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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.
I want the "wrath of the lion king" That's what I originally read and was very excited. Now I'm back to dissapointment.
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.
I have to hand it to Blizzard, their trailers are always of such awesome quality.
It instantly made me want to renew my account again. Must.... resist.....
Please Blizzard, stop doing this to me!
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
I felt left out when blizzard switched to a mmorpg model for the warcraft story - I enjoyed war3, and I don't feel like losing my soul and social life to WoW just to find out how the story ends...
Here you go.
I quit playing WoW earlier this year (early March) and I must say that life's been great since. I wasn't a raider (but was doing arenas hardcore) but I fell victim to what's called "Altitis". I found that taking characters to 70 was fun and fast and pretty soon I ended up with four level 70s and two level 60s (61 and 62) when I quit.
So when Blizzard brought out new daily quests or new festival events, I felt compelled (OC ftl) to do every quest on every alt - needless to say that stupidity (or OC again) burned me out. Now I am doing a lot more with my "free" time. I am hoping that the expansion won't make me renew my account or somehow magically I'd be busy playing Fable2, Alan Wake and Fallout3 that I won't notice WoW. I only need to hold myself together till SC2 or Diablo3 comes out at which point resistance will be futile :(
Should've stuck to playing Riverraid or Pitfall :O
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"? I mean, besides Arthas, what does the expansion really have going for it, story-wise? There's nothing else to really show off in a trailer. Yes, this comment is littered with personal opinion. I just never understood games that had no story to them.
Blerg.
The story doesn't end, ever.
Although..
10 million paying customers and then suddenly a last final patch... "The destruction of Azeroth"
"Sorry guys, the story ends here, game over, you won!"
That would be awesome *eg*
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
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?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Perhaps, but Blizzard has also released teaser cinematics for all of their games since Diablo II. MMO subscribership is not a locked-in, partisan thing either-- if WAR attracts 500,000 WOW subscribers (and that is an 'if' on the scale of Kipling's), that's no indication that any of them will stop subscribing to WOW. Likewise, while the games are similar in theme, you're more likely to see cross-pollination in new subscribers than outright competition, as newbies hear 'This sucks, I'm going back to WOW' and 'I'm sick of this, I'm going to WAR instead'.
Blizzard could just pick up Edwin Starr's song: WAR, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing...
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That'd be awesome if they did that. One thing that has always pissed me off is how nothing ever changes in the game. Those poxy gnomes have been running out of Gnomeregan for 3 goddamn years now! The big thing they did, with the pyramid things outside the cities (I completely forget what they were now) would have been awesome, except they HYPED IT UP before it happened. (And completely bollocksed it when it came out.) I think it's far better to spring huge stuff like that as a surprise. Stuff to make people say "Holy shit!" and think anything could happen. Even hardcore addicts I know begrudgingly agree with me that, despite Blizz claiming it's an "ever changing world", nothing ever changes, and it's by and large the same crap for years.
I don't know what other MMORPG's are like in regards to changing the game world. I remember Matrix Online offed Morpheus in the game. Anyone care to make a comparison? Because I like WOW (most of the time) but nothing in the world ever changes. There is no random element to it to imply a living, breathing world.
Awesome cinematic... Cool to see Sauron... I mean Arthas... (Peter Jackson has a lot to answer for.)
WoW is not going to last forever- looking at the player growth curves it's been leveling off for a while. Someday, eventually, it will begin to decline no matter how many expansion packs they manage to make. Lots of MMOs keep running at this point- you can survive with 10k subscibers if you don't bother with new content.
But WoW could be different: Blizz is smart enough that they should have something ready to go when this happens- World of Starcraft, WoW2 in a new area, something. Once that game starts off the ground, announce end of life for vintage WoW in six months time. Script an invasion of horrible baddies and follow through, with various zones falling to them while the horde and alliance frantically try to hold on. Make it so defended areas fall more slowly and let players see how long they can hold out, then burn Ironforge and Org a few days before turning off all the servers.
Follow that up with some free play time on The Next Great MMO for existing WoW players, maybe some sort of character transfer where you can move a "child" of your toon to the new world if it's WoW2.
You would have *legions* of retired players come back for this- most of the folks who have left WoW were just bored with the same old content, and frankly watching the sand castle get kicked down would be great fun. Get them excited again, get a ton of quick cash, give the players a reason to move to TNGMMO and not your competitor's and get rid of all your legacy support issues in one huge ball of fun.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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Come on really now. It's time Gnomeregan was taken back by the gnomes. I can't stand that place.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Dramatic narrative needs to be finite, otherwise there is no catharsis. MMORPG's need to get rid of the die/respawn mechanics, which turn them from finely crafted story environments, into a point scoring system.
Character, and drama are about the mortality, and finitude of plot, setting, and character.
Until MMORPG's implement character mortality, they will be inflationary, grinding, point scoring systems.
I know the common objection is, 'nobody will play a game where they put months into a character, only have them die, and have to start over.'
The obvious exception to this argument, would be the paper and dice RPG's where character mortality tended to be the rule.
From a game mechanics, physical realism perspective, death is rarely instantaneous, even from potentially mortal wounds, with a few exceptions.
Mitigating the finality of dying can be built in to the game environment, allowing PC's and NPC's to give aid to mortally wounded characters. Death by lag, and technical mishap can be arbitrated while 'in game' the character lies on their deathbed. A 'final judgement' scenario, in game.
Inheritance and allegiance systems can be built into games to allow character legacy to retain time spent.
PVP griefers can be handled by implementing account karma, which when positively or negatively accumulated, limits or allows varied options for character creation, and character legacy.
There are a wide range of possibilities for implementing a mortality rules MMORPG. It just hasn't been done, given the historical hysteria about the notion of someone 'loosing the lvl 100' character they spent months/years leveling.
The problem with that perspective is that 'level 100' characters are themselves a symptom of the inflationary game mechanics. Overpowered characters, superabundant and deadly NPC's and creatures, all built into a game to accommodate the undying locusts of PC gamer types raping the richly detailed story environment for LEET loot, whose value is flash, and point mods.
There are few famous player characters, the only 'celebrated' MMORPG 'player character' (Leeroy Jenkins), is ironically someone who committed a hilarious kamikaze spoiler on a pent up in game raid. A perfect example of how mortality serves to highlight character.
For story to 'happen' characters have to die, PC's, and NPC's, the world has to be subject to change, the basis for story, and drama; in human experience to date, is mortality, and the permanent change it implies.
To suspend mortality from a story medium, and then be chagrined that the story is weak and uninviting shouldn't surprise anyone.
The cynical argument I find most persuasive for why a real, story based MMO will never have mass appeal, is that there is an expectation of a certain well edited literary style, among fans of a genre. The wide range of literacy and imagination, or lack thereof, of players (in the current market), will always end up spawning worlds where some PC's try (badly) to speak like they fell out of a shakespear play, and others, spurning the affectation speak colloquially, or worse.
Stories, real ones, that are enjoyable to read, are subject to editing. Building an MMO environment where an editorial standard is enforced is more a cultural challenge than a technical one.
Personally I'm hoping to someday see a real story driven MMO environment, with a mortality based system of game mechanics, but the level grinding MMO's are killing the enjoyment and viability; possibly for a generation, of MMO's as cinematically driven story environments. Despite the best efforts of game writers and artists to create compelling story elements, the programming and business logic dictate the games remain fundamentally inflationary point scoring systems.