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MMO factory NCSoft today took the wrapping paper off of Carbine Studios, its latest developer. According to the press release, Carbine has some very apt cogs in its machinery deriving from 17 former Blizzard employees, "including lead and senior developers from the World of Warcraft team," including lead designer Kevin Beardslee, who is now the vice president of design.
Additionally, former Fallout designer Tim Cain has been tapped to be the programmer director. Carbine is currently working on an unannounced MMO, according to their website. No other details have been revealed, but the team definitely has a powerhouse of employees.
A Rogue character in World of Warcraft with arguably the best gear in the game right now has been sold for 7,000 Euro (approximately US $9,700). The avatar had both Legendary swords dropped by raid boss Illidan Stormrage, as well as 4/5 of a Tier 6 armor set.
The original owner, Zeuzo from clan Method on Sylvanas server, has been sighted building up a new Rogue. When asked what one could do with $9,700, the Joystiq staffer offered these suggestions:
"Save it toward a house ... or Jet Ski!"
"Buy as many WoW account as I could, build that many new computers and multibox it!"
"A pool of pennies so that you can swim around in like Scrooge McDuck."
"Cybernetic Mongoose"
"I hear Russian mail-order brides are increasingly more reasonable ..."
The buyer, Shaks, currently resides on the Kazzak server but has not had any activity since September 3. Our sister site WoW Insider speculates that his account may have been banned, given the publicity of the auction and Blizzard's policy against selling accounts -- which would be truly sad for Shaks and truly hilarious for the rest of us (especially Zeuzo).
While strolling through the halls of Austin's GDC, a staffer for The Inquirer says they overheard the following conversation, reprinted here in its entirety.
Blizzard Employee 1: What are you working on? Blizzard Employee 2:Starcraft II, and you? Blizzard Employee 1: I am working on Hydra. Blizzard Employee 2: [stunned silence]
OK, so we added that last part. But the conversation ended sort of abruptly, and we thought that would have been a bit more dramatic. So, we've got some pretty obvious questions raised by this. 1. What is Hydra? 2. Is it Diablo III? 3. Why is it called Hydra? 4. What does Employee 1 have against contractions?
Hey, we hear there's some rampant speculation a few inches below, why not scroll down and join the party?
Last night the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" won the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program (less than one hour). If you still haven't seen the episode since we first reported the nomination in July, you can now always rent or buy the 10th season DVD set of South Park which includes the episode.
Season 10 also includes the episode where Cartman freezes himself so when he wakes up the Wii will be available -- things go horribly wrong. So go check out the Emmy-winning episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" and the two-parter "Go God Go" for your South Park meets video game entertainment needs.
Austin's Game Developers Conference -- Austin being the MMO capital of the US -- kicked off one of its early events with a speech by Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. He tells the story of just how unprepared they were for World of Warcraft's success saying, "We had to shift our mindset that we were not just a game publisher or developer. We were now a service company." The company has swelled from a a few hundred to 2,500 employees in the span of a few years. Much of that is to support the massive infrastructure necessary to keep the World of Warcraft running.
He says the early months of WoW they couldn't have been prepared for. They set Warcraft III as their sales expectation ceiling on WoW and prepared for that -- it sounded reasonable at the time. Of course WoW ended up being almost too popular and the game was close to unplayable half the time in its first six months. Morhaime says that's when they had to shift everything. He goes on to say that Blizzard's name standing for quality has helped them out immensely and he stressed for developers to always finish their games before release. The money a company makes in the short term won't fix a poisoned name in the long run.
Vivendi is a big ol' company, what we're going to focus on is their Vivendi Games division which earned €119 million for the first half of their 2007 fiscal year, which is a 91.9% increase from last year. All you need to know about this growth, despite growth being the industry standard lately -- unless you're Atari, is that it has so much to do with World of Warcraft it's not even funny. Although Vivendi Games used the very conservative term of "continued momentum" to describe the phenomenon of WoW -- 9 million people hittin' the pipe and handing over around $15 a month to play the game creates fiscal magic and sweet snuggle love to the company's bottom line.
Beyond the games division, Vivendi saw a 10.6% increase in earning over last year, around €2.6 billion. Don't expect WoW to stop making money for Vivendi. Wrath of the Lich King is the expansion many WoW players have been waiting for and the game continues to grow its user base years after release.
The nation of Korea let out a collective "GG!" today as Blizzard released a new patch for both the original Starcraft and its expansion, Brood War. Starcraft has been on the shelves for a little over nine years now, surviving countless leaps in technology to remain one of the most popular strategy titles available. This patch doesn't fiddle with the intricate balance achieved by nearly a decade of competitive play, but it does iron out few of the last remaining bugs before Starcraft II arrives.
Made stability improvements to replay saving code.
Fixed a bug where the map download progress was not shown.
Pressing alt-f4 while in Starcraft and logged into a league now logs you out of the league.
Updated some of the localization for the league page.
Fixed an exploit that allowed nukes to fall anywhere on the map.
