Tag Archives: Battle Royale

Blizzard Discovers Battle Royale with the WoW Plunderstorm Event

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There was a bit of speculation about the pirate flag entry on the World of Warcraft 2024 roadmap.  It had no details, just “10.2.6” which was assumed (correctly) to be the patch number.  But what it might actually mean… nobody outside of Blizzard knew… or if they did, they weren’t talking.

World of Warcraft retail 2024 roadmap

We started getting some hints and finally a date for it last week.  And, yesterday morning the patch update went live.  I did not land at 5:50am (that would be ten to six, or 10.2.6), the update took well into the afternoon Pacific time, but news of it’s arrival was all over the various sites by the time I was awake and settled into another full day of staring at screens.

And there it was, Plunderstorm, a WoW based battle royale game with pirates.

With the release of the 10.2.6 content update, players can get swept away in the Plunderstorm— a fun, new, limited-time, pirate-themed event of prodigious proportions lasting the next several weeks. Scour the map and try to be the last pirate standing while dashing across the Arathi Highlands to find abilities, upgrades, and loot to plunder just to survive!

You need to have a WoW subscription to play and you need to have the WoW retail client installed, as that is where it lives.

WoW retail contains WoW Plunderstorm

This is NOT yet another retail battleground.  Instead, it is a stand alone event that you have to roll up a fresh, pre-made character in order to participate.

  1. Select Plunderstorm from the World of Warcraft game menu to get into the action.
  2. Create a new, ready-to-play character—player characters are unique to this event. You don’t need previous knowledge of races and classes to chart your course for mayhem.
  3. Choose between Solo or—to play with your Battle.net friends—make a group from the Plunderstorm character screen and select Duo. If queued for a Duo without a partner, you’ll be automatically matched with one. You can also access chat, customize characters, and see the queue from the Character Select Screen.

On the one hand, cynical old me sees this as a cheap way to try and generate some interest using a game mode that is just one Lord British endorsement from being completely past relevance.  Is there some shooter that HASN’T tried to integrate this play mode yet?

Even Fortnite, the game that has made so much money for Epic, has been busy trying to find some new twist to keep its model fresh.  Plus, was this another Holly idea?  I mean, she did come from Daybreak, which for a brief moment was on top of the battle royale world with H1Z1… until is screwed it all up and became a footnote, irrelevant to the current meta of the genre.

On the other hand, who am I to say what is fun and what is not?  And yes, if it wasn’t cheap, it certainly was no more expensive than another battleground to add in Plunderstorm.  Why not throw something else against the wall.  It isn’t like Blizz has a lot of other things in its pipeline for retail between now and The War Within.  I am sure some will find it fun and, if it is popular enough then it seems likely that the unstated limits of the event’s duration will be extended.

And it offers prizes that you can take back to retail WoW and WoW Classic.

They even got Carbot Animations back in the fold with a launch day video.

So plunder away I guess.

Related:

PlanetSide Arena Delayed Until Summer for a Simultaneous PS4 Launch

The launch date for PlanetSide Arena keeps moving further away, and at an accelerating rate.

The game, aimed to be a combination of Battle Royale and classic shooter scenarios, was announced back in back in December with a January 29th launch target.  I mean, it was just PlanetSide 2 recycled into an arena game.  It isn’t as though Daybreak hadn’t already built an arena shooter in H1Z1 already… and H1Z1 was built off of PlanetSide 2.  Seemed like a reasonable target or a low bar, depending on how you looked at it.

Meet the Promised Battle Modes

Then, just days before the promised launch, Daybreak came out and said it wouldn’t go live until March 26th, though if you had pre-ordered on Steam… because of course there was a pre-order offer… you would be invited to the Founder’s Season on February 20th.

Then, five days before that Founder’s Season, Daybreak has announced that the whole thing is being pushed out until Summer.  At least that was the correct usage of the Friday afternoon press release.  But here I am on Monday morning dredging it all up again.

The ostensible reasons given were related to feedback received during the closed beta as well as a desire to launch the game on across both the PC and PlayStation 4 platforms simultaneously.  We’ll see if a cross-platform launch includes cross-platform play, something Sony says it wants but acts like it is keen to avoid.

Maybe the reasons behind the push for a summer date even true.  But there are some other factors in the wind here.

One might be the recent launch of EA’s free to play entry into the Battle Royale arena, Apex Legends.  The title launched at the beginning of the month on Windows, PlayStation 4, and XBox One and is reported to have had more than 25 million downloads and 2 million players going at it concurrently.  Launching into the teeth of that with a pay to play title might be a big ask.

And then there is the refunds for those who pre-ordered.  Per the announcement:

In light of our revised launch plan, we are refunding all Planetside Arena pre-orders.

My guess is that while Fortnite alone didn’t scare them off the selling the box, the emergence of Apex Legends might have.  I expect, at a minimum, that this will mean PlanetSide Arena will be moving to a free to play model while Daybreak watches the market and starts building up a cosmetics cash shop.  They’re going to need to work hard on that, because I’ve never thought PlanetSide 2 was a pretty game.

Meanwhile, the pessimist in me thinks that this might be their Infinite Cisis, Turbine’s attempt to get in on the MOBA market that was too little and too late and which pretty much broke the company. (We got some dirty laundry aired after that.)

Not that Daybreak is down to just two aging fantasy MMORPGs the way Turbine was at that point.  No, Daybreak has two aging fantasy MMORPGs, an aging superhero MMORPG, an aging MMOFPS, and that Battle Royale game, though that last seems to be part of NantWorks at this point.  Also unlike Turbine, they don’t have a big company like Warner backing them.

We’ll see when the next bit of news about this hits I suppose.