Back by popular demand, and now with 50% more hall space for your convention-going enjoyment, BlizzCon officially returns to the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA, on October 10–11. Join us for another epic celebration -- meet your guildmates and fellow gamers from around the world; spend some quality time with current and upcoming Blizzard games; and partake in the contests, tournaments, and developer discussion panels that make up BlizzCon. Check out the press release to learn more, and stay tuned for further updates. BLIZZCON™ 2008 ANNOUNCED Blizzard Entertainment® gaming convention returns to Anaheim Convention Center October 10–11 IRVINE, Calif. – May 12, 2008 – – Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced plans for its third BlizzCon™ gaming convention, to be held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California on October 10 and 11. BlizzCon is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding Blizzard Entertainment®'s Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® franchises. In response to the demand to accommodate more attendees, this year's event has expanded from two convention halls to three. "Whenever we've been able to meet and interact with Blizzard gamers from around the world, it's been a great experience for us," stated Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We're looking forward to seeing even more of our players at this year's BlizzCon and delivering another entertaining and informative event for them." BlizzCon will offer a wide variety of activities to help all attendees get the most out of the two-day event. In addition to serving as a gathering place for the different Blizzard Entertainment gaming communities, attendees will be able to enjoy: Hands-on play time with upcoming Blizzard Entertainment releases Discussion panels with Blizzard Entertainment developers Competitive and casual tournaments for players to showcase their talents Areas and activities devoted to licensed products such as the World of Warcraft® Trading Card Game Costume, machinima, and character sound-alike contests with great prizes Commemorative merchandise based on the Blizzard Entertainment franchises A silent auction More exciting activities to be announced Tickets for BlizzCon will go on sale in the next few weeks at a price of $100 USD per person. As the event draws closer, further details will be announced on the official BlizzCon website: www.blizzcon.com.
Simonson chats about his current work on DC/Wildstorm's World of Warcraft, including how his 15 year-old grandson helps granddad with the series, as well as the work of Simonson's better half - writer Louise "Weezie" Simonson - on the upcoming Gotham Knights animated DVD.
Ten Ton Hammer: How are you guys handling Death Knight PvP? It seems like a pretty—I wouldn’t say overpowered class—but, you’re introducing a whole new system in there with the runes and that sort of thing. How are you guys blending Death Knight into the current classes, as far as PvP goes? Jeffrey Kaplan: I was thinking of that when we were watching Tom and Lee do the demo, “Man, this is going to freak everybody out when he shows them the pull towards ability, or the Chains of Ice, or Death and Decay with the fear going off…” If you can’t see the arena implications behind some of that… But, even if we hadn’t introduced the Death Knight in Wrath of the Lich King—we have the talent panes disabled on the machines in there, but, if we were to show you the talent panes right now for the remaining classes, and the new abilities that they’re getting, the class balance, as you know it today, is going to change pretty drastically without the introduction of the new class. We’re adding ten new talent points, new tiers across all three of the trees across every class, adding new core abilities, and retuning old abilities. Take a look at Warrior rend, or Thunder Clap, there are ones in there that are old abilities for classes where they didn’t use them, or they felt ineffective… We’re going to have to rebalance PvP in this expansion, anyway. So it’s kind of, if anything, the perfect time to introduce the Death Knight, and make sure it works within that balance.
Keith: "It's pretty much official at this point, since Pocket's made an offer to my agent that I've accepted, and Blizzard likes 90% of the outline: barring a major disaster, I will be writing a sequel to my StarCraft: Ghost novel Nova. Tentatively pencilled in to be published in the summer of 2009 (though it isn't formally scheduled yet, so that could very easily change), the novel will be called Spectres, and will pick up where Nova left off. (I really hope it is published in summer 2009, as that's when the Ghost Academy manga is scheduled to debut also....) In some ways, this will be a novelization of StarCraft: Ghost, the game-that-never-was. Nova was written to be a prequel to the game, and the plot of Spectres will include many elements of what was to be in the game. Having said that, don't read this novel expecting to see exactly what the game would've been like. The game plot is, at best, a loose basis for the novel. We went for what worked best for the overall storyline in general and for this novel in particular, rather than fidelity to a game that will probably never see the light of day. It will also tie into both Ghost Academy (which will take place alongside Chapters 18-19 of Nova) and to the forthcoming StarCraft II game. Nova will be in both, obviously, and another character in both the manga and the novel is a major player in the upcoming game. Oh, and Agent Malcolm Kelerchian will be returning in Spectres as well.
