The Future is.... Right After Tax Season?

Well...

Instead of a Blizzcon for making announcements, Blizzard is going to have a presentation on April 19th 2022 to cover the future of the Warcraft franchise. 

The post covered Classic Season of Mastery, TBC Classic, and Retail, so I presume that we'll see presentations on all three iterations of WoW.

This is my completely uninformed speculation as to what will be presented:

• Season of Mastery will conclude and there will be another WoW Classic reboot.
• TBC Classic will conclude by December 2022 and will be replaced by Wrath Classic in time for Christmas 2022.
  
• A TBC Classic reboot --akin to Season of Mastery-- will be presented.
• A new Retail expansion, set for release in Q1 2023, will be revealed.
• There will be a boosting service for Wrath Classic in the same vein as the Deluxe Edition for TBC Classic.

It's entirely feasible that Wrath Classic and Retail might switch positions in the timeline, but that's my feel at the moment. It's also possible that the Retail expac is released in Q3 2022 instead of Q4 2022 or Q1 2023, but given the silence out of Blizzard I kind of doubt it.

Despite the hue and cry over the Deluxe Edition for TBC Classic, enough people bought it that Blizz is definitely bringing it back for Wrath Classic. Yes, that means that bots will swarm all over Utgarde Keep, The Nexus, and Ajol-Nerub, because that's what they do.

I also expect Wrath Classic to follow in the same vein as TBC Classic and drop earlier in the launch event than expected, meaning that a mini-version of the Left Overs --featuring Death Knights-- is going to experience what we experienced. That being said, starting in the mid L50s makes the leveling experience much easier, so probably not as much of a mental meat grinder as what was experienced last Summer. 

(Was it really just last Summer? Yeah, yeah it was. Sheesh, my TBC progression raid experience didn't even last a full calendar year.)

So sit down, prop your feet up, and reach for that bowl of popcorn on April 19th. (Y'all can have that; I'll just have a salad, thank you.) Maybe we should create a Blizzard Bingo to see just how many Blizzard buzzwords are covered in the presentation.

The Maelstrom is Churning

Well, that was fast.

Blizzard Delays Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2

Well, another reason why BlizzCon was cancelled, I suppose. There's nothing to announce. Oh, and more news on the Blizzard management front:

Jen Oneal is Stepping Down from Blizzard 

It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. At this rate I could be a manager for Blizzard and have a longer shelf life.

This isn't a visualization of the state of
Blizzard. Honest.

Alas, BlizzCon...

Under the heading of "no surprise", Activision Blizzard announced the other day that there will be no BlizzCon in 2022.

The suits apparently need to spend time on how to reimagine BlizzCon and make it a more inclusive event, but aside from what the press release says I'd be mildly surprised if we ever see another BlizzCon again. Part of BlizzCon is a celebration of Blizzard's output, part of it is about Blizzard patting itself on the back, and part of it is for the fans of Blizzard's games. But when a massive misreading of the fanbase ("Do you not have phones?") or controversy (Google "Blitzchung and Hong Kong") are what is remembered from 2 of the last 3 BlizzCons, I find it hard to believe that Activision Blizzard is going to set themselves up for more (and well deserved) controversy with the ongoing lawsuits and corporate culture problems.

And to be fair, the company has a lot more problems than just "how do we make BlizzCon work?" If nothing else, the Activision side of things --or the corporate bean counters-- will likely try to kill off BlizzCon as "a waste of money". Because that's what they do.

Okay, now that the Town Hall is Over...

Blizzconline 2021 has come and gone, and for a change I paid attention to it.

Being able to watch the livestream for free does help (a lot).

In the past, you could pay to watch the livestream --or you could even pay to watch the activities on DirecTV (honest!)-- but even then, I'd only read the commentary from WoW Insider/Blizzard Watch or from my fellow bloggers. So when the "Do you not have phones?" comment blew up, I wasn't around to watch it live.

So yeah, I was a bit concerned about how this remote oriented con would work out, and whether the con would skew more toward one of Nintendo's quarterly updates, or something straddling an authentic in person con experience.

For the record, I was fine with either, as long as Blizz didn't a) shoot themselves in the foot with another "do you not have phones?" comment, b) shoot themselves in the foot with another "tough gamer moment" comment, or c) shoot themselves in the foot by trying to bow and scrape to the Chinese market.

Basically, don't shoot yourself in the foot.

