About The Warcraft Movie – It’s Coming Eventually

 wow news  Comments Off on About The Warcraft Movie – It’s Coming Eventually
Dec 012013
 

One thing to note is that it’s the Warcraft movie, and not the World of Warcraft movie. Currently the release date seems to be for March ’16, but it’s already slid back at least once, so don’t count on that being the real date. The story will be about the first contact between Orcs and Humans. While the Orcs were the aggressors, invading the Human lands, they were also under demonic influence. Durotan and Lothar are the protagonists and it’s looking like there will be no read “bad guy,” other than the side opposite those of us who lean towards the other faction. Gamefront has a movie primer where this is discussed. Regarding the Orcs…

The movie may very well open with a scene from Durotan’s childhood — a scene in which he and his friend, Orgrim Doomhammer, are assaulted by an ogre while racing each other through a forest. The two are saved thanks to the intervention of a draenei hunting party, establishing Durotan’s sympathy for the race of people that the orcish horde would one day wipe off the face of the planet.

And the Humans…

How can Blizzard best introduce Anduin Lothar, a man who would go on to become regarded as one of the greatest warriors of all time? Perhaps by depicting the childhood incident in which he demonstrates martial prowess against trolls while on an adventure with his friends Prince Llane Wrynn and Medivh, thereby establishing three key characters in one scene. Wrynn will go on to become King during the First War, while the sorcerer Medivh will be the catalyst for this war.

Of course, this is all speculation, but it sounds like fun. Here’s the rest: Warcraft Movie Lore Primer They have a director, one Duncan Jones, who did Moon and Source code, both which I thought were pretty good. Hopefully he can do good things with this movie. More here: Duncan Jones Chooses Warcraft Over James Bond Writer Ian Fleming ScreenRant ran a piece a few months ago on some of the plans for the movie.

What’s clear at this point is that Jones isn’t going to make a dumbed-down blockbuster that’s totally friendly to mainstream audiences. He’s going big, here, and while that’s a huge risk with a general public that doesn’t frequently turn out for fantasy fare (Ringsand Harry Potter aside, among a few other exceptions), the payoff could be equally great. Contemporary fantasy movies rarely receive their due diligence while video game movies are typically seen as a joke, but it sounds like Jones intends on making the best film possible in both traditions, which is nothing if not exciting. Here’s the rest: Warcraft Movie Plot Details

More details were released at Blizon, though most of it is still under wraps.

… the film will be an “origin story,” focusing on the “first contact” between humans and Orcs. Iconic characters Anduin Lothar and Durotan from the original real-time strategy games will play major roles.

Jones stated that originally, the Warcraft film’s script was human and Alliance-centric. The team felt, however, that that wouldn’t have done justice to Warcraft’s other half: the Orcs and the Horde. “It’s about both sides,” said Jones, who wants the movie’s audience to be as sympathetic for the Orc heroes as the Human ones. “It’s going to be red and blue.” In other words, the Warcraft film will be about “being a hero no matter what side you’re on.”

Metzen remarked that this decision was made so that all Warcraft players can experience in the film the same balance between factions they enjoy in the games. “You have to be as empathetic for Orc heroes and their situation and why they’re doing what they’re doing as you are about anyone,” stated Jones. Pardo added: “the red side is characters too.” Durotan will represent the uncorrupted Orc nobility.

“To tell a story where you’re really, honestly telling it from both sides—especially a war film—is unusual,” Jones added. “The fact that we’re able to get an opportunity to do that is, on a story level, breaking a few barriers. I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of films with this structure.” More from GMA’s post: Warcraft movie reveals story, iconic characters, locales

IMDB.com has a page up for the movie, so far all of the cast members are “rumored.” Looks like Duncan joins, above, will also be a writer along with one Charles Leavitt. WoWwiki’s page also lists some of the crew and some background of the whole movie project. Colin Farrel is rumored to be playing one of the leads in the Warcraft Movie, but he has not confirmed this or released any details. He has admitted to reading the script, which he thought was awesome. More here.

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On the Future of the World of Warcraft

 Blizzard, wow news  Comments Off on On the Future of the World of Warcraft
Nov 112013
 

IGN interviewed Blizzard co-founder and CEO Mike Morhaime about the future of WoW and the various other Blizzard franchises that we’re so fond of. Here are a few selected comments:

On creating new content and keeping the game accessible to new players, or returning players: “… I think maybe an unintended consequence of adding all of this content is that when you layer in complexity and add new things, the people who aren’t keeping up with all of that feel like they’re getting further and further behind.””

