Monday, October 25, 2010

"I'm a Libra. I like long walks on the beach, drinking gin, and nerfing paladins."

They do have a really good sign for Blizzcon, at least

Greg Street, aka Ghostcrawler had all the best lines from Blizzcon this past weekend. Another good one was, "How about that alchemy mount? I'm sure everybody wants to mount their friends."

Not the best line, but the most important perhaps:

"We're in an unusual position in that it's about a month before shipping and you guys know just about everything we know about the game."

Which is a neat summation of why Blizzcon this weekend was a bit...less exciting than the others I have watched.

Really, there is no news left. I have a theory that they were saving the cinematic for the opening ceremonies, but then a leak was detected and Blizz pulled the trigger on Monday rather than let it get away from them.

But yeah, it was a pretty low-information convention, I think. I have yet to go back and check out the Diablo and Starcraft panels, but I don't think they got anything new either.


The one panel that I really enjoyed was the open Q&A on Saturday. A lot of better than average questions came up then, along with a number of thoughtful answers.

But this was a striking contrast to most of the others. Chris Metzen in the quest and lore panel looked like he had somewhere else he would rather be. He had a few things to say about Thrall that were interesting, confirming that Thrall is pretty well the main character of WoW and that he is not gone at all. He is extremely important to the ongoing story and in fact is set to become a lot more active than before.

The class development panel was mostly a bunch of hunters and paladins crying about things they don't like with their characters. I hope somebody took down their names so they can't get in next year.

Ghostcrawler mostly kicked back and let his boys answer all the QQ, which must have been amusing for him. The developer team did a good job though. I thought they really demonstrated the level of thinking that goes into their work. They could admit to some mistakes, which is good. But I hope that some people watching might realize now that these guys really know what they are talking about when they make changes to the game.

And the repeated "Ghostcrawler promised me a moose!" references were well and played out by the end of day one. I hope we can move on.

Well, all things considered, I think it was the wrong time for a Blizzcon. There was very little in they way of panels that weren't just Q&A and I'm betting that's cause most of the Warcraft team is busy working on y'know...this expansion and the buggy patch and everything that goes with that.
A month ago, they could have had some secrets to reveal still and I think some pressure would be off. Right now, there was no news and lurking over the whole event seemed to be this shadow heralding the real event coming up on Dec. 7.

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