Oh, I get it about China and the CCP: it's the 2000 lb. elephant that will trample anyone who gets in their way. When they can make one of the richest people in China, Jack Ma, vanish, you know they don't mess around. 

And by comparison, Blizzard --and most other gaming companies-- are the tuna out there for the orcas to feed on. So if you want China's market, you have to play by China's rules. The last BlizzCon, and the events leading up to it, made that abundantly clear. 

This time around, however, a global pandemic took center stage and China receded into the background.*

***

I've been working from home for so long that I've forgotten that it takes some time for people to get used to it. So when Blizz people started talking about how they had to get used to conferencing and collaborating remotely, their issues simply did not compute for me. It was only about a minute or two in when I realized that "jeez, they've never done remote work before!" 

Once you get used to it dealing with work from home becomes second nature, and if you've a boss that is flexible in your work habits then you can take time out to be the kids' taxi or make it to a game and then come home and get more work done.** But using collaborative tools like Teams or WebEx can take some time to get used to, and a graphic designer ready setup in the home is probably a whole other level of complexity that I never had to deal with.

These were the sorts of challenges that Blizz confronted, but it seems that they've gotten used to it.*** I suspect that the transition took longer than Blizz' management expected, particularly in terms of work output, but on the flip side they now have a workforce that isn't tied down to Southern California property values. I'm not exactly sure if they'll take advantage of that, but you never know.

***

Work from home foibles aside, I found the info sessions I watched informative but not overly so. I knew going in that the nature of the con meant that the extra time spent getting dynamic feedback from the crowd as well as the natural give and take wasn't going to be there, so that meant that the info sessions themselves were going to be shorter. That wasn't an indictment of the process, it's more of the way it is when you design a presentation: you have to give enough time for the crowd to react and respond before you can continue, and in a virtual environment you don't have that.

The part I was most interested in was BC Classic, and I wasn't disappointed. I felt that Holly spent extra time reminiscing about the old days in order to establish her bona fides, which given the nature of her coming from Everquest I felt it was necessary to pacify certain parts of the WoW community who still think of her as "the EQ person". Still, the info about items such as bosses, classes, and when you can roll a Draenei/Sindorei were spot on. Among those of us who were watching from the Myzrael-US Discord server, we were all in all very happy with the info provided. Could there have been more? Sure, but I suspect they're still aiming for a May release and don't want to get locked into that timeline if something shakes out in the beta.

The "You are not prepared!" was a wee bit dated, but as someone pointed out in our BWL run Saturday night, Illidan is NOT prepared for US.

***

Now, for an old time gamer like me, it was nice to see the repackaging of the old Blizz games, including The Lost Vikings. And the reworking of Diablo II. 

I realize this is the era of remastering games --see the upcoming Mass Effect Trilogy remaster as an example-- but if it is done well then it is a welcome benefit to gamers around the globe. The PC environment especially has changed so much over the years since ME or D2 were released that even without the graphical remaster the code would have likely required a rework to operate properly in the era of RTX 30 series video cards.**** The real kicker is whether the remaster is redone in such a way as to anger the fanbase (Warcraft 3), a reimagining of the game (Final Fantasy VII), or a a faithful but purely upgraded graphical version of the game (looks like D2 and ME for now). It does look like Blizz learned their lesson on Warcraft 3, but we'll see when the remastered D2 comes out.*****

One thing I do appreciate is that the Diablo IV development team is providing regular updates and details of the game's progress, so you know what's going on. Frequently this is too much of a black box --Schroedinger's Cat aside-- and you have no idea as to the details. But that the D4 team is spending the time to communicate with the fans as well as their thought process behind certain developments is a very very GOOD thing. I understand that some of the items the dev team are working on are going to be hidden --story, for one thing-- but understanding details of where they are in the process without throwing out dates is fantastic. The one thing I hate is when the suits announce a release date, because software development is not like building a widget, there will be major setbacks and reworkings that need to be addressed, and that's just your average Monday morning. Assigning a date and expecting a dev team to meet it is a potential disaster in the making, crunch notwithstanding.

***

So in the end, I enjoyed this Blizzconline. And yes, the RPG player in me enjoyed getting a chance to see Matt Mercer and the Critical Role crew in a Diablo esque game on Saturday. 

