WoW at Blizzcon: $#%ing Pandas

I'll say it again: $#%ing Pandas

Most everything I have about the first day of Blizzcon is positive, but I need to get that headline off my chest and out of the way up front.  It seems to me we should be able to do better than with cutesy-wootsy, widdle panda bear characters. I mean, Samwise Didier invented this race in a throwaway sketch to please his infant daughter. COME ON!

Moving on.

Darn, Pandaria looks good!  I watched part of the art panel this weekend and was pretty impressed with the tools they have and they way they use them.  For my money, Wrath of the Lich King was the finest scenery they have yet made for this game, and Pandaria seems like it is made from the same cloth.  I can hardly wait to get to go exploring there.

And, as for the unifying element of this expansion, I'm feeling happy that there is no new Big Bad this time around. I have little doubt that some rotten new NPCs will step forward to have our might focussed against them, but it's nice to not have the world's safety hanging by a string.  No one should be expected to have to save the world EVERY SINGLE DAY!  Not even our characters. If the Alliance and Horde factions go to all-out war, that's a good thing too.

Thinking of war between the Alliance and Horde, during the Lore Panel, an Alliance player stepped forward, braved the boos of the crowd and asked Chris Metzen point blank when he was going to let the Alliance back into the fight. And Metzen just doesn't get it. He described a quest series they are trying to write in which Varian Wrynn takes our characters as valets of sorts in a round-the-world tour to shore up Alliance support. But that's not what I want to see. What I want is to see the Horde gains to Alliance territory retaken and the cursed wretches given a drubbing. I want the political map of the world redrawn.  Cheerleading for the king is a poor, poor substitute.

I think somebody boxed Metzen and a few others about the ears before letting them out on stage this time. The roars for the Horde were a bit more balanced, but I mean... really, Metzen: appreciate he's a writer and he likes his characters, but the Alliance needs action now, not more soul-searching from the king, dammit.

There are so many other things they touched on this weekend, I'll surely come back to revisit some of these in future blogs, but just quick notes after the jump for now.

A Blizzcon Predictor

Just a few days til Blizzcon!  I just went to look up all I wrote about last year's Blizzcon and as I suspected, I never really said that much. I think I generally tried to stay positive and while there have been a few times this year that I have toyed with addressing last year's Blizzcon again, I'm pleased to see that I have refrained from doing so. Just a model of self-restraint I am.

So, I'm going to stay positive now. Watch this!

Here's what I think we can expect from Blizzcon this year:

The Foo Fighters are Going to Rock
I just had to get that one out of the way first. Because it's just absolutely true.

This Blizzcon should be a Hella Lot Better Than Last Year's Blizzcon
Basically, there was no news at last year's Blizzcon and there has got to be some news this year, so it's going to be better just by default in that respect. Almost every panel had panelists who looked strung out and nobody had done anything to prepare besides bring a chair so they could listen to an endless stream of lousy Q&A. It was right on the eve of the release of Cataclysm, so I can't entirely blame them or anything, but it still made for crappy panels.

Pandas?
To recap the whole "Mists of Panderia" expectations that bubbled up this summer and then went oddly quiet.  Back in June (I think), Blizzard filed trademark papers on the name "Mists of Panderia" in the same manner that they filed papers on "Cataclysm" two years earlier. Back in the day, that was the earliest widely-known hint as to what was coming in this latest expansion, so the fans pounced on "Mists of Panderia" name with relative certainty.

Since that time, various blue-post and media comments from Blizzard people have both suggested confirmation and suggested denial of the validity of the Panderia predictions, which, I'm sure, is exactly how Blizzard would like it.  They have kept their secret about the next expansion pretty well this time out. But you can expect them to show us their cards at Blizzcon in five days time.

What I Wanted to Know from the Lore Panel

Alex Afrasiabi and Chris Metzen try to not answer too many questions at the lore panel

Watching the lore panel this weekend, I sensed that there is a fine line Blizzard walks every time they do one of those things. There are relatively few questions one could ask that Metzen and Afrisabi would be willing to answer.

Spoiler Questions - Most of the unknown story is stuff we will see in the near future and they are not going to give that away.

Questions about favorite characters, like "Are you going to bring Illidan back?" The devs look at each other, cause they know the answer in Warcraft is that anybody could come back, but that one is not really under consideration.

Completely random questions that nobody ever thought about, like, "What clan does Saurfang belong to?" I think it's an interesting question, but as Metzen put it in that case: "Blackrock. As of ten seconds ago, it's Blackrock."

So, let's imagine that I up and flew my butt down to Anaheim and forced all the others out of the way so that I could ask the Lore Questions. This is what I would have asked:

"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.