BlizzCon 2009 – News and Information
One of my top writers, Jesma, got the pay-per-view broadcast of BlizzCon and is writing articles with news and updates. She is taking her own screencaps as well!
Some interesting developments have already taken place:
Friday:
BlizzCon 2009 Kicks Off – Friday BlizzCon Highlights
Saturday:
World of Warcraft Cataclysm Expansion – New Zones
World of Warcraft Cataclysm – Race and Class Announcements
Post your thoughts and comments here or at the above article(s).
The monk looks kinda cool. I’m still waiting for an archer class though.
The WoW expansion info has been floating around the net for a few weeks now. It all sounds like good additions/changes, but nothing that would bring me back.
The battle.net changes sound decent too, though I’ve been hearing some ugly rumors about them setting it up so you need a subscription to get some of the battle.net functionality.
Diablo III doesn’t look too bad. As for the WOW expansion, I think Blizzard is probably going to catch hell for changing “established” grind patterns in the old world. I think at this point they are better off doing “WOW II” or a different MMO based off similar patterns.
More links to articles with Saturday’s info.
After years of desperately wanting D3, it is all going to be for nothing if they keep LAN play out. I have zero interest in playing multiplayer on battle.net. If I am going to be dependent on someone else’s servers and net connection, I want a persistent world (MMO). I also like the option of not patching to their latest version (if they did something I think is lame), and to play mods. That’s not possible on battle.net.
Considering the fact that mods are one of the big things that has kept D2 popular for all these years, it shocks and dismays me that they would just dump LAN play like this.
Lan play isn’t a big deal for me in Diablo, I always played on battlenet. If I was a Starcraft player though, I’m sure I’d be pretty ticked off about the lack of lan play. Either way, lan play seems like something that would be really easy to add, and I’m left wondering why they aren’t doing so.
Piracy.
They are of the mistaken belief that by removing LAN play, they will reduce piracy.
The same arguments could be made for SC2 LAN play. I *will not* buy SC2 if I have to check in with Big Brother before getting permission to play a game I bought *that doesn’t need the internet to function* (one reason why I still don’t like Steam). I will not buy SC2 if I need an internet connection to play multiplayer. The *only* reason I played the original SC as much as I did was because I could play it via a spawned copy on a LAN with family or friends. Removing that ability is idiotic.
If they are doing it to prevent piracy, that’s just pure greed. Diablo 2 -still- sells a tonne of copies even now. It still makes the NPD top 10 every week, and the last time I was at EBGames there was a guy buying the Diablo battlechest. If you are still selling your game well 9 years after release, you don’t have a piracy problem.
Whilst ranting on battle.net, I’ve seen little but praise for the proposed stalker features of the service. You can apparently see what your friends are doing moment to moment. Sure, the Twitter narcissists will love that, but if there’s no “stealth mode” for when I don’t feel like being bothered, well… chalk that up to another thing I don’t like about battle.net.
I am with you Tesh, this ongoing trend to reveal everyone what I did, when I did it, what I already did before and all that is going too far.
Note that I am not talking about WoW or Battle.net specifically, it is an ongoing trend in the gaming world, especially at Blizzard. What also bugs me off is this “MASTER ACCOUNT” stuff. NCsoft has it, Blizzard now has it, too. Buy and download games from various shops or directly from the company, and then you need to run the launcher of this or that company to play the game.
I wonder what happens to players who downloaded Aion from Steam. Do they have to run 1. Steam and 2. the NCsoft Launcher. Aion is started with the NCsoft launcher application, now add Steam to that.
The best thing is that I bought Aion after being totally enticed after the first two beta events. Now I am not really that excited anymore, as the endgame seems to be VERY korean (PvE grind + constant PvP, not much to “explore” or do else. They try to hide the korean wolf behind western fluff, moar quests, moar dungeons – in the end the core game is still very eastern, IMO, regardless what they do) I cannot even sell the game.
Why? Because Aion is tied to my NCSoft Master Account. Either the buyer must hope that I never change HIS password over my master account, or I must fear that he gets access to all my games. And it is also not allowed/possible at all to sell the account at all, actually…
These systems are totally in favor of the seller, not a service to the customer, rather the opposite.