I am glad that the con went as well as it did, because I'd argue that a hybrid of the strictly in-person con and the online version is the way of the future. Hell, when Metallica came on my wife wandered over from watching the television and said "Hey, Metallica!" 

"Yeah," I replied. "They're playing for Blizzcon."

"Wait, this is live?"

"Well, at least it was done strictly for Blizzcon, but...."

"But that's so cool!!"

Now, if I can get her to watch the intro about how gamers were impacted by Blizz' games over the years, because that was an advertisement for not strictly Blizz' games, but gaming in general. That could have come straight outta GenCon and not missed a beat.

*But not totally gone from people's minds. Kind of like saying Beetlejuice three times and --voila!!-- Michael Keaton appears.

**Yes, I have been the kids' taxi for a long long time.

***I'm perfectly happy working from home. What I've discovered about working at the office is that I spend a lot of time socializing and a lot less time working, so when I need to get things done I don't go into the office. I know quite a few other people in my neck of the woods who think the same thing, and they're content to work from home too.

****I discovered that when I went to install LOTRO on my oldest's new laptop. It still looks for old DirectX 9.x, which you can't download anymore, and the failure to install was driving me crazy.

*****It just occurred to me that there's likely a certain amount of the Mass Effect fanbase that is going to buy the remastered version primarily because of the upgraded graphics in the sex scenes. Oh well.

Just One Request

Please please please.....

PLEASE!!!!

NO "DO YOU NOT HAVE PHONES?" MOMENTS.

 

'K?

 

So, When Does Drusera Show Up?

In addition to the announcement that Her Universe will be designing clothing for Overwatch in additionto WoW, Blizz introduced another Overwatch character, Ashe.

The animated short, Reunion, I found fascinating because while there's a lot of Blizz in the short, there's also quite a bit of Wildstar. I was not expecting to get that Wildstar vibe as much as I did, but the short was a Western / SF mashup, so maybe that's it.

Regardless, here's the short:

At the Intersection of WoW and Fangirls

Ashley Eckstein, known among Star Wars fans as the voice of Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker's apprentice*, is also known for the geek clothing company Her Universe. She saw a need for clothing for fangirls, and she built Her Universe into a globally recognizable brand. Although Hot Topic now owns Her Universe, Ashley retains creative control over the brand**, and she remains its most visible champion.

As such, when this dropped on the Her Universe FB page, I sat up and took notice:

From the Her Universe FB page.

This is going to happen sometime today (November 2nd, 2018), so this should prove to be a very interesting panel discussion at BlizzCon. I may not play WoW any more, but I really love this. (Besides, I'm banking on WoW Classic to pull me back in.)

If you want to skip anything about the panel and just go check out the WoW gear Ashley and Co. have designed, go to the Her Universe website.

Oh, and Happy BlizzCon, con-goers!

Sure, stick Saurfang next to the Devil.
Because Orcs, I suppose.

*Sorry, no spoilers here.

**I'd asked her FB page about that when the buyout was announced, and she said she explicitly wanted control if Hot Topic acquired the company. She was excited about the prospect of teaming up with Hot Topic over geeky stuff going forward.

Blizz Presents: A Short Data Structures Seminar

I'm coming a bit late to the story --okay, 11 days late-- but I read with great interest the work that Blizz is putting into WoW Classic.

Coming from an IT background, I particularly found the file table formats a good example of what Blizz will need to do to get WoW Classic working properly.

The way Blizz placed items into file tables has changed over the years, from a fixed length format like so:

Spell ID   Name   Effect One   Effect Two
01         AAA    Damage       Apply Aura
02         BBB    Damage       Nothing

to something more dynamic, like this:

Spell ID   Name
01         AAA
02         BBB


ID   Spell ID   Effect
01   01         Damage
02   01         Apply Aura
03   02         Damage


This removes artificial constraints put on the system by the data design, and allowed Blizz to be more dynamic and expansive in what individual items/spells/whatever could do. The kicker here is that Vanilla WoW used the old data structure while somewhere over the past decade plus WoW transformed into using the latter data structure.

Blizz believes they can keep the latter data structure in place and simply utilize the old data, but after they convert the old structure into the current one. From a personal perspective, I think it's the smartest way going forward, since it fixes artificial limitations and allows WoW Classic to utilize the current game engine but deliver the Vanilla experience. Additionally, Blizz won't have to build an entirely new team just to handle the old data structures and the old engine, but just have a subteam off of the main infrastructure groups that make sure that any changes don't break the "converted" environment of WoW Classic.

