Where's a Demon Hunter When you Need One?

Looks like WoW's latest expac, Legion, will drop at the end of August.

That's a very very long time for "not much" in the context of new content for Azeroth, but we'll see how that pans out. In terms of context, they're going back to one of their favorite baddies --Gul'dan and the Burning Legion-- so in some respects it'll be a blast from the past.

But this is very much a WoW-at-a-crossroads release. Blizzard is no longer releasing sub numbers, so there won't be that metric to scale against, but they absolutely need a healthy WoW to keep other projects afloat. WoW's profits allow Blizzard the luxury of taking their time on projects to get them "just right" (the soon to be released Overwatch) or to kill a project when it simply isn't working out (Titan). Without those profits, it is likely that (for example) Heroes of the Storm would have ever seen the light of day, as it required a completely different mindset from Blizzard's development team.

Notice I didn't include Activision in this listing. Activision, well, likely has other plans for its Blizzard sibling, and those probably include maximum profit for minimum work. If Legion stalls out early like Warlords did, then that might be the last major expac for WoW; Activision will demand more Heroes of the Storm and less WoW from the Blizzard development team.

Here's to hoping that the MMO standard bearer doesn't fall victim to the bean counters and get put off to a steady state level of support.

A Server's Last Minutes

The Vanilla WoW server Nostralius, a "private" WoW server that existed in a somewhat illegal manner outside of the WoW-verse, had to shut down the other day after a cease-and-desist letter came from Blizzard's lawyers.

Someone had managed to capture the final few minutes of Nostralius (Horde-side) and posted the video on YouTube:

Blizzard may not be under any obligation to provide any Vanilla (or BC or Wrath) servers for those fans, but there certainly is a demand for them.

And now for some Lighter Fare

After the emotional rollercoaster that was the Overwatch short film Alive, I figured you'd want something a bit happier and lighter in tone.

Sure, I could have gone completely off the rails and posted about the NCAA Men's Basketball National Title Game, but not everybody is a college basketball junkie like I am.

But I really like Sneaky Zebra's YouTube videos of cosplayers at Cons around the world, so I thought I'd give them a signal boost for their latest video, from WonderCon 2016:

And, for those more interested in MMO cosplay, their BlizzCon 2015 music video:

Sneaky Zebra also has a Patreon Page, so you can support their work.

No, this isn't Frampton Comes Alive

Blizzard released another short film for Overwatch, and this one hits you right in the feels.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

And before anyone asks, no, I can't play shooters. But I wish this was a third person angle game.

I Guess Blizzard Wasn't Channeling Sir Mix-a-lot After All

Today's graphical correction has been brought to you by Overwatch.

Seems that Tracer, the Brit with the cockney accent who can teleport around the battlefield, has a very, um, un-Tracerlike victory pose:

From The Mary Sue.

Maybe Tracer would pose like that --in private-- but this pretty much goes against everything we have, both in-game and out-of-game, about Tracer so far.

Some fans voiced their concerns about Tracer's pose, and the Blizzard devs agreed and removed the pose from the game.

Amazingly enough, the commentary has remained (relatively) civil on the Blizzard Beta sites, although I can imagine that it won't last.


EtA: Well, that escalated quickly.

Paging Neil deGrasse Tyson...

...white courtesy phone, please.

Sorry, but I just had to add this.

Okay, not really, but typically during an MMO's nighttime I don't often look up. I'm more used to the focusing on the baddies on the ground, and besides, the sky at night in MMOs changes depending on what zone you're in.*

Some MMOs don't even bother changing the sky based on the time of day --I'm looking at you, SWTOR-- because the background scenery is only important enough for the imagery it presents to you as part of the story.

Lord of the Rings Online, on the other hand, is a bit different.

For starters, some baddies only come out at night, such as trolls, and any quest that involves getting rid of the trolls that roam the countryside in, say, the Trollshaws** close to Rivendell, means that you have to wait until the sun goes down before you can go troll hunting.