It can certainly be daunting for a new player. You step into this huge world with its tons of content and it’s easy to get lost. It’s nice to see that these things are appreciated. In WoW 6 there will be new quest tweaks which should make it easier to know where to go and what to do next. I’ve always appreciated having an older player help out when I started a new game, but it’s kinda hard to code tha into the system. 🙂

This Gnome's #1 Priority? More Gear!Setting priorities: “If I had to prioritize, it’s our active players at number one, our returning players at number two, and then probably third is players who, after nine years, haven’t tried it yet…”

You have to get the new blood in and then you have to figure out how to make them stick. Ditto the returning players. And then you have to keep your base or you’re just churning, going nowhere. Repeat customers are gold.

Going “Free to Play?” “.. I think the focus should be on accessibility, providing a free onramp to the game. But if you really want to play WoW for any length of time, I think we’ll stick with subscriptions.”

And the subs guarantee a reliable cash flow to pay for the new content. I’m fine with that.

How about those subscriptions? ” It’s pretty normal to see a spike with the launch of a new expansion. When there’s a period with not a lot of new content, we see that drop.”

Makes perfect sense. Anyone with a website will see a big bump in interest at an expansion launch and a decline preceeding it. Most of the Mists of Pandaria content has been released, so I expect things will slow for awhile until Warlords of Draenor gets close.

Heroes of the Storm? “We think that there’s enough room in the genre that everything doesn’t have to be exactly the same as everything else…”

The game will be free to play, but some heroes, skins, etc might well be sold. If Bliz does this right then I think they will carve out another nice little niche in the gaming market. There’s certainly enough love for the various characters.

Hearthstone is going Mobile, will WoW? “It’s something we talk about,” he admitted. “There’s probably an opportunity to have some type of connection to the world from mobile devices. I don’t think we’ve figured out exactly what that should look like. I don’t think consoles are necessarily our best opportunity for World of Warcraft. In terms of gameplay, our focus is going to stay on the PC, and then we’ll continue looking at ways you might be able to interact with the world from other devices.”

I just can’t see WoW going mobile, it’s just too complicated. Imagine doing a raid on a tablet with a wifi connection?

Well, maybe they’ll figure it out. It’s probably inevitable, in some form. And Blizzard has thought about it.

Here’s the whole interview

Warlord of Draenor Official Trailer

Sep 102013
 

This is a video released by the World of Warcraft that covers the main features of patch 5.4: The Timeless Isle, Siege of Orgrimmar, the Proving Grounds, and more.  Check out Blizzard’s page for the patch notes which detail most of the changes. (I’m sure there are a few undocumented changes, though they’re probably small.)

Enjoy:


And then you should make sure you’re leveled, in order to get at all this content.

The Hunter 5.4 Changes, Good or Bad?

 Classes, Hunters, Patch Notes  Comments Off on The Hunter 5.4 Changes, Good or Bad?
Sep 022013
 

As with all the classes, the Hunter 5.4 changes are numerous. Some are pretty big (Readiness,) some are buffs or nerfs, and a few are just “quality of life” type stuff. So read on for the details.

Nate that tool tips (hover over the link) show the 5.4 patch info. (For all the official 5.4 patch stuff go here.) To get to level 90 ASAP and kick Hellscream out of Orgrimmar, go here.

General

  • New! Counter Shot is now a baseline interrupt ability learned by all Hunters at level 22. This makes up, somewhat, for Silencing Shot being removed from the talent trees and given to Marksmanship as an ability.
  • Dead! Readiness has been removed. Given the massive burst that people were using it for, maybe it needed to be removed. Various other abilities have been buffed to make up for some of the change. It’s probably a great change for game balance, but will force you to work a bit harder.
  • Arcane Shot now deals 125% ranged weapon damage (up from 100%) and had its focus cost increased by 50%. So it now hits harder and you’ll be tossing off fewer than before. You’ll get a harder hitting strike.
  • Deterrence now has a 3-minute cooldown (up from 2 minutes) but has 2 charges. This makes it more flexible than before. Need to use it and then again in 30 seconds? Now you can.
  • Disengage now has a cooldown of 20 seconds (down from 25 seconds). This is a nice change.
  • Explosive Trap had its overall damage decreased by 30%. Proportionately, more damage has been removed from the initial damage than the periodic effect. The glyph is unchanged and causes it to do knockback, which may be more useful anyway.
  • Hunter’s Mark now has a duration of 20 seconds while in PvP combat (down from 30 seconds.) No change for PvE and PvP doesn’t need a 30 second mark anyway.

Pets:

  • Revive Pet no longer requires the Hunter to have line-of-sight to their pet. This is a nice “style of life” change.
  • Stampede damage dealt by pets when the ability is used outside of an Arena or Battleground is no longer reduced by 75% (The tooltip is wrong.) It now does full damage anywhere else, such as PvE and World PvP.
  • The following Hunter pet abilities no longer cost Focus to use: Dash, Dive, and Charge.  This gives you more incentive to go ahead and use them at the start of a fight.

