarily give a speed boost).
With BlizzCon 2008, the convention sold out in less than a day; while we aren't talking Comic-Con crowds of 130,000+, we are talking about 10,000+ tickets sold in a matter of minutes.
Yesterday at around noon, BlizzCon sales went live; it became quickly clear that their servers could not handle the amount of users hitting their site, buying up tickets, and they promptly took it down. They brought it back up, and the server died again, going down for an hour or more. They did this a few more times up until 6pm when they brought down the server until the next day at noon. Today at noon, there were close to 10,000 tickets available, in a matter of minutes, those tickets were sold, the server died a few times, and the server was closed for ticket sales until 8PM tonight. At 8PM, the server promptly died, and came back 10 minutes later, and sold out the remaining tickets in the next five minutes. This process was a major fiasco; instead of a escrow system to buy the tickets, the tickets required several steps before you were given the option to confirm your purchase, and at each step required the server to send a message back to the potential purchaser; however, when the server can't handle all the requests, it sends back errors, and one is forced to hit reload over and over again; at the same time the potential purchaser has no idea what's going wrong, or if their order is going through. I tried to purchase tickets 4 or 5 different times; in all cases, the batch of tickets sold out as I was putting in my credit card information. How did I know they sold out? The shopping cart kindly told me so AFTER booting me back to the front page of the store.
Here's the thing -- I can almost guarantee you that almost 50 - 75% of those tickets sold may not actually be used for admission, but rather for the purchase of the goody bag for resale, so Blizzard is fully capable of overselling the convention, because even with the crowds of people at BlizzCon 2007, I'd say there were no more than 3,000 to 5,000 people in attendance; the convention floor never got so full of people that one felt crowded. However, this year's BlizzCon should be a good one: Diablo III, Starcraft II and Wrath of the Lich King all make their appearance this year, which are all upcoming products with a massive fan-following.
Mark Wilson has penned a op-ed piece on Kotaku called "What King of Fighters Taught Me About Diablo 3, in which he advocates a hand-drawn solution to Diablo 3:
It's interesting to look at the game all these years later, because even though were were sprite-based, a lot of people back then thought it was real-time 3D with a locked isometric perspective, and now the assumption seems to be that since it was a sprite-based game, Diablo must have been hand-drawn. There's a number of issues when it comes to hand-drawn art, and our computers and game systems have not been designed for it. There are no sprite-based graphics accelerators to help optimize the drawing of pre-rendered frames, and there's a finite limit to how quickly data can be brought in through the system.
For Diablo II, the sprite sizes were significantly bigger than anything in Diablo I, and there were portions of the game that could lag or pop due to the sheer number and size of loading the sprites into memory. (If you've ever been killed by Duriel at the end of Act II dungeon before you finished loading the area, you know what I'm talking about).
One of the issues I've had with King of Fighters' claim to be hand drawn is that they don't explicitly define what this means; does this mean actually putting pencil to paper and drawing out each individual frame, before they are scanned in, or does this mean that an artist is using a Wacom tablet with an animation program on the computer? Both can qualify as being hand drawn, it's just that one way is much more labor intensive than the other.
With all of that being said, is it possible for Diablo III to be hand drawn? Yes. Is it likely? Probably not -- first think about all the combinations of armor and weapons that a character in World of Warcraft has, now imagine hand drawing 30 frames for each of the following: getting hit, casting a spell, attacking, talking, and running and you've got just the basics -- that doesn't account for all the different directions the character could be facing, or any of the extra variations of getting hit or casting a spell you might want to include. Doing all that work by hand just to create a look doesn't make sense when you can emulate that look with much less work using 3D animation tools.
World of Warcraft Dell XPS Laptops in both Horde and Alliance flavors.