From an HR perspective, they keep the personnel costs down while they still remain committed to the additional work, and keep a stable interface in place for dev teams.

As anyone in IT can tell you, keeping the back end craziness down means more time spent actually developing the game. In my own experience, that last 1.5 years at the software shop was spent constantly fighting to get a stable development platform, which was constantly breaking when people would make a tweak here or there. When we had a stable platform, the programming teams could actually make significant progress, but frequently we had outages where people were breaking code without realizing that their "tweaks" were causing huge downstream ripples, and those ripples had to be constantly beaten into submission.*

Blizz is trying to minimize ripples in an ancient (by gaming standards) environment by utilizing a stable platform and just converting the data to something usable, but that conversion is the critical part. My first thought was you could build a Perl or Java script to convert the data into the format you need, but I'm sure that Blizz' example is one of the easiest parts of the data conversion process. My experience running QA on data set translation code for CAD/CAM tells me that the WoW Classic team will get a conversion done, but then need someone to sift through and manually check all. of. the. freaking. data.

Yes, by hand.

That is NOT going to be a fun task, but someone will have to do it. And I don't envy that person's task.

Still, I'm heartened by the work that Blizz' WoW Classic team has put into the game, especially since they're likely in major crunch time leading up to the next WoW expac.

One thing I do expect is that by the next BlizzCon, they'll likely have some in-game footage of how things are progressing with WoW Classic, and given Blizz' history, I expect them to remain silent on any release date until they get closer to something resembling an late stage Alpha. But it is happening, no doubt of that.




*Bioware has had major issues like that with the development of both Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda with the Frostbyte engine. Frostbyte wasn't built for what Bioware wanted to do with it, so they had to create their own interface with Frostbyte. The problem was that the Frostbyte team was constantly breaking the interface whenever they would make changes to the engine. Yeah, I've been there, Bioware. SO been there.

No Need for Coffee Today

This is what I get for focusing too much on work* during the big announcement yesterday:

Yep, that's right. Vanilla WoW is officially returning with officially sanctioned Blizzard servers.

Apparently this dropped during the Blizzcon keynote address, and for people like me who miss the pre-Cataclysm WoW, this was the announcement of the day. 

No details, which isn't a surprise, but the fact that there was an announcement** is a big thing. Blizz has finally committed to resurrecting the old Vanilla environment.

***

Aside from the announcement itself, the most interesting part was how some of the major internet outlets reported on the announcement. You can get a glimpse of that from the titles:

Ars Techinca: Blizzard finally relents to years of fan pressure with World of Warcraft Classic - Shock announcement comes at outset of annual Blizzcon event

PC Gamer: This is how Blizzard plans to finally bring back Vanilla WoW servers - We talk to Blizzard's vice president to learn why it took so long, and how it's happening

Polygon: World of Warcraft Classic is an official vanilla server - No longer need to make your own!

Kotaku: Blizzard Announces World of Warcraft Classic

To say that people didn't see this coming --and even Steven Messner of PC Gaming admitted it as much when he sat down beforehand to interview Blizz' J. Allen Brack-- is a bit of an understatement.

I know I didn't.

No more than a few weeks ago, I'd commented on Shintar's Priest with a Cause that I don't buy the explanation that Blizzard doesn't have the source code. There may be technical challenges, but any decent development house keeps their source code around for versioning purposes.

But now, things are looking up.

***

The cynic in me says "Blizz must be hurting for money to bring this back", but I'm not so sure. Bobby Kotick aside, I really do believe that the Blizz people want to do this sort of thing for the fans. If it makes them money, so much the better. But still, it must be cautioned that modern MMOs are not what we're getting with Vanilla WoW. Vanilla WoW is still very much a quirky translation of the pencil and paper RPG genre into a computer screen, with items such as ammo for ranged weapons and weapon proficiency leveling coming back. If you play Old School D&D and other Old School inspired games, that might not be an issue, but for people raised on the action MMO or newer pencil and paper RPGs this might be a bit of a shock. Kind of like switching from Dragon Age: Inquisition or Witcher 3 to Baldur's Gate.

But if you're like me, I'm down with this.***

Like Shintar said, I might have to start giving Blizzard some of my money again.

