Really Cheap World of Warcraft November 28, 2010
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, entertainment, EverQuest, EverQuest II, World of Warcraft.Tags: MMO Expansions, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King
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Blizzard is making a big push to get everybody ready for the Cataclysm expansion.
We’ve gotten a revamp of classes.
New starter experiences are in for the current races.
The sundering has occurred and we have changes all over old Azeroth.
They have cut the experience needed to get from 71-80, so you can hurry up an get ready for the expansion.
We get to see the trailer for Cataclysm any time we want from the game logon screen.
But just in case you were feeling behind, just in case you didn’t have all the expansions, Blizzard has a deal for you it seems.
Discount WoW
For a limited time you can get all of WoW, the base game and both already released expansions for $20.
I guess Blizzard hasn’t released enough expansions yet to have to worry about consolidating them all in each running expansion there after. They can stick with their Battle Chest combo offer for now and worry about the EQ/EQ2 method (both of which have way too many expansions to juggle individually at this point) at some later date.
How many expansions do you have to have before you just start rolling them up?
And as SynCaine would no doubt point out, you can get all of the current game for less than the price of a sparkle pony.
Three Zones Through the Outlands April 7, 2010
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: Hellfire Peninsula, Nagrand, Northrend, Outlands, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Zangarmarsh
5 comments
The Outlands occupy a strange place now in World of Warcraft. They represent a hurdle between classic Azeroth and the current destination location of Northrend. Most people, it seems, don’t want to get to the Outlands, they just want to get past them.
Put me on that list as well, I guess.
My daughter, my mother, and myself have been lingering in the Outlands for a couple of months. This slow progress has been mostly because my daughter spends a lot of her time distracted making alts, figuring out how to get on top of buildings, and taming new pets for her hunter.
Once in a while though she is driven to actually concentrate on her main character for a bit. And so it was, a couple of Sundays back, when she suddnely declared she had hit level 68 and was now ready to venture into Northrend.
That meant there was some catching up to be done!
I was not horribly far behind, sitting around level 65. I had been through the Hellfire Peninsula quests and was working my way through Zangarmarsh.
A diligent weekend afternoon got me through Zangarmarsh, after which I jumped to Nagrand, which seemed most appropriate for my level. And then another couple of focused hours in Nagrand got me to 68 and ready to ascend to Northrend.
So three zones worth of content was about enough.
I did divert into Terokkar and the Blade’s Edge Mountains for a couple of “go talk to…” quests, but never ran down the follow-ons.
I also ran one and a half instances with the dungeon finder. And the half instance was barely that, as I got kicked because, as healer, I couldn’t keep the level 61 tank alive when he pulled full rooms of mobs in the Steamvault. The group did me a favor on that one. Good luck to the next healer, I thought, if a level 67 resto spec’d druid running HealBot can’t keep this guy alive.
So there were some other sources of experience, but not enough that I would have had to visit another zone. I left Nagrand with quests left on my plate.
And so I left The Burning Crusade for Wrath of the Lich King.
I knew the Outlands had more content than needed to get you from 60 to 70, but when you only have to get to 68, you pretty much shave off a whole zone or so worth of content.
And when you can fly at level 60, even the run through those few zones goes pretty quickly.
Now just another seven levels until I can fly again.
The Lich King… Bond Style December 17, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: Arthas, Bond, James Bond, Wrath of the Lich King
9 comments
Having all of the James Bond movies on DVD at our house, I feel fully equipped to appreciated this video.
The theme from Casino Royale played out with WoW characters but fully in the spirit of Bond movie credits.
Stunningly awesome for a Bond fan like me.
Going Through a Phase September 11, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: Cataclysm, Phasing, Wrath of the Lich King
20 comments
Phasing, the changing of the world as you progress through the story of Northrend, is one of the innovations that Blizzard introduced to the game with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
And, as a method of investing people in the tale of the expansion, it has been a success.
It is certainly an answer to the long time complaint about MMORPGs, that you can do all the quests you’re given and the world remains the same.
In Northrend the world changes based on your actions. Some of my favorites:
The Argent Vanguard fortress is under siege when you first arrive. You help the Argent Crusade to throw back the scourge and the area phases and the fortress is no longer surrounded by hostile foes. Your assistance has tangible results in the world.
You help the Crusade assault and hold Crusader’s Pinnacle and, if you defeat the scourge counter attack, the location goes through a phase change when next you visit. A tower has been built, more quests have opened up, and a flight point has become available.
