Tonight, on EndgameRadio Prime, Oizys and Zug dine upon the holiday left-overs and prepare a delicious feast of end-of-the-year-wrap-up, in our own special style. We’ll go over the past year and it’s adventures, as well as look ahead for the new year. In the endless sea of 2007-wrap ups, we assure you our wrap is the most delicious and interesting of the lot.
(10:28:20) zug: http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/6069/wow1shotyv2.jpg
(10:28:35) oizys: Illdiowned
(10:29:10) oizys: seriously, how did he hit twice… wouldn’t the first have killed anyone?
(10:29:21) oizys: or is that just lag
(10:29:35) zug: might have been a thrash
(10:29:42) oizys: ah
(10:30:12) oizys: 76000 = your character restarts in Dun Morogh with no clothes
(10:30:35) oizys: like… and shorter than they were before
(10:30:39) zug: hahaha
(10:30:44) zug: missing hair
(10:30:47) oizys: yeah
(10:30:58) oizys: “this is how gnomes are made”
This week we talk about BLIZZCON! Tonight we’re gonna go over Zug’s adventures at Blizzcon. Tune in for a review of the announcements, and our impressions, and opinions! The new Wrath of the Lich King Expansion, with the level cap, a new class (DEATHKNIGHT!) and a new profession (INSCRIPTION!) We chat about all the crazy PVP changes/additions. And then we settle up on the Starcraft 2 Demo.
In preparing for the Winnebago that is Comic-Con this weekend, we are donning our respective Geek Armor and getting pumped up while talking about the other upcoming conventions Blizzcon and Penny Arcade Expo. More info has come out recently about TerraDrive - a LARP/Paper Roleplaying game that will be debuting at PAX and we discuss our first impressions, a little bit of the WoW talk sneaks in under the guise of pre-Blizzcon speculation, and much reminiscing is done about Comic Con past and future (future reminiscing? - yes) and what it means to gamers in a post-E3 world. We wrap it up with some discussion of masters of marketing like Pokemon, constantly showing us how it’s done, and some frank statistics on in-game advertisements now that the science is coming of age. Also we say “Chocolate Rain” a lot.
Conventions on the brain. We’re deep in the trenches of ‘convention high season,’ having just been to Anime Expo, getting buzzed by E3, and now waiting for Comicon and Blizzcon. We give a bit of an E3 wrap up, going through some of the things that jumped out at us since last show, as well as a few stories and experiences from past Anime Expos. We discuss conventions in general, and then ponder about Anime licensing and the business models. Lastly, we take five and flex our game development muscles, and come up with some ideas for a game based around Conventions.
What may seem like an excessive practice, multiboxing is getting more popular.
The art of playing multiple accounts at the same time. For example - a cleric and a warrior - both controlled by you. Heals that land when you need them. Double the power but double the demands on your already stretched attention. This is a community of people who control two, three, four, five, even ten or more characters at the same time.
The cost of setup is too steep for my blood, but given everything, I would love to give it a shot.
China’s drive to impose social and political “harmony” on the internet has claimed a new set of victims: undead skeletons. Chinese players of World of Warcraft, a hugely popular online role-playing game, have expressed outrage after their ‘undead skeleton’ characters were suddenly clad in new flesh, apparently in order to comply with a secret government ban on bare bones.
This makes at least the second time China has shaped the biggest MMO in the world. The first being the decision to not allow Pandarin as the first race expansion. (It’s illegal to portray Pandas getting harmed in China.)
Blizzard does a big deal and curtails some of the excessive prerequisites for being able to play deeper into the game. They basically lower the barrier of entry into the ‘endgame,’ and what that means. We drool over the new Warhammer Online quest concepts that got released: gather quests, Christmas quests, and public quests. Manhunt 2 got an AO rating and that’s very bad for business. Get ready for Anime Expo!