Beast Mastery

  • Beast Cleave‘s range has been increased to 10 yards (up from 8 yards.)  Great for burning down larger groups.
  • Kill Command damage has been increased by 34%. Another useful buff.

Marksman

  • Aimed Shot now deals 450% ranged weapon damage (up from 350%.) Ouch. Combined with your Careful Aim you will be doing major damage with your openers.
  • Binding Shot is no longer a Marksman Hunter ability and is once again a talent. Silencing Shot takes it’s place.

Survival

Talents

  • A Murder of Crows now deals 40% more damage. This makes it very competitive with the rest of the tier and might make it the “go to” talent (for long fights) of the tier.
  • Aspect of the Iron Hawk now reduces all damage taken by 10%, down from 15%. 5% more damage won’t kill you (maybe,) but it will hurt a bit. Note that Spirt Bond was buffed.
  • Spirit Bond now regenerates 3% of total health every 2 seconds while the Hunter’s pet is active (up from 2%).
  • Glaive Toss no longer initiates auto-attack. (If you want it to start your auto-attack then stick it into a macro with /startattack and you get the old effect.)
    • #showtooltip Glaive Toss
    • /startattack
    • /cast Glaive Toss
  • Lynx Rush‘s damage has been increased by 30%. Sweet. With the boost to Murder of Crows this tier has become more interesting.
  • Narrow Escape‘s root effect is now a nature spell (was a physical spell.) This will make it easier to dispel.
  • Silencing Shot is no longer a talent and is now an ability that replaces Counter Shot for Marksman Hunters. Other Hunters still have that Counter Shot for interrupts.
    • Binding Shot is no longer a Marksman Hunter ability and is once again a (level 30) talent.
  • Wyvern Sting now has a range of 40 yards (up from 35 yards).

Glyphs

New Major Glyphs

  • Glyph of the Lean Pack: Reduces the range of Aspect of the Pack to 7 yards. Are there some of you that like smaller packs?
  • Glyph of Enduring Deceit: Camouflage also reduces spell damage taken by 10%. I can see how this will have some use here and there. All damage reduction effects are nice (unless they’re on the other guy, of course.)

Major Glyphs

  • Glyph of Mend Pet now has a 100% chance of cleansing 1 Curse, Disease, Magic or Poison effect from the Hunter’s pet on each tick (up from 50% chance.) This can help pet survival in certain situations.
  • Glyph of Mending now speeds up the periodic effect of Mend Pet to restore health to the pet every 1 second doubling the total amount healed over 10 seconds. Very nice change, a big boost for your pet.
  • Glyph of No Escape now increases the ranged critical strike chance against targets affected by the Hunter’s Freezing Trap by 100% (up from 20% chance.) Ouch. This may become a required buff depending on how often you use Freezing trap.

There are no new minor glyphs

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New Guild Finder Tool in 4.1

 Patch Notes  Comments Off on New Guild Finder Tool in 4.1
Apr 222011
 

This looks like a very cool idea. From the devs:

In patch 4.1 we’ll be introducing the Guild Finder, a new system designed to enable easier and faster guild recruitment. Guild leaders and players who are looking for a guild to call home will use the Guild Finder to meet one another and begin communications that can lead to a prosperous membership.

The Guild Finder is intended to act as an in-game bulletin board for guilds that are actively recruiting. Previously in World of Warcraft, your options were limited. You would have to publicly post on your realm forum message board, or speak to other players directly via private messages or the chat channels. That can be a time consuming process. Guild Finder will allow your “looking for new members” message to work 24 hours a day, accessible to all of the characters in your faction, from anywhere in the game.

Click here for the rest

This will reduce trade chat spam to some extent, depending on how widely known it becomes and if people decide that it’s a pretty cool tool. I think it looks great and will be a big help to getting people into the right guilds.

I didn’t see anything on that page about creating guilds, but that’s easy enough. Offer 10 or 20g to anyone who signs, become official, then fill out your info in the widget.

Will it do away with blind invites? I don’t think so, but I think they may become fewer.

Will it help or hurt smaller guilds? I have no idea, but I can think of arguments either way.

 Posted by at 10:33 am  Tagged with:
Oct 142010
 

Rumor has it (Ok, it’s only a rumor with me) that the quakes you’ve been seeing in-game are the result of Mage crits with their spells. Another mountain being destroyed or crater being created. Probably the main reason for the upcoming Cataclysm is the damage the spell casters are causing.

You thought your warrior was tough? Here, eat this 100k crit.

From MMO-CHampion:

We made many changes yesterday. A lot of these were bug fixes, and many bug fixes will affect damage one way or the other. So just because you don’t see a specific change referenced below, doesn’t mean it didn’t change.