The scaffolding is still up on the tower
You assist the Knights of the Ebon Blade in their attempt to retake the Shadow Vault and turn the minions there to assist the Knights. Again, with success comes a new quest hub, an inn, a flight point, and a set of daily quests.
And all of this is great. It works well when you are running through the quest lines by yourself.
But if you have a regular group, and that group does not keep rigidly aligned in quests, there can be issues.
Being out of sync has lead to conversations I haven’t heard since the early days of EverQuest II when multiple instances of the same zone used to be common.
When you are in a group that is out of sync, you can see the group member markers on your mini map, but you cannot see anybody who is not in your phase of the area. So your whole group can be standing next to Highlord Tirion Fordring, but if you aren’t all in the same phase, you can spend a lot of time insisting that you’re RIGHT THERE and yet not be able to see your friends.
So you have to wait for your out-of-sync friends to catch up. But you cannot help them because you are not in the same phase. You can, however, leech experience from their kills if you hover over their dot on the mini map while they run the quests.
With our group and it’s range of play time budgets, this has ended up being an issue on a number of occasions.
Now I’m not saying phasing is bad. I still think it is very cool. And it is a discreet phenomenon. You are not in a different phase of the entire zone, just a small area of it, though the localized nature of it can lead to moments of confusion. The other night four of us flew through an arch in Icecrown, but I could only see three of us on the other side. Earl had done the quest in the phasing quest in the area so he flew into a different version location.
But it would be nice if there were a way to resolve the out of sync group issue besides waiting for those behind to catch up.
I don’t know what the answer is. It certainly is not the biggest issue facing the world, but it is one which our group seems to be running into with some regularity of late.
And given that phasing is supposed to be a huge part of the upcoming Cataclysm expansion, I hope Blizzard has some ideas on the subject.
December in Review December 31, 2008
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, Diablo III, DS, entertainment, EVE Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Month in Review, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Sony Online Entertainment, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft.Tags: Age of Conan, Cooking Mama, RMT, StarCraft II, Tabula Rasa, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King
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On Events in 2008
I sit here on the final day of 2008 looking back and saying, “WTF?”
Pirates of the Burning Sea set sail, but foundered. Excellent ship to ship combat turned out to not be worth a monthly fee.
Age of Conan should have launched in March because it came on like a lion, but is now more like lamb in size and competitive vigor. (Or maybe a salt marsh harvest mouse.) Folks in Oslo have since been heard saying things like, “Third time is a charm!”
Warhammer Online screamed “WAAAGH!” in September, but within six weeks the Mythic team was trying to consolidate its population rather than adding new servers, something that Mark Jacobs himself had previously said would be a sign they were in trouble. Not that Mr. Jacobs is now saying they are in trouble, but I just love that quote as an example of things not to say. Meanwhile, even some WAR fanbois have changed their mind on the game.
Tabula Rasa, after a statement of support by NC West President of Publishing David Reid, was declared untenable just weeks later and slated to be closed at the end of February 2009. The Bane issued a press release declaring total victory over the humans while General British, Colonel Blackthorn, and Major Miscalculation fled into space. A blank slate indeed.
Sony Online Entertainment talked a lot about cool upcoming products, but shipped no new games. Aside from two expansions and a lot of small content additions, the big headline of the year for SOE seemed to be, “EverQuest and EverQuest II: Now with RMT!” While I won’t argue with Grimwell’s declaration of success on that front, the reaction seemed to me to be mixed.
All the while the Wrath of the Lich King seemed to be getting lukewarm support at best over the summer with many a blogger picking apart individual features or weighing the whole and declaring it “too little, too late” after nearly two years of waiting. Then, as the day approached, people began filing back into Azeroth after their summer vacations in other lands. On the ship date Wrath broke previous sales records set by The Burning Crusade, pushed WoW to a new subscriber peak (sure, just half a million people… small when compared to 11 million, but still more than almost any other subscription based MMO you care to mention has total.), and was generally declared wonderful by those who have enjoyed WoW in the past.
So screw convention wisdom, I’m going back to wild and crazy predictions. Diablo III will generate more revenue than Toyota when it ships and StarCraft II will cure cancer and lead to the reunification of Korea.
The Site
I cleaned up the right hand bar quite a bit. The most obvious piece that is missing is the counter for Feedburner. I originally put it up there to encourage people to subscribe to the site via FeedBurner, since it offered some statistics. However, most of the people who read the site via RSS use the WordPress.com feed, so the counter was displaying about 10% of my RSS readership. Since WordPress.com has since added some minor stats about RSS, I decided to just remove the counter. The FeedBurner feed is still live and will remain so, there just won’t be a link to it now.