This is where LOTRO's sped up game time comes in handy, so you don't have to wait for the night time on whatever time the server is set for to actually go troll hunting. If you play only from 2 - 4 PM at your local time in a game that keeps a true 24 hour game clock (WoW, for instance), you'd never actually see the night sky unless you played on a server on another continent. LOTRO's in-game clock is so fast that an in-game "day" is slightly over 3 hours of real time.

Well, this is nice and all, but on one of those times when I was travelling through Evendim (swimming across Lake Nenuial because, you know, a F2P player doesn't have access to things such as boats that make such travel easier), I happened to look up at the night sky above me.

Ithil (aka "The Moon") is off screen above and slightly to the left.

I'm by no means an amateur astronomer, as what qualifies as a telescope in our house is an old Stevens 3" reflector that I received as a Christmas present back circa 1981***, but I know enough about the night sky that I picked out this immediately:

Apparently my toon has good eyes, as I can only see about 7 or so in real life.

The Pleiades. Right next to the tower at Tyl Ruinen.

Now, when Tolkien wrote the stories about Middle-earth, he grounded the tales by referencing real world items and putting his own spin on them. The Moon became "Ithil" in Sindarin (one of the Elvish languages), "elephant" became "oliphaunt", etc. The Pleiades became Remmirath (in Sindarin), or the Netted Stars.

I realize that MMO skies aren't going to be astronomically perfect --the developers have way too many other items to worry about to be concerned about getting the night sky in Northwest Middle-earth in the Autumn completely accurate****, but I still found it surprising that the devs took the time to get The Pleiades right.

I might have to go back and see if I can find Orion in the sky.





*Think of how cloudy with an eerie glow Icecrown Glacier is in Northrend, and you get the idea.

**I know, I know. Silly name. But Tolkien wrote it that way and put it on his maps.

***I still occasionally drool over a Celestron, Meade, or Orion telescope catalog, wishing I had the money and time to do some stargazing on a regular basis. I even considered trying to build my own telescope, but I realized after crunching some numbers that I'd be better off simply buying my own telescope than trying to make my own. And I think my wife would be very upset if I took years to finish another one of my "projects" around the house.

****Tolkien does reference Remmirath and Menelvagor (Orion) in Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.


EtA: I just had to add the Airplane scene after the fact.

The Doom that Came to Nexus

It's only natural that I, having come lately to Wildstar, am the last person on the planet to find out about its impending doom.

I'd just run smack into the attunement wall which requires you to run instances to progress further in the story, so I was wondering what to do about Wildstar when Syl posted this that referenced layoffs at Carbine.

Off on an article chase I went. Which lead me to this article from Polygon.

Which is ironic, to say the least, because I think that in the end Wildstar got more right than not.

I know that when I initially checked out Wildstar I wasn't so sure about the sexy female designs/armor as well as the heavy dose of Texas in the attitude of the game, but I eventually came around.* The story sputtered at first, but eventually got going around L20 or so. It's unfortunate, however, that a significant part of the storyline doesn't end when attunement begins.

I don't mind raiding being behind an attunement wall, because that's part of Vanilla and BC that I wish was still around to an extent. But there's a caveat there: having a decent portion of the storyline behind that attunement wall leaves a lot of players hanging. SWTOR fixed that problem by two methods: a class storyline that ended in a solo mode, and an overarching storyline (in the expacs and KotFE) that had a solo mode, even for the group content. WoW fixed the problem by leaving as much of the story as possible outside of the raid content itself.**

While I do realize that Carbine's focus was old school hardcore raiding, I do think that the story and game would have been a big hit as a standalone game. Or as an MMO that embraced a newer design for endgame, aka not falling into the MMO trap of "the game begins at endgame".

There will always be one nagging thing at the back of my head regarding Wildstar: why didn't the Dominion simply use all of its available resources across many worlds to simply crush the Exiles? It's a bit different when you're trying to play whack-a-mole across a galaxy, but on one planet? It should have been clobbering time.





*Or got used to ignoring it. Your choice.

**It also create LFR, which has been either a boon or a bust depending on who you talk to.