I saw these at BlizzCon back in August, but I thought they were one-offs, customized laptops that Dell did just for fun. I don't think it ever occurred to me that anyone would want to sell a laptop that advertised their online vice. However, it does appear that these are actual computers, but you'll be paying $4499 for these gaming laptops, which include a 2.2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, equipped with 2GB of RAM, 17 inch screen, a 512 MB GeForce 8700, a DVD-R drive, Wireless and 160 GB Hard drive. Now, last I checked, you could get a Apple MacBook Pro with almost identical specs for $2799. The MacBook Pro is a little bit faster -- 2.4Ghz instead of 2.2Ghz, and the MacBook Pro includes built in Bluetooth (a $20 option at Dell), and has a slightly different graphics card with less RAM -- A GeForce 8600M GT with 256 MB for the MacBook Pro, and a GeForce 8700 with 512MB for the Dell (about 25% faster). So, the question that you should be asking yourself as a buyer is whether or not having the backlit Horde/Alliance and a faster graphics card is worth a $1700 price difference. That's like over a 100 months of World of Warcraft!
My advice, if you really want to buy a gaming laptop, get the MacBook Pro, and enjoy the next 8 or 9 years of playing WoW on it with the money you save. Of course, if you're really hardcore into WoW, you've already figured out the best way to do it is to go with a multiboxing setup.
When I was at BlizzCon this weekend, a guildmate of mine related the following to me about why another guildmate was not able to attend:
When I came back from BlizzCon on Friday evening, I uploaded my BlizzCon 2007 photos to Flickr. Photographs from BlizzCon 2007 have taken over my Top 10 views, with my number one photograph garnering over 5,000 views in a 72 hour period.
I guess I shouldn't underestimate nerd power either.
I drove down to Anaheim to pick up my badge today, rather than attempting to pick it up tomorrow (the memories of the ridiculous lines at AX2007 were still fresh in my mind). When I got there at 530pm, I saw a huge crowd of people outside the convention center, some had their badges and goodie bags, some didn't. Lines were long; I counted most lines averaging about 30 people, meaning there were quite a few lines with no more than 5, and a couple of lines with 50 or more.
The way they set up the lines was different than any other convention I've been at -- they actually split the registration lines up by last name, and they didn't really set them apart wide enough such that it became impossible to tell which line went to which last name (nor did they have those lovely velvet or pleather barrier things to keep the lines neat). If the registration line is still the mess it is tomorrow, I will get some photographs of the chaos. There were multiple Michael Huang's registered for BlizzCon, and this caused some confusion. In fact, when they gave me my badge, they had given me the wrong badge (this I would not have noticed, save for the fact that one of the other Michael Huangs had put their lame player name (Frewtea) on their badge.
The goody bag was, as I expected, chock-full-o-goodness, including the Murloc outfit and the Beta Key, as well as the T-shirt, and a couple of CCG items. Everything else in the bag is a discount coupon for "show specials" at Blizzcon or some other minor tchotchke.
I depart again for what will likely be my last convention of the season -- BlizzCon 2007. Blizzard hosts these BlizzCons every couple of years in Anaheim, admission is always expensive, and the goody bag is full of things that provide a decent return on eBay. BlizzCon is a two-day convention, taking place on Friday and Saturday at the Anaheim Convention Center.
One of the things that I had forgotten about Blizzard was their constant fear of leaked demos, and their FAQ about BlizzCon reflects this, particularly the rule about laptops at Blizzcon:
Desktop computers, laptops, and electronic storage devices are not allowed in the BlizzCon exhibit halls. Please leave these devices in your car, at home, or at your hotel.
BlizzCon 2007 Schedule of Events is filled with panels and competitions, and my focus will be on attending the panels and writing them up.
With the iPhone, 8 million WoW players' dreams of being able to play WoW from anywhere has finally been realized; A google app called Telekinesis makes it possible to interface your computer remotely through the iPhone. Control-wise, it seems pretty difficult to navigate around -- forget about trying to do anything more complex than staying in place and clicking on npcs.
Although I would expect the iPhone's battery to not last too long running something as intensive as this.
What happens when two old veterans of game design at a game conference in Bloomington, Indiana go into a local game shop? (as told by Richard Bartle):