One Year Ago
December 2007 seemed to be a busy time for the SOE. First there was the whole “moving a whole guild from test to a live server” brouhaha. Then there was the rumor of SOE being purchased by Zapak Digital Entertainment. And, finally, there was the deal with Live Gamer to take over transactions on the Station Exchange servers, at which time Smed himself said that this did not mean that they were going to open the flood gates of RMT on any of their servers not currently served by SOE’s own Station Exchange RMT plan. All of which I wrapped up in one post.
The yearly EverQuest Nostalgia Tour was off to the usual activities.
I put up my predictions for the “Next EverQuest II Expansion,” which I have yet to score. I will have to get a post together comparing The Shadow Odyssey with my own guesses.
The Saturday Night Permanent Floating Instance Group was finishing up Blackrock Depths.
Dr. Richard Bartle brought up the “why so much fantasy” question for its regular beating to death.
I was interviewed over at World IV. So far that is the only interview I have ever been asked to do.
I lost my first battlecruiser to pirates in EVE Online. Meanwhile, after pissing away a lot of ISK on invention, I was not getting a lot of results.
And I bought a new gaming computer full of Quad Core goodness.
New Linking Sites
A big holiday thank you to these sites who link to The Ancient Gaming Noob.
- Blog MMO – Le Voleur dans WoW
- Dense Veldspar
- Mass Dispel – Musings of a WoW Priest
- Somewhere in England
- The Nothing Chronicle
- Word of Shadow
Please take a minute to visit these sites, one of them may be your new favorite blog!
Most Views Posts in December
- Play On: Guild Name Generator
- Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access
- How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
- Howling Fjord Quest Night
- Best MMO Expansion in 2008?
- Do You Name Your Ships?
- 2008 MMORPG Progdictionations
- LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga
- Five LEGO Video Game Titles I Want
- The Name Generator (which has nothing to do with #1)
- Is There Hope for a Science Fiction MMORPG?
- The Way Questing Used To Be
Best Search Terms
world of warcraft hot to get out of gnomergen
[A lot of people are]
which mmo
[A question that plagues so many of us]
new lego emperor
[That is what we all seek!]
Spam Comments of the Month
ignorant christmas wallpaper cell phone :PPP
[Not a random string at all!]
I use WoW code all the time as it saves time!
[added to my Know Your WoW Code post and linked to a gold seller.]
Deleted Comment of the Month
Die in a fire you ‘tard.
[Like almost all of the really hateful comments I get, this came from an EVE Online player. The game inspires passion, both good and bad.]
EVE Online
EVE Has been quiet for me this month, not so much out of a lack of desire to play as a lack of time. The first half of the month I was busy shipping a product before the holidays, and then came the holidays. Still, I ran a mission or two, hauled freight when needed, kept production going, and brought in another pile of ISK. Still no freighter though.
EverQuest
I have not played ANY EverQuest. There has been no 2008 EverQuest Nostalgia Tour. EverQuest II might be old enough now that it is suitable for nostalgia. That certainly fits what I have been doing there.
EverQuest II
In Norrath I have been mostly involved with the adventures of Reynaldo Fabulous of Freeport, a swashbuckling berserker who has been cutting a swathe through the original level 1-50 content in EverQuest II. With the support of his friends and his guild he has managed to get to level 52 and remain fabulous.
Lord of the Rings Online
The call of Moria seems to have hit Gaff. Having a lifetime membership means I can pick that game up any time. However, now he is talking about starting over on a new server. Damn his eyes, I finally have horses on all my guys on the old server.
World of Warcraft
Holiday commitments and illness has kept the instance group from playing as often as usual. Still, we are banging away in Northrend and expect full victory in Utgarde Keep any day now!
Coming Up
Santa delivered more than just LEGO kits to our house over the holidays. There were also a few Wii and DS games that I will mention in future posts, though it seems at the moment that Cooking Mama II is the surprise DS hit with my daughter.
And, of course, tune in tomorrow for my predictions for 2009. I’d better start working on them!
