Issue 92: Sorry for the lengthy delay; between work, the website becoming compromised and various other IRL stuff I haven’t been able to post a recent MMO Times. The hidden benefit though is that now that Blizzcon is over you know there should be plenty to talk about *cough*garrisons*cough*. MMO-Champion is probably going to get a lot of love in this issue because they seem to have the best overview of all that came out of Blizzcon this year. Therefore, if you are curious about what is new with World of Warcraft then I would recommend reading the headlines/posts in this issue from MMO-Champion.
I didn’t just find articles about what Blizzard announced and revealed at Blizzcon so don’t go anywhere. There are plenty of other things happening to read about. In fact if you stick around you will see that a new event will be starting for Final Fantasy XIV players as well as the next iteration for Marvel Heroes (which provides some godly, and demi-godly, additions). Plus Trion teases players with some recent domain registration activity. Read on and game on, friends.
Blizzcon 2013 is this weekend (if you didn’t know). I didn’t get a virtual ticket this year, we have to save some money but the opening ceremonies are free to watch. If you watched it then you might not find anything in this post that you didn’t already know. It has been two years since the last BlizzCon so I know everyone is pretty excited about what they are announcing (even if you’re not playing WoW anymore).
Heroes of the Storm – The video introducing Dustin Browser was pretty cool. All the different heroes fighting each other. They showed some content of Heroes of the Storm. It pretty much looks like League of Legends with all the Blizzard heroes. Based on the glimpses of the videos you can play as Arthas (as the Lich King), Carrigan, Diablo, etc. I’m not much of a LoL fan but the game does look cool and I’m sure if you are a fan of both games then you’re going to really love this game.
HearthStone – Rob Pardo. Originally a stealth/experimental project at Blizzard. Despite how “geeky” a battle card game seemed to be, when they were playing the game internally they logged so many hours they decided that they must have something pretty good, and thus HearthStone was born. This is Blizzards first tablet game and there will be iPhone and Android versions (haha, no Windows Phone!). Honestly, I can actually see myself playing HearthStone on my tablet more then on my computer.
**Big News** Going into beta next month.
If you went to the show or ordered a virtual ticket then you will get a special Blizzcon card called the Elite Tauren Chieftain and when you play the card, yea, its pretty awesome! Adding golden player cards, like the golden cards, which are fully animated. It looks kind of cool.
World of WarCraft – Of course the illustrious Chris Metzen talked to us about the WoW expansion. We all kind of knew it was called Warlods of Draenor – Metzen predicated the announcement by talking a lot of origins. He called the Alliance the “Captain America Faction” … love it! It sounds like we might be fighting some pretty old school villians which will be kind of cool to see (some names Metzen through out were Gul’dan, Hellscream, Blackmoore, etc. So it’ll be interesting. After building up the Alliance and giving some love to the Horde, the next expansion video debuts:
Warlods of Draenor – It will contain a new zone called Draenor (kind of obvious) The video said you will be able to build and upgrade garrisons so that might mean some kind of player housing. I’m sure the details of garrisons will come out in future panels, I will have to watch some of the other live blogs to learn more. Obviously the new level cap is 100. All the existing character models are getting new looks and upgrades and, of course, new items and loots. You can see the video below:
Please feel free to share anything you saw and your thoughts, positive and negative.
Issue 91: Greetings Ghoulish Gamers! Halloween is just around the corner, do you have all your ghoulish plans ready to go? Perhaps your plans involve a little gaming while the kids are out getting their trick-or-treating on; or perhaps you have to man the door waiting for the arrival of this years lot of cosplay potentials? If sugar-seeking rugrats are keeping you from your favorite MMO, perhaps you will be able to check out these headlines (from your handy smart phone or tablet) while you wait.
There is an update coming to SWTOR that many players have been talking about since the games launch. There are also a couple of Blizzard announcements that pertain to more then just World of Warcraft. Some updates coming for FFXIV, Neverwinter’s first event, and other news. So eat some of that candy you’re handing out (you paid for it anyway) and read on! And try not to scare the kiddies!
Issue 90: Guten Tag! I hope all of you have had a safe and fun Oktoberfest this year! I know here we had a visit from Star Trek’s Captain Sulu to lead off our local brewfest. Anyone else have any interesting Oktoberfest stories? Hopefully you didn’t stay indoors and play GTAV the whole time. While you will always be able to come back and wreck havoc in Los Santos, you won’t always be able to go out and enjoy some awesome beer until next year. Be that as it may, here are some headlines that you may have missed as a result of your drunken stupor.
Despite my lengthy absence from posting the next issue, there doesn’t seem to be a lot happening anyway. BlizzCon is the next most notable conference coming up so theories and whispers have begun to float around regarding Blizzards current and upcoming titles. Some sad news about Warhammer Online, another Blizzard trademark foreshadowing, and other patch and expansion news for our favorite games.
Issue 89: The Siege of Orgrimmar is live on all WoW servers, but that isn’t my excuse for my lapse in posting the Times. Life, as is always my excuse, just got busy again. Hopefully I will be more astute with my MMO news for a little while, especially since BlizzCon is in the not too distant future (in a month and a half I believe). Honestly, based on the time I have spent trying to catch up on my MMO news, I don’t think I have missed too many “WTF” or “ZOMG” headlines. If I do miss a particularly exciting, or troubling, headline please provide the link in the comments; unless it contains spoilers, like the Horde’s new Warchief (and its not a stack of peacebloom). Then please don’t reveal that so people can choose when they find out.
I tried not to go too far back as anything that is too old probably isn’t worth pointing out anymore. I have found some news for The Secret World, Guild Wars 2, MechWarrior Online and more. Anything that has gone live last Tuesday (or prior) (which seems to be a popular day for launching new content) I’m sure everyone knows about so I won’t get into things like WoW’s 5.4 patch, Marvel Heroes, FFXIV, etc.
Issue 88: I started a new client which always means I fall behind with my periodic posts such as the MMO Times. I know there are going to be a few items in this issue that are well over a week late and probably are old news which is why I pretty much rushed the rest of this issue to get caught up.
Gamescom is this week so a lot of the news is coming out from there, as I expected. There are a couple of big reveals and some release dates announced. The next WoW patch, 5.4, will be out September 10th which will bring the current expansion to its epic conclusion (I’m anxious to hear about the next expac at BlizzCon this year). Some more FFXIV news and some details about the LOTRO expansion (which hasn’t been in my list of topics in a while). Check it out folks, Gamescom was pretty good to us this year!’
Also, if you hadn’t heard, Blizzard’s newest title, Hearthstone, has officially entered its closed beta. Make sure you go out to your battle.net account and sign up to try to get an invite. Let me know if any of you have yours and if you have tried it out, I’m interested in your impressions.