Mists of Pandaria will fix Talents “once and for all,” say Blizzard
“Talents should be meaningful game-changers” says WoW’s lead systems designer, Greg Street. He’s been dissecting the successes and failures of Cataclysm in a frank post mortem on Battle.Net. Talent trees are one of the thorniest problems the World of Warcraft team has had to deal with over the last few years, but Street insists that the major overhaul Blizzard are planning for WoW’s talent trees will fix the problems players have been having with the system “once and for all.”
Cataclysm made important changes, bringing in a class specialisation choice at level 10 and pruning passive skills that players felt they had to take to maintain the most efficient character build. While Street says that the addition of a level 10 spec choice was “as close to universally acclaimed by players as anything we’ve ever done,” he admits that there are still big problems with the current system that Blizzard are determined to resolve in the next expansion.
Planetside 2 creative director predicts an MMOFPS renaissance: “they’re really difficult to make, so good luck”
Planetside 2 excitement is hitting an all time high. There’s 30 minutes of footage and a bunch of new screens here, which you should almost definitely watch. It’s like a beautiful dream coming true. A massively multiplayer FPS dream with magnificent scale, day/night cycles, vehicles and jetpacks.
Creative director, Matt Higby is just as excited as the rest of us. “It always blows my mind that there aren’t more MMO FPSs” he says, after showing a live demo at GDC.
World of Warcraft’s revamped Scrolls of Resurrection let you instantly level a friend to 80
If you want to tempt a friend who used to play World of Warcraft back into the fold, the revamped Scroll of Resurrection should do just the trick. Should your friend accept the invite, they’ll get a free server switch to your realm and faction, seven days of game time, a free upgrade to Cataclysm and the choice to instantly level up one of their characters to 80. Yikes.
Free PC games are awesome, thanks for reading about them
Writing a regular column about free games has been one of the most transformative jobs I’ve ever taken. Buried away in the depths of the internet are some remarkable things, and being able to unearth them, then share them with a huge number of like-minded people, is always an absolute pleasure.
It’s also changed the way I think about games, changed the way I write about games, and even inspired me to make games. All this from spending one day a week playing mostly amateur creations then scrawling down some words about what I made of them.
Blizzard lays off 600 employees, development teams “largely unaffected”
The juggernaut developer behind the StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo franchises just announced that they’re laying off 600 employees this morning. Mike Morhaime, Blizzard’s president and co-founder, released a public statement on the World of Warcraft forums to clarify the need to let these employees go and which sections of the company would be affected.
WoW Monopoly, Starcraft Risk… what should come next? Tell us and win EVE: Conquests
Blizzard recently confirmed World of Warcraft Monopoly and Starcraft Risk. Exciting stuff for the collector, but I’m not expecting anything that inspired. They’ll probably just be reskinned versions of the classic games. And why not? Someone is clearly making a lot of money from the physical equivalent of DLC.
Do a bit of research and things get more interesting. There are already World of Warcraft and Starcraft board games available. They’re appropriately themed to mesh with the game lore and, according to the informed hivemind that is Boardgamegeek, genuine fun to play.
World of Warcraft Annual Pass has more than one million subscribers
Blizzard have hinted at the success of the World of Warcraft Annual Pass deal that they launched at Blizzcon last year. In last night’s Activision Blizzard earnings call, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Blizzard CEO Mark Morhaime revealed that “to date, we have signed up more than 1 million players in the West.”
The deal offers subscribers a free copy of Diablo 3 along with 12 months of WoW game time, which could be paid for monthly. At £8.99 a month, the Annual Pass essentially costs £107.88 per player, which means the scheme has made at least £107,880,000.
How one WoW player’s eye for fashion made a million gold in 45 days
I hate the quandary between stats versus looks in MMOs. That’s why I love transmogrification; it lets you copy the appearance of one magical item onto another. In practice that means you can take two items: one powerful, one dapper and combine them to make a pretty thing with great stats.
The concept is nothing new, but it wasn’t introduced to World of Warcraft until last November’s patch 4.3. One man – appropriately known as The Mogfather – saw potential for extreme virtual wealth.
The Mogfather’s goal was to prove how profitable the transmogrification could be. Players aren’t able to sell any products created by the process, but that didn’t deter the entrepreneur. He started buying up auctions for cheap armour that looked cool: “When I looked at those armor sets that were primarily made up of lower-level items from The Burning Crusade and vanilla, my design eye kicked in,” the Mogfather told Joystiq. And he did all this before patch 4.3 landed.