The Ride to Utgarde Keep November 20, 2008
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EverQuest, Instance Group, World of Warcraft.Tags: Australia, Howling Fjord, Northrend, Utgarde Keep, Valgarde, Valiance Keep, Wrath of the Lich King
10 comments
The first Saturday night for the instance group after the launch of The Wrath of the Lich King found us wondering what to do. With a brand new continent to explore and ten more levels to grow, plus as yet unfinished content in the Outlands, the options were wide open. The line up for the night was:
70 Warlock – Bungholio
70 Warrior – Earlthecat
70 Priest – Skronk
70 Mage – Ula
70 Paladin – Vikund
We thought we should stick with our usual mission, though in the new lands of Northrend, so we decided to take a look in the first instance, Utgarde Keep.
This was a bit presumptuous of us, given that we had only upgraded some of our gear so far and we were struggling a bit back in the Outlands. But the new expansion smell was intoxicating, so we thought we would give it a try.
We met up in Valiance Keep in the Borean Tundra and started digging around various information sources to figure out just where Utgarde Keep really was. The expansion being fresh, information was somewhat sparse, but we eventually figured out where we needed to be.
Valiance Keep Harbor
Northrend is shaped somewhat like Australia and we were in Valiance Keep (Perth) and needed to be in Utgarde Keep (Canberra).
Northrend
(The above image was taken from Wikipedia who in turn took it from the CIA World Fact Book.)
Which, frankly, was a bit out of the way. But, again, the spirit of adventure was upon us, so we decided to follow the roads east and see where we ended up.
That is very much the way we used to do things in the old days, in EverQuest; just saddle up the horses and ride… except we didn’t have horses back then. All we had back then was Spirit of the Wolf, and we were happy to get that!
So on we rode!
We ended up on a very nice tour of… south Northrend? … Southrend? … the landscape. As we went, we tried to pick up the flight points so we would not have to make this long ride again. We did very well at first, but we missed one or two in the middle, so we do not have cross-country, non-stop service as yet.
The ride was a lot of fun, and my reference to the days of EverQuest and seeing new things was not idle.
There was the Borean Tundra.
See the Aurora
There was a beautiful snowy area that looked something like the night elves might end up with if they got snow.
Do Those Hooves Melt Snow?
There were areas of icy tundra with great fissures running through it and a giant tower in the snow.
Do Not Put Your Tongue On The Tower
And, in the usual jarring environmental change common to Azeroth where deserts and tropical forests exist mere steps apart, we ended up in a lush green forested hills, beautiful scenery and fjord turkeys.
Rustic Scenery
Eventually, after making it all the way to the coast and then past the Plain of Jars and back to the center of the Howling Fjord province, we found Utgarde Keep.
Charting Our Course
As usual with our navigation, we ended up around on the wrong side of the place, at Utgarde Pinnacle, which you need to be level 75 to enter. A few minutes and only two falling deaths later, we made our way to the right summoning stone and portal.
Once we were there… and revived… there was nothing for it but to get into the instance.
Getting Ready with the Usual Buffet
Again, more great artwork. I have not been a huge fan of the Tesla-inspired electro-plasma dungeons that you find in the Outlands, but here, in Utgarde Keep, I felt at home. Skronk said it felt very much like a D&D location, and I could not help but agree. There was even Vulcan’s own forge there to warm us when we got going.
Now There Is A Forge!
Warily, we started to work our way into the instance. And things went surprisingly well for a while. Our only wipe before the first boss due to line-of-sight issues when trying to heal. Things were looking good.
And then we hit the first boss, Prince Keleseth, and he just worked us. Not enough equipment upgrades, not enough hit points, and probably the wrong tactics meant that the prince wiped the floor with us five times running.
Prince Keleseth Thinking of New Ways to Kill Us
By that point, after the cross-country travel, we were tired and decided to call it a night. Soundly thrashed but having had a good time all the same, we left the keep.
Looking for a way out, we headed south a bit and ran almost immediately into Valgarde which, from the looks of it, is the OTHER starting zone for Northrend.
We grabbed the flight point then saw a ship pull up at the dock. It turns out that ship runs between Valgarde and Menethil Harbor.
Utgarde Keep Very Close in the Background
So the right path for us would have been to take the boat from Menethil Harbor to Valgarde in Howling Fjord, then run 30 seconds to Utgarde Keep.
That information was not on WoWWiki on Saturday night.
Of course, not having that information made the night an adventure.
I think there is a lesson in that for all of us.
No Shortage of The Wrath of the Lich King November 13, 2008
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: Wrath of the Lich King
2 comments
As was the case with the release of The Burning Crusade back in January 2007, Wrath of the Lich King was available in huge quantities at my local Fry’s. I dropped by on my way to the office to pick up my copy of the expansion, along with a copy of Kung Fu Panda/Secrets of the Furious Five.
