Posts with tag evolution

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I love this post over at Hots and Dots, and it almost makes me wish I'd done the same thing with my UI (though truthfully, I don't get too complicated, so most of my pictures would look like her first one). Lathere has collected a series of screenshots of her UI, showing off how much its changed over the years, from her first raids in Karazhan up to the current raids in VoA and Ulduar. And it's very cool to see how things have changed -- early on, she really adhered to addons and what they did as a default, and as time passes, you can see that not only are the addons getting better at giving you the tools to lay out the UI the way you want it (not to mention that other tech has gotten better as well -- she goes widescreen about halfway through), but she's getting better at customizing things exactly the way they should be. The UI gets much more abstract and simplistic as time goes on, though you'd presume that it actually lets her do more in terms of her character.

In fact, aside from the actual graphics in the background and the icons, it's almost hard to tell this is the same game. Of course, Blizzard has to keep a lot of things in the default UI the same, so they leave a lot of the really creative edits in the UI to the addon developers (and then, of course, steal the most interesting back). And they can get very creative indeed -- when you put these screenshots over a period of years up against each other, it's interesting to see how both the addon code and the player has changed the interface they use to play the game.

This must be the time of year for zany social theories about videogames. First, we heard that World of Warcraft might quality as being a religion. Then we heard that it might make for better citizens. And now, in an essay over at Gamasutra on the event of Charles Darwin's birthday, Noah Falstein suggests that games like World of Warcraft are actually models for evolution -- as we level up with experience points, our characters get stronger and more evolved, and we feel comfortable with that because that's exactly what we see happening in the world around us.

Technically, of course, you can't model Darwin's theory of evolution with a single character -- evolution isn't about one individual getting better, it's about a process of natural selection in a species over a period of time. To really model evolution, you'd have to play hundreds of alts, and quit them each time you ran into a problem, leaving you with just a few characters that worked really well. Wait -- maybe some of you are already doing that.

But Falstein makes good points in saying that certain elements of what Darwin described as evolution have shown up in game design as well -- the idea of specialization for certain character classes, tribal and national allegiances, and even the idea of memes (which are certainly widespread in WoW -- anyone ever heard of Chuck Norris or Leroy Jenkins?) are all drawn from Darwin's thinking and definitely embodied in the game we play.

Inspired by Noah Kalina, the Brooklyn photographer that took his picture every day for six and a half years, DerangedTaco captured a photo of his Warlock every time he changed gear. The resulting timelapse is a journey from roughly level 20, all the way up to level 70. He worked his way from level 70 blues, and then progressed into S1 and S2 items. Due to the upcoming release of Wrath of the Lich King, he doesn't plan to get anymore upgrades, but the video is still pretty interesting!

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.

Previously on Moviewatch ...

We recently showcased Surgee's cool and funny (and somewhat disturbing) music video "World of Warcraft: Evolution." Now he's brought to us his vision of a future WoW patch, in which some new features are added to the game to make it more playable and interesting. He gives concrete examples of how these new features will play out, which is something Blizzard should really take a look at. The lore-based trailers they do are wonderful of course, but something like this focused on serious gameplay would be really neat too.

Previously on Moviewatch...

I think most of us are aware that World of Warcraft has undergone a great amount of tweaking since its initial conception -- and even more tweaking since its initial launch. This video just makes it easy to visualize the precise amount of change that's happened since it's been available for public scrutiny. So take a look and watch an unknown game turn into a game you love (that may or may not be gone now) turn into the game we're all playing today.

Previously on Moviewatch...