Well, BlizzCon is officially over, and folks will have to wait another year to experience it again. Hopefully by this time next year, however, both StarCraft 2 and the WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King will be on store shelves, or in your hands. Until then we'll be waiting for the dribbles to trickle out of Blizzard with more information.
But, all is not lost. They did send us out with a bang that included 30 minutes of fairly decent comedy with Jay Mohr, a performance by Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftain (the highlight of the night of which a brief video appears above), and a pretty sweet set from Video Games Live, including the Diablo theme being played on a 12-string guitar. That was the best moment of the night, and makes us wonder even more when there will be some sort of a Diablo sequel.
Check out the gallery below, which contains some new shots from the closing ceremonies. You can always head over after the break to listen to the complete audio of Jay's performance, the L70ETC set, and the Video Games Live goodness. In handy mp3 format for your listening pleasure. Also be sure to check out the exhaustive BlizzCon coverage from WoW Insider, who really brought down the house with their in-depth look at Lich King, and the event as a whole.
Okay, before you start raking me over the coals again like some of you did with my writeup of StarCraft 2, I'll preempt this writeup similarly. However, I've played World of WarCraft a lot longer than I ever did StarCraft, much to the chagrin of my ex-girlfriend. Is there a correlation there? The world may never know.
Anyhow, the preemption part of this post is that I haven't played WoW enough for some of your strict demands. My Human Female Warlock Character is resting on her laurels somewhere around Level 43, and I bought The Burning Crusade, but never installed it. It still sits on the shelf, mocking me, taunting me, and haunting my dreams.
Hey look, it's Starcraft: Ghost from BlizzCon! (Image Credit) Err, BlizzCon 2005, that is. That was kind of a cruel (if not incredibly stupid) joke we played. While we are mocked 1,000 times over, check out the highlights for today:
During the recent BlizzCon, we sat down and got a ton of time with StarCraft 2, to the tune of roughly three hours or so. The upshot of it all? We were very impressed, and we had our asses handed to us, both in single and multiplayer modes.
Okay, first of all, before I get much further into this I have to say that by "we" I mean "me." I don't want to categorize the rest of the Joystiq staff as sucking at StarCraft 2, but I can pretty much definitely say that as far as this writer is concerned, I'm a complete noob.
Blizzard and its MMO World of Warcraft has been very kind to South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In addition to providing source material (as well as helping with the filming) of the Emmy-nominated episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft."
Now the duo is returning the favor by including a 14-day trial of the MMO with its upcoming 10th season DVD collection, which includes the episode in question, according to a press release from Comedy Central. Hopefully this will be just want the fledglinglittle game needs to stay afloat.
South Park: The Complete Tenth Season will be out August 21.
It's pretty impressive when you meet someone who writes extensively about video games, handles digital content and video game R&D for the BBC, and finds time to maintain an extremely popular blog, only to find out that they also rock some high level characters inside of World of Warcraft. Seriously, where do they find the time? By the end of the day, if I've managed to finish at least a third of the items on my to-do list, I feel like I've accomplished a lot. Alice Taylor does all of the above and manages to make me feel damn lazy.
Anyhow, I caught up with her during BlizzCon, and asked her a few questions about her experiences. She asked what my highest level character was, and when I told her a Level 42 Human Warlock, I think her look of scorn was burned into my brain. Forever.
Check out the interview after the break, and be sure to venture over to Wonderland, which is filled with video gaming goodness. Blizzard, take special note: her suggestions for improvements are spot-on. It would be nice to see BlizzCon 2.0 next year with some of these things implemented. Plus, free passes to Disneyland. Although that's just my little addendum.
WoW Insider covered BlizzCon 2007 for the World of Warcraft junkies like Nutella covers our toast: rich, thick and with a constant need for more. They've now put up their info dump of everything new they've learned about WoW at the convention. All hard facts, no speculation. They even put it in alphabetical order for quick reference enjoyment so WoW players can go back to getting that eighth alt to lvl 70.
If there is anything WoW Insider missed on their list, just let them know in their comments thread. Unlike The Burning Crusade, Northrend and the Wrath of the Lich King represents a continuation of the plot line from Warcraft III, something that many fans of the RTS series, who also play WoW, have been begging for. With any luck we'll get a release date soon, as things stand right now the time line could be very similar to The Burning Crusade and Blizzard may actually keep its every year expansion word -- give or take a few months.
Hey, BlizzCon isn't just about the wrath of a Lich King and the World of Warcraft -- let's get some StarCraft pron in here too. Blizzard has released new Starcraft II screens and there's plenty of stuff we're wondering and asking, "What's that?"
Hopefully some of our people at BlizzCon can get more details. Check out the new screens in the gallery below. We're definitely digging the new Terran Viking ... Starcraft meets Robotech.
Bungie jumps: Takahashi, Croal, and Totilo on the Joystiq Podcast Roundtable
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Listen to the Joystiq Podcast (because your ears can't read)
Posts with tag Blizzard
A Rogue character in World of Warcraft with arguably the best gear in the game right now has been sold for 7,000 Euro (approximately US $9,700). The avatar had both Legendary swords dropped by raid boss Illidan Stormrage, as well as 4/5 of a Tier 6 armor set.