Fry’s seemed to have cut back on the number of Collector’s Edition boxes they stocked, as they still had copies of the Burning Crusade Collector’s Edition sitting on the shelf up until last week. There was only one pallet of WotLK CE’s visible when I was in the store.
Of course, arriving at the office, I had to open the box to see what it contained. Contents:
- Game install DVD with activation code
- Expansion Set Game Manual(33 pages, of which 13 are credits… a lot of people worked on this!)
- Two 10 Day Guest Pass Keys (destined for the recycle bin)
- Blizzard Entertainment Product Catalog
The catalog was easily the biggest thing in the box, which I found odd for a company with essentially three game IPs, two of which are years out of date: Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo.
But I had not considered the World of Warcraft spin-offs. They include:
- WoW Novels (StarCraft and Diablo have them too)
- WoW Strategy Guides (Is the game so complex we need a hard copy Atlas?)
- WoW Manga
- WoW Minitures Game
- WoW Original Comic Series
- WoW Board Game (StarCraft too)
- WoW Trading Card Game (10 different flavors, plus a treasure chest set with dice)
- WoW Action Figures
- WoW Wall and Daily Calendars
- Talking (?) Murloc plush toy
- Life Size Frostmourne replica sword
- WoW T-Shirts
- Carrot on a stick key chain
- WoW Custom Statues
The last one intrigued me. A company called FigurePrints will, for $130, make an up to 8″ tall statue of your character with its current equipment. They are worried about such an onslaught of customers that there will be a lotto for the privilege of getting to pay to have you character created. And they are probably right to worry.
I wonder why the company making the custom guild shirts does not have a similar plan to get you a custom picture of your character or if such a feature is being planned? That would seem to be a more reasonable path.
And with all this, no animated series. Maybe after the movie version of the game.
Anyway, still hours to go before I can get home and install it. I’ve heard that there are some non-functional disks out there. (Earl seems to have gotten one.) We’ll see if I am on that list.
Meanwhile, Back in Azeroth… October 15, 2008
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft.Tags: WotLK, Wrath of the Lich King
9 comments
I managed to get on last night post patch and get my hunter to level 68.
Actually, I did not have to do much. Tistann was about 8% from level on Sunday, but when I logged in after the patch, he showed 100%. A quick ride for some discovery and poof, level 68. A little bit closer to level cap and being in position for Wrath of the Lich King.
Fortunately I have been logging into WoW fairly regularly, so I already had nearly 2 GB of the patch already downloaded.
The patch notes are a mile long and I did not read them all. There was one nice item I saw as I scanned through though, a boon for those of us always running out of bank slots and bag space:
New Vanity Pet and Mount changes: Players will now be able to access their non-combat pets and mounts by clicking on the pets tab in the Character Info panel. These pets and mounts will be now learnable much like spells or abilities. Once a vanity pet or mount is learned, the icon will disappear from within a player
Ula will be happy. She can now have all her pets with her every where she goes.
The achievement tracker was in. I know this is going to feed the obsessive compulsive need in people. I was a bit disappointed at how low my actual achievement count was on Vikund, my level 70.
Yeah, I can feel the need to fix that. Crap, am I back and hooked again already, almost a month before the expansion?
The other item I liked was the new calendar.
You can use it for personal and guild activities, but one of the really nice things about it is that it lists in-game events as well, like the when and where of Darkmoon Faire, which I apparently just missed… again.
And yes, somebody is going to say “WAR has a calendar” and claim that Blizzard copied that idea, as though Mythic somehow invented the whole calendar idea. When I compared the two, since the Twilight Dandies made level 2 and have a guild calendar as well, I felt that WAR’s was not as polished. Functional, sure, but designed by the same person who did the auction house I would guess. The WoW calendar feels better and looks quite a bit better, even if it does take up more screen real estate when open
The one thing that WAR’s calendar wins on is time display. I believe WAR’s calendar converts to your system time while WoW’s shows the server time, which can be confusing if you play on a server out of your time zone, and doubly so if you play with friends who are also scattered across other time zones.
There were other new things obviously new with the patch like updated load screens, WotLK branding, a new login screen, and such, but I did not spend much time poking around, it being a school night and all that.
There were some issues with the patch that lead to extended downtimes, as reported by Massively, but by the time I logged on (9pm Pacific time) only four servers were still down and our own server seemed stable and reasonably full of people for a Tuesday night.
Otherwise there was the usual patch night follies. All my Addons were disabled and such. You really find out how much you use them when they are all gone.