*In my defense that's what I'm supposed to do while I'm at work, but like the first and second rounds of the NCAA Basketball Tourney --Men's and Women's-- I typically keep an eye out for what's going on. For some reason I thought that the big item of the day was going to be the next WoW expac and I figured I could read about that later.

**As opposed to Titan, which was never officially announced.

***Other Old School MMOs, such as D&D Online or LOTRO, ought to be cheering this move by Blizzard. As more new fans are exposed to the original Vanilla WoW, they will likely be checking out other old MMOs.

A Lack of Something

I've caught up a bit on the news out of BlizzCon, and it seems that Blizz has made a couple of announcements:

• Legion, the new WoW expac, will drop in "Summer 2016". The placeholder is "on or before September 21, 2016".*
• Activision Blizzard will no longer release subscriber numbers as part of financial quarterly statements.**

The former isn't exactly a surprise to me. For all their talk about speeding up releases, Blizzard remains incapable of pushing the release cycle beyond the (roughly) 2 year mark. And this was even when Blizz decided to not wait until BlizzCon and release the name of the new expac at Gamescom. Blizz also stopped major content patches for Warlords significantly earlier than in prior expacs, with the unspoken promise of a quicker release cycle for the next expac.

As for the latter, I'm not surprised. At all.

WoW's subscriber numbers were stable from June 2015 (5.6 million) to September 2015 (5.5 million), but Blizzard's announcement of Legion came in August. Speculation ran rampant on various message boards that Blizz was going to release significantly earlier than they had in previous expacs --maybe even as soon as BlizzCon itself-- and I'm sure that kept people subscribed through the latest quarterly ending.

But with Legion's release sometime in Summer (people will hope for June, but will likely see an August or September release), you can expect subs to plummet.

The subscriber number problem has become an albatross for Activision Blizzard, so they are now attempting to jettison it entirely.*** The thing is, Activision Blizzard loved to trumpet their WoW subscriber numbers when it was a positive, so its absence will be interpreted by analysts as a potentially major problem facing the studio. The corporate finance people can talk all they want about better metrics for the health of the game, but they set the standard for years by talking about subscriber numbers, and you can't simply sweep that under the rug.

That said, a reduction in subscriber numbers is going to have an impact on development of the game. WoW has long been a cash cow for Blizzard, and a reduction in that cash flow means that they've got tighter financial constraints on future projects. 

***

What does this mean long term? 

Blizzard is likely to depend more on Overwatch, Hearthstone, and HotS to provide income where WoW is no longer able to. I believe it a very shrewd business decision that Activision Blizzard is opening it's own television/movie studio, and its first project is the wildly popular Skylanders property. Not WoW, not StarCraft, not Diablo, but Skylanders.

That's where the money is these days, and Activision Blizzard is chasing that money.****

Oh, and one more thing: without subscriber numbers, Blizzard is now free to experiment with F2P models in WoW. Sure, they've always said they'll never go F2P, but with the cash shop and the WoW Token they've currently sidled up right to that F2P line. If Bobby Kotick says "go F2P since I can't justify the staff for WoW", WoW will go F2P.

*There's a very interesting discussion on this over at Blizzard Watch as the Breakfast Topic.

**Word of this came out a few days before BlizzCon itself. Here's the eurogamer.net article on this.

***I'm deliberately saying Activision Blizzard versus Blizzard, because this is more a corporate business decision, not one made in the development house itself.

****Money is in mobile games too, and the purchase of King Digital is expected to bolster that area.

Meanwhile, back in Azeroth...

It's BlizzCon, which means that this got viewed and released into the wild:

The oldest Mini-Red was confused. "World of Warcraft?" she asked. "They really improved the CGI on their expac trailers."

"No," I replied. "It's for the movie."

"There's a movie?"

"Yeah. Been in development for a decade or so."

"Looks pretty good," the youngest mini-Red added.

"True, but the dialogue is a bit clunky."

(I decided not to point out the obvious Moses references to Thrall in the trailer. I presume a helluva lot more of those will be in the movie.)

***

Seeing a full trailer, I'm wondering whether this is one of those movies where the best parts are all in the trailers. (I'm thinking the same thing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens as well, so it's not just Warcraft.)

Why? Well, trailers have now been honed to an art form, making even bad movies look good.

