Time to Get Your Lich King On

By Joe Haygood | November 13, 2008

With much fanfare and anticipation, the newest World of Warcraft release, Wrath of the Lich King, has hit store shelves around the world. This time around, Blizzard has increased the level cap to 80 for those that feel the need to top the level charts. Also, a new area is opened to explore, with quests geared towards these higher level characters. The story in Lich King deals with the land of Northend, where you will fight the undead minions of Lich King Arthas Menethil, who would like to end all life in Azeroth.

If you were lucky enough, you may have gotten the game early at a convenience store that loves to break street dates, now you can get it everywhere for the low price of $19.99, along with that convenient $14.99 monthly fee. Click the jump for the full press release.

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Massive Entertainment Falls Under the Wing of Ubisoft

By Joe Haygood | November 10, 2008

Massive Entertainment, developers of the hit game, World In Conflict, has found a home after being cast out of its former Sierra home.

After the merger between Vivendi and Activision, a ton of game developers were left in the cold, after losing their publishing deals post-merger. Riddick, Ghostbusters and others had found homes, but World in Conflict was still out there for the taking, and Ubisoft must have seen the potential in carrying the World in Conflict brand snapped it up.

No word on what they will be working on in the near future, but would it be a stretch of the imagination to think that it will have something to do with the Tom Clancy brand.

Click the jump for the press release.
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Atari unafraid of ghosts, Riddick

By Jeremy Yerby | October 30, 2008

Last July the newly formed conglomerate Activision-Blizzard announced that they would only be publishing five titles that were under development for Sierra (a subsidiary of Vivendi). Ghostbusters, a game we’ve been teased about since early 2007, was not one of them. Sierra said that the game was not and would not be cancelled, however most of us knew that the future of the title was uncertain. Also amongst the games shunned by Activision-Blizzard is the remake of 2004’s excellent Chronicles of Riddick game. However, there may indeed be hope for both titles as it is now being reported that Atari has picked up publishing for both games.

According to Variety, the Riddick remake will see store shelves first, as early as this spring. With a wordy title like “The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena” those who missed the first Riddick game on Xbox could assume this is another terrible movie-game tie-in. However, the Xbox original was critically acclaimed and takes my prize as one of the best games to ever grace the big black box. This new game promises to include the classic game with updated visuals as well as a new single-player campaign and an all new multiplayer mode.

Although less is known about the Ghostbusters game, sources close to the publisher speculate that the game is likely to be released early next summer to coincide with the film’s 25th anniversary.

Source: Variety

Activision Blizzard Merger Complete - Now Charge for Everything

By Joe Haygood | October 12, 2008

You know that service that Blizzard has been using, well forever to host online games. You know, the one called Battle.net. It has been a boon to gamers for years, providing matchmaking services for all of Blizzard’s RTS games for years, with nary a hitch or outage during that time. Best thing about the service is that it is free. Well at least in the near future it is free.

Seems that the guys and gals over at Blizzard want to make money off of everything in keeping with the Activision philosophy as of late, and Battle.net is on the radar in this vision.

via Joystiq

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Blizzard reveals, explains another Diablo III class: wizard

By Stephen Munn | October 11, 2008

Those who played the original Diablo will remember the mage in that game, who was called the wizard. Blizzard has revealed, at Blizzcon 08, that the wizard is a returning class for Diablo III. The reveal trailer you see here shows the wizard as a woman, but all the classes in Diablo III so far are playable as either sex. This seems confirmed by the concept art at left. Cool stuff, and I’m sure we’ll hear more about it in about two months in Blizzard’s excellently produced Blizzcast.

If you want a look at the video, check it out or download it right here. You’ll have to use Blizzard’s download manager to get the file, but seriously, it’s worth it. Definitely reminiscent of the sorceress from Diablo II, with some interesting adjustments. You could also watch it at GameTrailers, but if you’re going to go through all that, you might as well watch it at high resolution on your own computer.

If you’re looking for more information on what this class is all about, go no further than the detailed explanation at Gamespot, linked below.

Source: Gamespot

Billy Berghammer interviews Diablo III lead Jay Wilson

By Stephen Munn | September 6, 2008

Blizzard’s own BlizzCast is running on well over a month’s delay, having just released their podcast covering the Diablo III announcement that happened in July. Compare that to this interview with the game’s lead developer, Jay Wilson, over at CrispyGamer by Billy Berghammer.

The great interview covers the loud minority of people who are complaining about the art style, meeting the expectations of the hardcore Diablo fan and removing troublesome elements like potions and runewords, the recurring question of whether the game could appear on consoles, randomly generated elements, and the upcoming new version of Battle.Net. There’s lots of light information for those who are hungry for details, so dig in.

