BlizzCon – Warlords of Draenor Features Announced!

BlizzCon is upon us and Blizzard had lots of things to talk about at the opening ceremonies.

They talked about Hearthstone and actually kind of piqued my interested in it.  I like that it will be on the iPad or iPhone.  I am not sure I need another game on my desktop.  Michael Morheim himself stood up and gave the big Diablo III auction house mea culpa.  As was mentioned before, the auction house is coming out and the game itemization is being redone.  That got a lot of cheers.  There was talk about the Blizzard MOBA, called Heroes of the Storm this week.

And then there was the big announcement, the next World of Warcraft expansion: Warlords of Draenor.

The New Expansion

The lore bit is that Garrosh Hellscream is going to escape from prison and travel back 35 game years in the past and through the portal to Draenor before it was wrecked.

And, of course, we have to go stop him.

Undecided if the time travel thing is rad or weird, but fact is that this is expansion #3 with an "orcs are warmongering jerks" theme.

— Jessica Cook (@Liores) November 8, 2013

Heh, yeah.  Orcs are like that I guess.

The basics are:

• 10 new levels – Level cap will be 100
• Everybody will get one insta-level 90 option with the expansion
• 7 new zones
• Garrisons – a sort of housing
• 7 new dungeons, and 2 new raids at launch
• Character model updates for original races
• Inventory improvements
• A new open world PvP zone and a few updates and changes

I took some screen shots of the live stream and, thanks to 720p quality, they are not bad.  I have those plus the details I gleaned after the cut.

Quote of the Day – Social Gaming in Hindsight

A lot of people now equate ‘game on Facebook’ to ‘spammy piece of shit,’ which I don’t think is an unfair or inaccurate estimation of the situation

Scott Jon Siegel, quoted at Gamasutra on social gaming

Gamasutra is moving into one of the things they do really well, which is looking at how things unfolded in some aspect of the gaming industry in hindsight by pulling in key players and getting them to talk about their experiences.

The topic of the moment is social gaming… which pretty much means games on Facebook… and articles like the one above are starting to show up to examine the phenomena.

Of course, it is tough to pick just one quote out of that article.  Gems abound, such as:

any Facebook game he tries will be poorly designed, lack invention, try to trick him into spending money and spamming friends, and start emailing him regularly without permission

And the especially damming:

You had a huge population of product managers, game designers, and developers making games that they themselves didn’t like

You hear a lot of “game studios are businesses” and “they have to make money” when anybody complains about monetization in games.  Those sentiments are true enough, if not exactly a defense against any particularly odious money making scheme.   But when your studio becomes all about the money and cashing in and being the next Zynga, well, something is wrong.

And a lot of the blame in the article goes on Zynga, both for their questionable business practices as well as for their huge initial success attracting copycats and wooing Facebook to tie themselves to the Zynga model.  In the end, so-called social gaming went from a giant cash cow, to a more modest one that now requires some originality to stand out.  You can still make money.  Look at Candy Crush Saga.

An interesting read, and one I am sure some people will take a great deal of satisfaction in.  “I told you so!” should spring to mind for some.

Additional fodder: These two videos about Cow Clicker and Age of Empires Online.

Extra Credit Question: Lord British was telling people they would be stupid not to make an MMO when World of Warcraft was the big, big thing.  He then jumped on the social gaming bandwagon and even attempted to hitch his star to Zynga at one point.  Now he has a crowd-funded project.  What does that say about crowd-funding?