Like, oh, this one:

But in terms of Warcraft, I'm really thinking of this:

In a pre-LOTR special effects environment, it's really a pretty good trailer. And the characters didn't sound that bad in their acting, either. But if you actually watch the Dungeons and Dragons movie, you realize pretty quickly how lousy it is: clunky dialogue, confusing plot, metagaming*, and bad acting.

Looking at the trailer for Warcraft, I honestly rolled my eyes at the Thrall parts. I know the story, but the Green Jesus criticism that is often lobbed in Thrall's direction is going to haunt this movie. And he's not even a main character.

For the sake of the MMO genre, I hope it doesn't suck, but I've a bad feeling that some of the worst parts of the Warcraft storyline are going to bite this movie in the ass.

***

Oh, and continuing the tradition of the Warcraft movie being upstaged by Star Wars, the Star Wars: The Force Awakens international trailer was released:

Yes, it has Japanese subtitles, but it shouldn't detract from the trailer experience.

All of the extra scenes not in the US trailer make the movie's secrecy all the more interesting.

Will it succeed? I think that's more on J.J. Abrams than anyone else.

***

While digging up the D&D Movie's trailer, I started punching in some old trailers from movies that I liked when I was a kid. These movies were much older than me, and I used to watch them on television when there were a lot of independent television stations and they would show old 50's and 60's era movies during the day.

Like, say, this one:

Yes, that's really Ernest Borgnine. And yes, they really butchered Viking society in this flick.


Or this one:

Yeah, that's Pat Boone.






*There's even a scene where one character accuses the other of being just low level. I mean, who actually wrote this script, anyway? Was it a riff on a D&D campaign?


EtA: Clarified when I was talking about the D&D movie trailer versus the movie itself.

Paging White Wolf.... Someone is taking your WoD moniker...

(I keep wondering when someone else is going to point out that White Wolf's World of Darkness has been using WoD since the Vampire: the Masquerade RPG was released back in 1991, but I guess it's just me.)

Seems that everybody else is jumping on the Warlords of Draenor commentary, so as usual I'm bringing up the rear.

Here are some thoughts about the announced WoW expansion:

• Blizzard is taking dead aim at EQ Next.
  
  Remember how EQ Next will be more of a sandbox with player housing?  Blizzard does, and the new Garrison ability is designed to counter that.  The idea is to give a player just enough of a taste of the sandbox that they won't be tempted by EQ Next's bigger sandbox environment.  Blizz isn't about to change their themepark MMO environment into a sandbox, so they decided that most players will only want a little bit of a sandbox instead.  Of course, this could backfire on Blizz to where enough players say "Hey, this sandbox is kind of fun, maybe I'll go try out EQ Next and see what it is like." But knowing Blizz' track record, I doubt it.
  
• The rest of Azeroth doesn't matter.
  
  If you didn't realize this when Cataclysm's revamped Azeroth left Outland, Northrend, and the BC starting zones out of whack (story wise), then they made it pretty plain with Warlords of Draenor.  They expect to give an account a free jump to L90 with a purchase of WoD, and "learning to play your class" means "going to the Proving Grounds".  This is the real intention of the Proving Grounds; to make all of the legacy software in WoW irrelevant.  Sure, you can level the old fashioned way, but Blizzard doesn't want you to.  The solution to fixing story problems caused by Cataclysm is to simply pretend that they don't exist; they want a new player to skip years of MMO development so you can get to the end game.
  
• "It's all about the endgame" is what WoW is about.
  
  That refrain about endgame is how WoW has kept its dominance over all other MMOs to this point.  Any other challenger to WoW's crown has been smacked down because of players who rush to the level cap and then complain that there's nothing to do.  While WoW has fallen victim to that complaint before (see: Cataclysm), Blizzard has kept WoW going with enough new endgame content to keep its core subscriber base satisfied.* Now, with WoD's "instant L90" and the Proving Grounds, Blizzard is basically saying that those people who claim "endgame is where the game begins" were right all along. A new player can buy all of the WoW stuff**, jump to L90, hang around in the Proving Grounds for a few hours, and take off for Draenor. No fuss, no muss.
  
  On the flip side of that, Blizzard is running the risk of eliminating one of their big edges over their competition:  their years of developing the world of Azeroth.  You can spend up to a year playing one toon and still not reach the level cap, but by eliminating that richness of the experience, Blizzard is reducing the entire WoW focus to ten levels and raiding.  A smart company can exploit that should there be delays once the level cap is reached.
  
