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Blizzard Unveils Wrath of the Lich King Cinematic
Today at the Leipzig Games Convention, Blizzard released the opening cinematic for the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft. The cinematic is available on the official site via streaming video or the Blizzard downloader. There's a mirror over at 1Up. As with all Blizzard cinematics, it looks fantastic.
The cinematics for Diablo were amazing. The ones for Starcraft were wonderful - I still get a chill watching the "funeral" sequence. The first one for Warcraft III blew the curve again. They always had a lock on terrific art and technical achievement.
The first two thirds of this new cinematic was just, "Pretty, but... common". The last third pulled it out, and it's once again great. They aren't leading the pack by a large margin anymore though. The available technology has leveled the playing field. They'll have to step up.
Previous trailers for WoW have been longer than this and showcased a bunch of different classes looking awesome.. but I daresay neither of them have been as awesome as this. This is the first serious Warcraft trailer I've seen for this game.
It focuses attention directly on the central figure of this expansion: Arthas the Lich King.
Arthas is your problem. Arthas is the central figure of the conflict. No matter who you are, your entry into this expansion's content will immediately involve Arthas meeting you at the front door and welcoming you to your untimely demise.
I love it.
Sounds like they've got an expansion coming out this year and want to market it, the same as... oh... I don't know... every other game company on the planet that has a game coming out in a couple months?
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The quest dialogues are well written. I think that the horde quest lines are better written and more well integrated with the world. My only big gripe is that since I haven't been playing the game since it first came out, a lot of the quest lines just kind of die. You level up to 58 and then head to Outland. Or you level up to around 60 and find that all of the quest lines disappear into prior "end-game" instances that nobody is running anymore. So if you really do read the quest lines like I do, you get to the point where you are ready to go fight some major badguys that have been built up in one way or another since level 1, and.... ooops, no nachos for you.
It was really just a bunch of ice. Didn't really hold a flame to the videos embedded in Warcraft III. Maybe it has something to do with them just rehashing "the grind"?
The grind is quite simply for people that play too much. I figure most of these have content enough for a single-player game, but what addict plays any such game 8 hrs/day * 250 days/year = 2000 hours? He'd burn through every single player game I know like a crisp being done in a few weeks. Maybe if they paid 100$/mo (2x50$ single player games) they could hire enough people to keep up but the market would vanish. So they make the end game like a tar pit, the further into it you get the slower you move. There is no end, there is no ultimate victory. If you grind like craxy to reach it anyway, I'd say that's your mental problem and not WoWs.
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