Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Hints At New StarCraft, Launches Burning Crusade
Game Developer Blizzard Entertainment's long-anticipated expansion to World of Warcraft has gone live. Initial impressions are ... not available, since all 8 million players are currently in the Outlands. I'll take that to mean the servers for the most part have not melted yet. At a Burning Crusade launch party, a Blizzard exec revealed we may see a new StarCraft game very soon. But today is all about WoW. If you're not playing, and want to live vicariously, check out WarCry's extensive preview of the expansion. You could read designer Jeff Kaplan's comments on new features at FiringSquad, or Shane Dibiri's talk of inspiration at Next Generation. One new expansion a year, eh? Some folks are already looking to the future, where we probably won't see WoW on consoles, but may see it with security dongles. 0.1% of the Earth's population can't all be wrong.
You have no idea how glad I am that I finally don't care about this story. I uninstalled the game last weekend, and I've moved the CDs to my "never gonna play that game again" spindle in the back of my closet.
That's one addiction that I'll never regret kicking.
Congratulations, you missed the point.
The idea isn't to prevent piracy, but to provide some means of more secure authentication because people are getting their accounts "hacked" where "hacked" means they had an easily guessed username and password, or their machine is riddled with trojans and someone captured their password.
"All in all, this is more of the same ... "
I have to tell you all that I absolutely hate this game. It is annoying and tedious ... and no I don't wanna join your bloody guild!
No, he had it right - 8,000,000/6,000,000,000 = 0.0013333... or about 0.1%
Warcraft II was delayed, Warcraft III was delayed 4 years (original release date was Q4 1999, was pushed back to September 2003 to change the game engine to 3D), Diablo II and its eventual expansion were both also delayed, as well as the Brood War expansion for Starcraft.
None of those had monthly fees; Blizzard has a history of delaying games in order to ensure that their customers get the best product available. Don't be so quick to assume the delay of Burning Crusade is just a conspiracy to milk more money out of subscribers.
Every time it's brought up, just start asking them how the grind is going. WoW, a great single player game with about 350 hours of play in it (only takes 13 days played to get to level 60... I did it several times) but after that, it's nothing but grind.
Ask them how many crypt thing legs they've gotten on the way to the 1200 (gotten ~20 per trip into an instance) to get the 30 tokens needed to buy the stuff from the faction person *AFTER* you've killed the 1000s of mobs to get the faction to actually buy it.
Or, how Blizzard nerfs the amount of honor you get from PvP because people are "earning it too fast".
Or, ask them how many times they've done Molten core (Onyxia/BWL/ZG/etc) in the past month and how was it different every time.
Pretty soon, they'll shut up and/or stop coming over.
Starcraft? I can't stop playing Masters of Orion 2! God I need sleep.
Oooh, I wish I knew what all that meant.