• The devs didn't watch Star Trek.
  
  The City on the Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison ought to be required viewing for anyone who wants to make time travel the centerpiece of an MMO expansion.***  To stop someone from altering the timeline, you jump to a period just prior to their entrance into the timeline and stop them when they appear.  Allowing them to work their disruption and THEN show up to put the pieces back together just makes for messy storytelling and makes suspension of disbelief incredibly hard to pull off.
  
  The devs wanted to go to Draenor; I get that.  And I get that probably 70% of WoW players won't care because they just want to kill stuff and hang with their friends.  But surely they could come up with a better excuse to go to Draenor than this.  This just seems like they had "Heroes of the Storm" on the brain when they dreamed up "let's have them all go back to kill Gul'dan and company!"
  
• The devs DID read comics.
  
  This story smacks of comic book alternate Earths.  The difference here is that while the alternate Earth idea for comics came about because too many authors had written stories that simply couldn't be reconciled without this handwaving, WoW had much tighter control over the story and the direction of the game. They shouldn't have gotten themselves into this sort of trouble --in game-- where they needed to perform this time travel handwaving.
  
• And Doctor Who... Don't go there.
  
  Keep The Doctor --and The Master-- out of it.  I'm quite looking forward to The Day of the Doctor on November 23rd, and I don't want to have arguments claiming that The Doctor was the model for Azerothian time travel disrupting it.
  
  Besides, I'll sic a Weeping Angel after you if you suggest such a thing.
  
• The Old Gods are Behind This.
  
  I guarantee it.  We'll probably find out that the Infinite Dragonflight is behind this, with the Old Gods pulling their strings.  Why?  Because who else would hate both the current Azeroth and the Burning Legion?  Blizzard has shown via the Mists storyline that they're unwilling to deviate from the Legion, the Lich King, or the Old Gods as the big bad for the end of an expac, so this expac will be no different.
  
  The final boss?  A corrupted Nozdormu, who creates the Infinite Dragonflight from the Bronze Dragonflight.  Pure speculation, but there's two groups that have access to time travel, and this wraps everything up in a complete package.
  
• Trolls will show up somewhere.
  
  There hasn't been a WoW expac without them as an adversary, so why stop now?
  
• Blizzard continues to get a lot of mileage out of their graphics engine.
  
  New character models notwithstanding, from Vanilla through Mists the artists have been able to maximize the terrain to great effect.  If you look closely at the terrain, it's still the same old stuff that's out there in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, but just reworked to maximum effect.  I believe this will continue to be the case with WoD.
  
• Warlords of Draenor won't get a release date until EQ Next and Wildstar have one first.
  
  It's a game of one-upsmanship, and Blizzard has shown that they intend to wield their power as the 800 lb gorilla of the MMO market to maximum effect.  Wildstar's devs have said that they intend to go straight after WoW, so expect WoD to drop right before Wildstar does.  As much as I think this entire behavior is infantile, there's no denying that it works.

I guess I had more to get off my chest than I expected.  I know I've got some months --maybe even years, if I go and do what I usually do and start a new class from scratch-- before I make a decision on WoD, but I find myself stuck on the entire concept of the thing.  This expac has the feel of a Michael Bay movie, where it's all pretty, but there's nothing at it's heart that makes sense.

*Just a guess, but I suspect that 2-3 million of the subscriber base are what I'd call WoW's core players, those who'd play WoW until they turned off the lights.

**Not a cheap investment, by the way.  It's still somewhere over $100 if you will buy all of the expacs + Warlords of Draenor when it comes out, unless Blizz really cuts the price on all of the previous expacs to a minimal charge.

***Back to the Future I through III comes in a close second.  Oh, and while I don't like Harlan's behavior as a human being (go read his Wikipedia entry for an eyeful), there's no denying he wrote some classic SF.

Edit:  Fixed some punctuation and grammar errors.

Well, that didn't take long....

That's a wee bit of a screwup in advance of any announcement.

If the rumors are true and time travel --and Garrosh-- are at the center of the expac, I'm not so sure I'm on board.  I'm kind of blah about the whole idea of Garrosh again.

A Short pre-BlizzCon Post

Everyone in the WoW-verse seems to be yakking about Warlords of Draenor in the past week or two, focusing on the new WoW expac.  But this being a con for all things Blizz, what if they announce something else entirely?

Like, say, a WoW themed game* for Xbox One/PS4?  A PvP oriented game?