Source: CrispyGamer

PAX 08: Starcraft II Impressions

By George Walker | August 30, 2008

There is SOOO much to do here on the PAX exhibition floor. During the exclusive 2 hours for press attendees, I found myself easily distracted by titles I had completely forgotten about in light of Gears 2, Fallout 3, and others. Starcraft 2 was one of those titles.

“Playable Starcraft II? I better check this out!”

And… it is exactly as I feared. This is basically original Starcraft with some updated graphics and new units. I was surprised at how much this plays and looks like the old Starcraft. They are definitely not straying far from their roots, but considering that Starcraft is still insanely popular in other nations such as South Korea and Peru, this is not surprsing.

I’m probably not going to be buying Starcraft II. That could change, I suppose, depending on the strength of the multiplayer side of things, but I still prefer more modern titles like Dawn of War and Company of Heroes.

Bill Roper Details The Sinking Of Flagship

By Paul Munn | August 18, 2008

Flagship’s collapse has been shrouded in some mystery and it looks like my favorite Flagship product — ok they only had two — but anyway it looks like Mythos is in Hanbitsoft’s hands and might come back someday. Jeff Green has a rather sizable interview with Bill Roper at 1Up. Roper left Blizzard and is the founder of Flagship. He gives lots of detail on what’s happened to the studio.

At the outset you get the idea that Roper feels a strong sense of duty to the former Flagshippers:

We handpicked everybody, both on the game-content side and the online-technology side. So we’re really working to get those guys placed.

He hints that their attempt to get a new partner, investor, or owner fell in he middle of a big aquisition spree. He doesn’t mention EA by name, but he does mention that some large publishers were in the middle of acquiring or trying to acquire others and so, while interested in Flagship in some way, couldn’t give them the attention they needed right now. I guess it really is true that so much success is timing, and not all that timing is in your own hands. It’s also interesting to me that when T3 invested into Hanbitsoft Roper says they turned from a positive partner into an adversarial one.

Now it’s all about closing up shop as gracefully as possible. For the full details check out the interview here.

Musings on the Diablo III town portal after many viewings

By Stephen Munn | August 15, 2008

When I wrote about the big reveal of Diablo III back in June, I was pretty excited. One thing I said at the time was that this is the part where we all watch it over and over again. Naturally, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing: watching the gameplay trailer, which I’ve downloaded at an ungodly resolution of 1280×720 and footprint of 800+ MB. One thing I didn’t notice at first was the town portal, which Deckard Cain retreats through as the barbarian enters a particularly hazardous area. Now, it’s just a town portal, but let’s have a look at it for a second. It really kind of gives the impression of a hole in space, I suppose, moreso than the undulating blue pools of the previous two versions, but this rendition of the portal is a bit of a change. I guess what I’d always expected was a kind of rippling water effect, perhaps even showing part of the destination when you look into it. This is fine, it’s not like I’m complaining about color or anything, I do like it. I’m making more of a deal out of it than some might expect, simply because I’ve spent so much time in Diablo games opening these and stepping through.

Let’s have a look at how they’ve changed over time, shall we?

This is a town portal in the original Diablo.

This is a town portal in Diablo, got it at Blizzard.com

This is a town portal in Diablo II, made it mah-self

Blizzcast is riveting but like everything Blizzard, staggeringly late

By Stephen Munn | August 14, 2008

Blizzard’s been putting out their own podcast now since January, and the fourth episode just hit the RSS feed a couple of days ago. The production values in the podcast are astounding, featuring lots of music from the various Blizzard games and interviews with multiple Blizzard staffers in every episode. Their podcasts are hitting about two months apart at this point, which would be fine considering Blizzard’s legendary ethic of “it’s released when it’s ready” save for the fact that episode four ended with the statement that next episode they’d talk about “the newly announced Diablo III.” Newly announced? It was announced on June 28th.

I realize now that only Episode 4 appeared after that announcement, but with that kind of a time delay between that announcement and the release of Episode 4, it’s kind of stunning. Do we have to wait until October to hear content on the podcast about Diablo III?

I’m going to take a step back momentarily because I’m not a World of Warcraft fan and the podcast has been almost exclusively about that so far, save for some talk of Starcraft II. I’m not giving Blizzard a fair shake here. When I first started mixing our podcasts, it took me hours to put one out and they sounded pretty poor. Things have improved quite a bit here but I’m still far beneath what they’re accomplishing in a podcast, and that may be the issue. Podcast throughput really starts to happen when you realize you need to let some stuff slide, and that may be beneath a team like Blizzard.

I mean, let’s look at the show notes for example. They’ve completely transcribed the entire podcast, word for word, complete with time signatures. Everything’s color coded.

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