Still, things looked good. This is Blizzard’s first shot in it’s Lich King arsenal. Come November I think we’ll find that report’s of WoW’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.
$500 for a WotLK Beta Key? July 31, 2008
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: Beta Keys, eBay, Wrath of the Lich King
9 comments
My wife, walking by my office door, casually asked, “You’re not going to pay $500 to play this Lich King thing, are you?”
As I was expecting something more along the lines of “are you coming to bed?” “is the house locked up?” or “don’t forget to set the dishwasher,” I was a bit taken aback.
As usual, several separate thoughts rushed for my mouth and got jammed in together like the Three Stooges in a door way, leaving me muttering, “Who? What?” (Which sounds like “hooowhaa?” when I am in that state.)
She had already passed by and settled down in front of her computer. I walked over and she showed me an article on Yahoo! about Warcraft testers paying big bucks for access.
Yikes! People paying for beta access? Paying to test somebody else’s software?
Okay, it boggles my mind, but I get paid to test software, not the other way around.
But sure enough, we went to eBay and searched on “lich king beta” and found more than a few auctions up selling beta keys.
I have to wonder what the Blizzard stance is on that?
That and how many of those codes for sale are just scams? I mean, PayPal is good on giving you a refund if you do not get something tangible from an auction, like LEGO minifigures (don’t ask), but if all you are buying is an n-digit code number, how do you get your money back if it did not work? PayPal is NOT good at refunds when it comes to intangibles. They used to explicitly exclude such things from their refund policy, and may still, I’m just too lazy to check.
So, in answer to my wife, I said that if I had a beta key, I would happily sell it for $500 and just wait for the expansion to ship.
I went back to my office while she headed down the hallway. Arriving at our bedroom, she called out to me yet again.
The cat had just thrown up on the bed.
Reality was back to normal at our house.
Blizzard Web Site Marketing Cookie Cutter July 11, 2008
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, Diablo III, entertainment, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Sony Online Entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: StarCraft II, Wrath of the Lich King
5 comments
I have heard more than a few people credit Blizzard’s marketing as a key to the success of World of Warcraft.
Often it is compared against SOE’s marketing, usually in a “Goofus and Gallant” fashion in an attempt to explain how EverQuest II is a better game, yet it is WoW that has millions of subscribers.
With the announcement of Diablo III, Blizzard now has three “new” products in play (but not a release date among them), giving us a chance to see side by side comparisons of Blizzard’s marketing acumen in the web sphere. (but not the WebSphere.) How does Blizzard position and explain these three products?
I started off looking at the Diablo III page. This page has sections for Classes, Bestiary, Environments, Lore and Dungeons. Each section features an entry or two, but will no doubt be filled out further as time goes on.
Then I went to the page for the World of WarCraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. This page features sections on the new Class (the Death Knight), Bestiary, Environments, Story (lore), Factions (more lore), and Dungeons. These sections have a few entries each, including interviews with members of the development team.
Finally I went to the StarCraft II page and saw something similar. Not exactly the same, there was only Units & Building and Game Universe sections, but those equate out, in my mind at least, to Classes, Bestiary, Lore, and Environments.
While I commend the clarity of all three of these sites in delivering the sometimes scant information about the games in question, I have to wonder if there is a template at Blizzard for unreleased title web site design. A checklist with the following required items:
- Game Logo
- Iconic Game Artwork
- Features page
- Screenshots page
- Artwork page
- Downloads page
- Movies page
- FAQ page
- Community/Forum page
- Blizzard Logo in game theme color
Thus you end up with three web sites for three different games that feel very much alike.
And what is my point? Aside from the fact that Tobold could have probably put together a realistic mock-up of a Blizzard web site for The Freezing Jihad, I don’t really have a point to make. It is more of an observation about how a leading game company like Blizzard with a vaunted marketing department ends up keeping things simple and predictable.
Nothing here is a mystery. Sites devoted to unreleased games have most, if not all of the same elements. But not many of them are laid out with the style and informational simplicity of the Blizzard sites. Looks good, delivers the information.
I can think of game sites that looked good but made finding information difficult. Gods & Heroes, Age of Conan, and most EverQuest/EverQuest II expansions have fallen into that category.
And there are sites that get the information out there, but are not much to look at. I hope that EA-Mythic (or, soon to be just Mythic again soon) spent their time putting style into their game, because they didn’t waste many cycles doing so to their web site.
Does anybody else follow Blizzard’s pattern of simplicity and style?
