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Blizzard Announces New Warcraft MMORPG
An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "Blizzard Entertainment makers of the enormously popular Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo series, have announced their next game: World of Warcraft, a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game set in the famous Warcraft universe. Gamespot has an extensive preview available complete with screens and loads of info on the game." It looks very pretty. I still want the Star Wars MMORPG to rock my world tho.
Sam Lantinga, author of SDL, was hired by blizzard. Is he working on this title? is new warcraft will be sdl based? if so linux port should be piece of cake.
esp if it's Warcraft-style game, with an AI to take over when you leave...
Insightful but Overrated Troll
Some of us don't play games all the time, but only once and a while.
I don't like getting my ass kicked by young punks who play video games 10 hours a day, every day, and then being called {lame|loser|suck|asswipe} or what have you.
Sometimes I just like setting the difficultly level down as low as possible, and just kicking butt. Nothing more fun than stomping through a village in Warcraft destroying all buildings and peons in the way.
Blizzard HQ (South) in Irvine, CA, has two product development teams. Team 1 is their RTS team, composed of many of the developers who brought us Warcraft II and Starcraft. Team 2 is comprised of mainly new hires (from companies such as Activision and ID) as well as some previous members of Team 1.
Blizzard North is taking a short break after working on Diablo games for six years. They have not announced what their next project will be, but their design team has probably begun story-boarding it already.
I'll probably get World of Warcraft (just like I did Warcraft and Starcraft before it) for the pure fact that they do PC Warhammer gamers better than Games Workshop :-)
My theory about why it's the new fad is because they HAVE to.
With the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox/etc., the capabilities of these consoles have gotten better and better. Their graphics and sound are better than on PCs, and for the most part they are played on bigger, more immersive screens. If you want a FPS, play it on a console.
So what kinds of games can't be played on consoles? PCs have better connectivity and more versatile input devices (keyboards) and that's about it. Therefore as a PC game designer, you need to make a game which uses the keyboard in a meaningful way, which means "talking" which implies some kind of roleplay.
Who do you talk to? You can talk to NPCs, but that gets really repetitive and stupid. You also can't charge $10/month to talk to NPCs. Let people talk to other people, and all of a sudden people spend 200 hrs a month playing the game. That phenomenon is real and every game development company sees it.
The MMPORPG is just a way to keep the PC relevant in gaming, while giving them annuity revenue models.
"The difference between theory and practice is small in theory and large in practice..."