Then, once the new feature hit, he relisted his designer items at a higher price based purely on their aesthetic appeal. “I took the pricing spread of fashion and brought it to my markets.”
World of Warcraft – Warsong Gulch PvP Three-Way
In our recurring Three-Way video segment, three editors go head-to-head-to-head as they take on the same section of the same game with unique strategies and play styles. Once they’ve put their methods to the test, the editors convene to survey their colleagues’ trials and exercise their inalienable right to copious wisecrackin’. In this edition, Josh, Chris and Tyler tackle a round of World of Warcraft capture-the-flag PvP in Warsong Gulch. Josh takes the role of bodyguard while Chris heals and Tyler focuses on running the flag. Check out the introduction above, and see how the team fared in the following videos…
World of Warcraft to get cross-realm raids with patch 4.3.2, expansion prices lowered
A post on Battle.net mentions that patch 4.3.2 for World of Warcraft will give players the ability to form raid groups using the Real ID party feature. Whatever realm you and your friends are on, you’ll be able to invite each other into a single cross-realm group and then take on any classic dungeon or raid together. This’ll work with the raid finder, but you won’t be able to run Dragon Soul on normal or heroic yet.
Blizzard Dota preview
Americans. They’re just like us, you know. Sure, they all take guns to work and drive limousines to the corner shop, but we should cherish our cross-Atlantic cousins. I had first-hand experience of their usefulness during my first game of Blizzard’s take on the DOTA template – called, imaginatively, Blizzard DOTA.
I took to the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) – the clumsy name for games of League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth’s ilk – grouped together with PC Gamer US’s Josh Augustine and Lucas Sullivan. Josh chose to play tank, absorbing blows as Warcraft 3’s beardy Muradin Bronzebeard.
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria preview
For the past seven years, there’s been a darkness on the edge of Azeroth. The Burning Crusade brought a host of demonic forces. Wrath of the Lich King saw an invasion of the dead. Cataclysm destroyed the very world itself, a manifestation of evil that cracked earth and boiled seas with a flick of its maleficent wings.
What next? What hideous mindrending monstrosity, dredged up from the abyss of the human psyche, could follow a villain as truly malevolent as Deathwing? Now we know. Pandas.
Games of 2012 – World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria
They had me at ‘pet battle system’. Casual WoW is back. At Blizzcon, Blizzard outlined their philosophy for what they’re attempting to achieve with the next, and possibly most important, expansion pack ever. More activities. More entertainment. More time spent out in the overworld. More time competing with your guildmates and server friends. Less time spent in the cities waiting for your dungeon group or arena team to start.
The problem Blizzard face is that the World of Warcraft player population is ageing; and with it, their interest in spending hour upon hour raiding is drifting. The long-term playerbase began asking awkward questions like “what am I achieving?” and “why am I playing if I’m not having fun?” Blizzard’s response: put some fun back in.
Ultimate Christmas Giveaway: Win a giant World of Warcraft bundle, including a signed copy of Cataclysm
Welcome to the PC Gamer Ultimate Christmas Giveaway! This is the biggest competition we’ve ever done: packed with peripherals, games, and exclusive items signed by some very important people. Why are we doing this? Because it’s Christmas! And we love you.
Merry Christmas PC Gamers! We’ve finally reached the end of our Christmas giveaway, it’s been a great ride, and we’ve given out some amazing prizes, but all good things must come to an end.
We’re going out with a bang though, giving your the chance to win a copy of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm signed by the dev team. That in itself would be an awesome prize, but we don’t do things by halves, and neither does Blizzard, and they’ve given us a monster bundle of goodies to go with it, including posters, t-shirts, action figures, comics, mousemats and more. It’s an amazing prize, and one lucky reader will win it.
Check inside for full details of what’s included, and a chance to win it.
Opinion: Why World of Warcraft’s new talent system doesn’t go far enough
I don’t envy the World of Warcraft development team. They’ve got a population of 10+ million players to please, a relentless stream of expansion packs and patches to deliver, and a vast array of content to refresh and balance. It’s a hard job. Right now – they’re taking on one of the hardest jobs possible: introducing fundamental change to the core mechanics of the game – the talent system – in an attempt to improve it.
The new talent system let you assign points into a tree of abilities every level or so. Instead, you’re given a menu of abilities that unlock at pre-defined intervals, and at those intervals you’ll pick one from three. It feels, immediately, less RPG-y that by not assigning points every level (or in Cata, every other level) you’re making less choices. But, I do agree with Ghostcrawler who pointed out in his blog that “you will have more choices that *matter*.”