IGN: We heard about a lot of the content in Wrath of the Lich King in your presentation, but what we didn't see was anything about the new profession features. Could you fill us in on what's been going on there? J. Allen Brack: Inscription is the new profession; it's actually one of my favorite parts of the new expansion. Right now what we're working on is creating the system for how you actually create and inscribe scrolls. The way it's going to work is you'll have a series of mats that you need to do and then you'll create a scroll that will actually do the buff of the spell in question. Each scroll will have a specific use, so you won't create a generic scroll, it'll be a special scroll that will upgrade this fireball to do this type of thing. Right now we're still trying to make sure we've got that kind of mechanic down. That's actually most of the work. Most of the work is figuring out how that all works, what the materials are, how that comes together, and once we have that, then figuring out what the individual spells are and what the individual spells are and what the effects are going to be is going to be relatively easy.
IGN: Can you talk a bit about the Death Knight's abilities. Jeffrey Kaplan: Yeah so he has three presences which are similar to Paladin auras in that it's an activated ability that is always up on him. The difference between a Death Knight presence and a Paladin aura is a presence only affects the Death Knight. Some of them are tailored more towards DPS, like the blood presence and the unholy presence, whereas the frost presence is really tailored around the Death Knight tanking. The Death Knight gets some super-cool abilities; I think army of the dead is my favorite, where it's an area of effect, moderate cooldown, rain down ghouls on everything around you. They really overwhelm the scene. I love the raise dead ability. And that one he can cast on a number of different targets, so if I'm out there fighting in Northrend and kill something, I can cast raise dead and bring a summoned ghoul out of the corpse to fight alongside with me. But if I'm out there adventuring with you I can cast raise dead on your corpse and then you don't get to come back as you but you do get to come back as this very fun ghoul who has a whole action bar of abilities. IGN: What about the rune resource system the Death Knight uses? Jeffrey Kaplan: So you have six runes total and you'll always have six runes. You'll get to pick, and there's actually a forging process where you put those in your blade, you'll get to pick how many of those you have within six. So if you wanted four blood runes, one unholy, and one frost and that's the six you're going to run with, you can totally do that. We want there to be some customization in how a Death Knight manages his resources and let him choose. The runes have their own separate, independent cooldown as you consume them. Right now it's feeling good at about 10 seconds per [rune]. And then there are also abilities and talents that can trigger an instant refresh or conversion that consumes your blood but puts it into frost. You get a lot of run resource gameplay that way.
This Wednesday The Guild was invited to tour Blizzard! Guided by our intrepid tour guides Kenny and Kasey, The Guild had a fantastic, geek extravaganza and thoroughly outstayed their welcome. Yay! Jeff Lewis (Vork) volunteered to write the blog entry of our experience there. We hope you enjoy reading about it after the jump, and again, thank you Blizzard!!!
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"Journey with me now to a room rammed with networked machines and games journos at Blizzard's LA offices.Next to me sits a representative from a German StarCraft fan site, who sobs gently as he strokes the hairy hide of a 3D Ultralisk (a massive Zerg unit), a decade-long wet dream a reality. For the next two days we've been given unrestricted access to the latest multiplayer build of StarCraft II. With Blizzard having already revealed the revamped Terran and Protoss races, we've been invited here for a world-exclusive reveal of the game's final race, the Zerg."