Privacy and Data Protection also seems to be nothing that anyone in charge of Blizzard Activision seems to remotely care of. While they are actually quite good to keep their projects, personal life and all that pretty secret they obviously have no issues with revealing and logging every detail of anyone playing their games.
Hey, looky! SC2 not only has plans to drop LAN, but include DRM! It’s as if they are going through the checklist on how to piss me off and make me *not* buy the game.
StarCraft 2 DRM?
I’m expecting the announcement of a subscription model for the game any time now. Then there’s the inevitable Achievements… (”For the Swarm!” – Kill all three enemy teams in a 1 on 3 match, or maybe “Shroud Explorer” – Reveal every inch of every single map in the game)
Oh my, this is the typical “online activation” system. Requires an account, and Blizzard’s platform is battle.net, what else. So basically you create a battle.net account and then add your SC2 key to it.
Nearly the same system is used by the very successful “Sins of a Solar Empire”. To patch/upgrade your game you need to connect to Stardock’s “Impulse” service, where your product key gets checked and verified.
Man, the anti-piracy measures REALLY piss me off in this case. How many copies of a game do you need to sell? Sure, you deserve to be paid for your games, but when you are cutting features and adding DRM to sequels of games that sold(and continue to sell) ridiculously well without it, I’ve got no sympathy at all. Diablo 2 and Starcraft are very easy games to pirate, yet tonnes of people still buy them a decade later. There is no better example that I can think of to prove how illegitimate anti piracy measures are than adding them to the Diablo series.
Should I blame the fact that the old school Blizzard people left the company years ago? Or maybe I should blame the merger? Does Activision want to upgrade from wiping their asses with $5 bills to wiping them with $10 bills?
Yeah, this is really a damn shame. I just got done ranting about this with my wife.
I was at Best Buy on Monday to buy a game, and the guy in front of me was buying the Diablo 2 battlechest. The game is almost 10 years old, and he was paying $20 for it.
If I’m playing Diablo with my wife, sitting 5 feet away from me, I don’t want to deal with lag as we both connect to a server thousands of miles away. And when those servers are down, we can’t play at all? WTF?
I don’t want to be forced to play whatever stupid patch they use, when they lamely nerf stuff and don’t fix it for months. I remember when they nerfed Whirlwind because of how OP it was with pikes. I stayed on 1.02 for months because of that one. I just used my same old two swords and enjoyed a non-nerfed whirlwind. The nerfed version SUCKED with two swords because they couldn’t be arsed to figure out a better way to deal with the pike combo.
I don’t want my offline games turning into broken, gimped, MMO hybrids that have all the bad parts of an MMO with none of the good parts. There are actual GOOD THINGS about offline games:
Why kill those benefits?
And all of this so they can, in their mind, convince a few pirates to buy the game? Legitimate customers get screwed so they can try to sell a few more copies to some asshole pirates?
Guess what… those pirates don’t give a crap about you Blizzard. They would gleefully piss on your corpse. Your die hard fans have been waiting in earnest for Diablo 3 – hoping against all signs that there would even BE a Diablo 3. So you focus on these jerk pirates instead of your legitimate customers that have paid billions of dollars to your company over the last 15 years? SERIOUSLY?
I am sick and tired of legitimate, paying customers having to suffer because companies have the wrong headed belief that they can stop pirates from stealing.
You cannot stop them. They don’t feel pity or remorse or fear and they absolutely will not stop until they have stolen your game.
My prediction: pirated copies of D3 and SC3 available for pirates before the retail versions even hit the shelves – just like with Spore.
Longasc, indeed, it could be a lot worse, and there will be those who don’t even notice it… but I have allergic reactions to this sort of Big Brother mindset. If I’m connecting to the internet to play a game, there should be a %#^* good reason to do so. Verification of purchase isn’t a good reason.
(And I could argue that modern MMO design doesn’t offer much in the way of good reasons, either, but I digress.)
I really am baffled by Blizzard. On the one hand, I want to praise them for Cataclysm, and taking steps to make the Old Azeroth interesting, which I’ve been recommending for a while now. On the other hand, the battle.net stuff pisses me off, as does the subscription model. Increasingly, I just don’t want to spend money on their products even though the company has done some good work. That, perhaps, is my bottom line, and I can’t help but be a bit… disappointed. I *want* to like Blizzard and toss them some cash, but I just can’t.