They already have practice with Diablo 3, so it's not too much of a jump to consider that they'd tap into the next-gen console market.

Again, something to consider as people are probably already lining up for the 11 AM PST opening ceremonies.



*Or Starcraft, for that matter.

And My City Was Gone

With the announcements that there will be no Blizzcon this year and that there will be a Battle.Net World Championships event to be held in Asia in 2012, it seems that Blizz is suffering from not enough personnel all around.

Okay, that's the face of it, but here's some other theories.

1. Focusing on Asia when an Asian themed WoW expac is released is a smart way to revive the WoW franchise.  Well, maybe.  Part of this depends on how the Asian population will feel seeing a culture that is an echo of their own in MoP.  If WoW sets a patronizing tone with the Pandaren culture, this whole thing could backfire and be a big release disaster.  The assumption that the pop culture references and snark found in WoW will play the same in Mists of Pandaria can be a very bad one.
2. Blizzard's focus is now on the Asian market.  Similar to #1, but in this case Blizz is going to develop and market with the Asian market in mind first.  Considering the worldwide appeal of their games, I'm not sure I quite believe this, but I do realize that the Chinese market will eventually dwarf all others.  Still, I'm sure that there are plenty of large overseas markets (hellllooo, Brazil) that don't like being passed over.  We don't know whether the Battle.Net Asian event is going to be located strictly in Asia or whether it is going to move to different cities each year.  Of course, it could be a one-off gimmick, too, but we'll have to wait and see.
3. Blizzard needs to realign staff to get their releases out the door.  Well, yeah.  They said so themselves in their post on the WoW website.  Still, for people who are wondering why they aren't hiring staff, consider this:  anyone who works in IT/software development will tell you that it takes at least six months before a new hire gets up to speed, and often that can stretch up to a year.  Contractors can fill in a pinch, but unless they are former employees even they will take some time integrating into your business environment.  Therefore, the best method of dealing with this situation is to peel personnel from other, lower priority projects and delay what you can.  Blizzcon, as the lowest priority among the staff, got the axe.
4. The three releases Blizz wants to work on are in significant trouble.  Although similar to point #3, this is more of a technical issue than a personnel one.  We haven't heard a peep out of Blizz since D3 was delayed, and as time goes on, this silence becomes more and more damning.  From being a week or two away from release to what seems an indefinite hold, the "tweaks" that D3 needed seem to be more major than realized.  If Blizz realigns staff (see #3 above), to deal with these major issues, this will have a ripple effect on the rest of the Blizz development projects.  In that case, Blizzcon as just the lowest priority item got chucked onto the woodpile.  Since Blizz keeps their development timeline so close to their vest, we won't know if there are other slippages in the release schedule at all until you wake up one day and say "hey, what happened to Heart of the Swarm?"
5. Activision/Blizzard is getting hit hard by SWTOR defections.  It's hard to tell right now given the lack of direct data out there, but judging by my personal experience I believe this is more a factor than some people would care to admit.  I never discuss guild material on the blog, so I'll only say that TOR has had an impact among the WoW players I know, and I'm sure it will have an impact with their quarterly subscription numbers.  If Blizz is feeling some pressure from TOR, then they may be shifting personnel around to accelerate development among all of their projects, not just the ones officially acknowledged. Like oh, say, Titan?
6. Activision/Blizzard is going to move development overseas.  I mean, really?  Come on, man.  You're going to read that into this move?  Get a grip.  If Activision/Blizzard decides to move development staff overseas, I'm sure there will be other signs than the movement of a con to Asia.
7. Activision/Blizzard is going to kill Blizzcon.  That's entirely possible.  The corporate world works in Byzantine fashion a lot of the time, but one truism often remains:  the money will go to the cheaper alternative.  If Activision, as the parent company, decides that Blizzard is flushing too much money down the drain by hosting a separate event when they could be better served integrating into PAX, that'll be the end of Blizzcon.  Given the history of some game companies to have less than stellar customer relations, it wouldn't shock me if this was merely the beginning of the end of Blizzcon.  That said, I'll believe it when I see it.  Of course, I said the same thing about Pandaren in the upcoming expansion, so maybe I ought to be careful what I wish for.

Overall, I expect that the next quarterly investor call from Activision/Blizzard to be very interesting, and will shed some light on the direction of WoW in the near future.