With that said, here are the specific changes we made in reference to my previous post:

1) We buffed the base points and coefficients of many warrior dps abilities. We didn’t do as much to tanking abilities.

We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Ret abilities.

We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Feral cat abilities.

2) We lowered the base points and coefficients of many mage abilities, but lowered Fire more than the other two.

3) We nerfed Shadow Word: Death, but it is possible we didn’t nerf it enough. It should not be Shadow’s biggest spell.

4) We returned Searing Pain’s damage to its 3.3.5 levels.

5) We increased the benefit of resilience by 50% for players level 80 and below. The tooltips will probably not reflect this change.

We don’t have any other changes to announce at this time. I am reluctant to mention additional classes or specs that we are looking at currently for fear of instilling excitement or panic.

I heard rumors that long time players (one or two, anyway) were quitting over the 4.0 changes. I don’t get it. Those are the players, more than anyone, who should know what happens after patches.Yeah, I know that players leave for any numbers of reasons, including boredom, it just seems that giving a reason like “the patch broke my game!” is silly. But, what do I know?

Over 12 Million!

 wow news  Comments Off on Over 12 Million!
Oct 082010
 

Really it’s only abut 2 mill, because everyone has 6 accounts, right? 😉

Bliz announced yesterday that WoW has over 12 million subs. Regardless of how snarky one wants to get with the numbers of real players that’s what… 5x the #2 game?

Blizzard Entertainment said Thursday that the number of players now subscribed to “World of Warcraft” and its expansions has reached 12 million.

The multiplayer online game topped 11 million subscribers in October 2008.

The rest is on PC World (and a few zillion other places)

I want Aion’s graphics, animations, and some of the mechanics combined with WoW’s depth and cool features. Ah well, WoW’s what’s taking my game time. Guess that says it all.

edit: Just a last minute thought – people play Aion and the other games for a couple of weeks or months, they play WoW for years. I think that says it all.

 Posted by at 9:04 am
Nov 232009
 

The new tier 10 armor sets. This might be enough to make me pass on any gear rolls in the new 3.3 raids (assuming I could actually get into them in the first place.)

The t10 rogue set, noooooo…..

  • Paladins now wear dresses.
  • The Tauren and the Humans have merged (hunter armor) or maybe those are gloves?
  • Warriors, DKs, Priests, and ‘Locks are Ok, at least by comparison to the others.

So here they are, in all their, ahem, glory.

I think Bliz needs to look into Aion’s armor remodeling system.

The 3.2 Patch Notes, as Viewed by the Orc…

 Patch Notes  Comments Off on The 3.2 Patch Notes, as Viewed by the Orc…
Aug 042009
 

Say what?

A friend and I are putting together a new blog, Orc and Gnome, which we hope will have an interesting feel to it. Over there we’ve written up a couple of posts on the patch (see below.) I’m the Orc, he’s the Gnome.

The 3.2 patch is live (or will be in a couple of hours.)

Lots of little changes. While there’s a lot of stuff there it doesn’t look like you’re have to rebuild your talents, unless you’re a Death Knight. DKs received a small nerf (much needed and yes, I play one) and they’re had enough talents moved and tweaked that a respec is necessary.

Mar 182009
 

Dual Speccing is on its way. Want one spec for raiding and another for PvP? Now you can have them both, for the low low price of 1k gold (pocket change, right?) By the way, your glyph set can change with the talents. One set of glyphs for raiding, another for PvP.

As of today…

  • You have to be level 40+. Originally you had to be 80.
  • You can switch talents anywhere, no Lexicon of Power is necessary.
  • 1,000 gold to set it up, payable to your trainer. Need more gold to pay for that? Go here.
  • It looks like the system is set up that you can use it during any period of downtime and never in the middle of a fight, battle, or raid. So you can duel someone, but cannot change spec mid-fight.
  • Your actionbars also switch with the specs. Have one setup for your raid, another for PvP.

Switch your gear, too

There’s also a very cool change to the Equipment Manager. You can now save up sets of gear and switch them with a hot-key. Finish that raid, then switch specs and gear with a couple of clicks and you’re good for the arena.

For the near future there will only be the two specs, but GC says that Bliz is considering …

We will be launching the feature with just two specs, but depending on how we feel it works out, we might consider additional specs in the future.

Here’s the Interview with GhostCrawler that originally lays it all out.  There have been some changes since the interview, mentioned in the UI Page.

More UI Stuff

There’ve been some changes to the Looking for Group chat interface. Think anyone will use it now or will we all continue to spam the trade channel?

Like the BGs, but hate to have to travel to the big city? You will be able to queue for the Battlegrounds from anywhere, as long as you aren’t in a fight. Take a momentary break from farming crystallized whatevers and jump in line for your BG. When you’re done you’ll be popped back to where you were, to continue… your….. farming……zzzzzzz