Posts with tag ghost

The holidays are fully upon us, descended around the house and home like the drifting snow the season is famous for. It's been a rough week, and I'm not going to say much. As many of us are parents -- and all of us are human beings with basic emotions like compassion and empathy -- well. Everyone's said nearly everything. We're feeling it, too.

Most of this article was written by Thursday night, so if we seem too jovial... that's because none of us could have known.

Darkmoon Island is home to the brand new Darkmoon Faire. In the original preview for the new Faire, we learned that some shady people and some crazy deals were made to secure the island location for Silas Darkmoon and his traveling Faire. What the Darkmoons got with their purchase, however, might be the real mystery lurking beneath the unassuming Faire-grounds.

Spoiler warning: There are spoilers for the patch 4.3 content that is currently on the public test realms. If you do not want to be spoiled, I wouldn't read the rest of this.

Picture this: You're an innocent, wide-eyed goblin, exploring the Ruins of Gilneas in Cataclysm. You're minding your own business when all of a sudden, a hideous, jaggedly polygonned female worgen leaps out of the bushes and assaults you! You fight valiantly, but -- QQ! -- your chosen class has been nerfed to the ground in beta patch after cruel beta patch! You clutch your chest, cursing Ghostcrawler with your final breath. You fall to the ground as a sassy little green corpse.

"No problem," you think. "I'll simply run back to my corpse!" And so you try. But ... you can't find it. I mean, it's there somewhere, but you're on the wrong side of a moat, and ... well, you've never been here before. Wait, this doesn't look familiar at all ... I mean, it sorta looks familiar but ... it's different. You think you've seen that tree before but ... no, wait, it looks exactly like all the other trees around here. And ... dammit, your ghost just fell into this deep trench. Crap. You're nowhere near your corpse or the Spirit Healer. How the hell are you going to get out of this?

The answer: The brand new Return to Graveyard button. It's a new feature in the latest beta build, and it does exactly what you think it does.

I love ghost stories, and one of the nice things about WoW is that Azeroth is full of them. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that one of the nice things for us is that Azeroth's full of them, because lore-wise it's hard to argue that the existence of any ghost is a happy occurrence. While I could (and probably should) turn this into a giant feature cataloging all the ghosts in the game, I have my personal favorites:

Caer Darrow

The inhabitants of Caer Darrow are my favorite ghosts, not least because you can't see them at all until you've done a bit of work on their behalf. The island seems utterly deserted barring the Sarkhoff couple...until you realize that it's not, and that there's an entire town full of people trapped on its "happiest day," going about its business, oblivious to how the world's moved on. That there's a ghostly vendor you can't otherwise talk to without a Spectral Essence is even better.

Rayless on the General Forums asks a question that I've always wondered about but never poked into; how exactly does phasing work? If you've leveled through the Death Knight starting area, done the Wrath Gate questline, or quested in Icecrown (and you should really do all three), you've had the opportunity to see Blizzard's most intricate phasing in action. However, Zarhym and Crygil are pretty cryptic on how it's done, and it's up to players to fill in the details.

In a nutshell, phasing is all about the information that's sent (or not sent) to your computer by the game server; Blizzard can toy with anything that's not client-side, affecting which buildings and NPCs you can "see" but not affecting the game's basic geography. I was surprised to discover that phasing has technically been in the game since launch -- ghosts and stealth are a form of phasing, as are (I would assume) the ghosts of Caer Darrow -- but the hugely elaborate set pieces of Wrath are simply a more complicated evolution of the same mechanic.

Given the success of phasing, players have been kicking around suggestions for instances or zones that could do with a touch of it, and Gnomeregan seems to be a pretty consistent pick. I'd have to agree, but I'd also add the Echo Isles (the Gnomes and Trolls have overcome their low-level foes by now, surely?) and perhaps Duskwood for starters. Is there any other zone or instance that you think would benefit from a little reality-bending?

So I was out working on heroic Steam Vaults with some friends last night. Like usual Hydromancer Thespia was being a pain, and we wiped a couple of times. On one of the death walks back, fellow guildie Agate and I meet up with another group of ghosts running over to Coilfang Reservoir. Nothing new there.

Except Agate noticed a couple of guys running behind him. After a bit of moving around he confirmed that they were in fact on auto-follow.

"Hahaha, look at this, these two guys are following me. Should I have some fun?" he asks over vent.

If you have been to Honor Hold recently, you may have observed a strange flying creature circling the alchemists' tower. Insatiably curious, cunningly perceptive adventurers everywhere may well wonder: What in the world is that thing doing there?

Lebowski, the resident engineering trainer, teaches his classes not too far from there. "One of my students pointed to it and asked me what it was," He told Mysterious Mysteries earlier this afternoon, "and this gave me the perfect opportunity to unveil my latest invention, the Telesupernaturaspectroscope! It may seem like a mere [Ornate Spyglass], but I have fitted it with a [Super-snapper FX] and a coating of [Ghost Dye], thus allowing us to capture images of spectral creatures while observing from a safe distance!"

The Telesupernaturaspectrograph Lebowski took is quite chilling indeed. "You can see here," he tells us, "the Unexplainable Freaky Owl -- or 'UFO' as I call it -- is not only blue, but it seems to have gaping holes in its wings! Yet it flies! I suspect the alchemists are up to something!"

We questioned Alchemist Gribble and Magus Zabraxis inside the alchemists tower as to what they think about this strange UFO flying about their tower. Miss Zabraxis replied that she didn't know about freaky owls but offered to show us her latest experiment, while Mr. Gribble stated, "It is the obvious result of conditions and circumstances which brought about its existence! Now go away and come back when you're ready to learn Extremely Advanced Alchemy!" Rorelien, the night elven Herbalist Trainer was seen to be lurking suspiciously in the background, but she declined to comment.

Have you spotted any strange or inexplicable items or creatures in your journeys around Outland? Have you any theories as to what they're there for?

I'm sure we've all done it from time to time -- trying to get somewhere new, you've encountered heavy resistance from the locals and died a terrible death. Refusing to give up, you've run back to your corpse and continued on, until you're caught and killed again. Perhaps you thought you'd be smart and run to the spirit healer in your destination zone, far off from where you died, only to tragically see that you've been sent back to the location of the spirit healer closest to your corpse.

This does make traveling through areas high above your level quite the challenge -- as I'm sure they were intended to be. Die, run back, rez a bit further down the road -- then simply wash, rinse, and repeat until you've reached your final destination. However, over at Mania's Arcana, Mania provides us with two tricks that will allow you to do the majority of your traveling as a ghost. The trick? If you die on one continent and then spirit rez in the other (yes, you can ride boats and zepplins as a ghost!), you'll be allowed to rez right where you want to. And, perhaps more conveniently, if you run as a ghost to wherever you wish, disconnect, reconnect, and then try to spirit rez, you'll be allowed to.

Now, both of these little tricks smack of overlooked bugs, as the intended behavior of the game client is clear. But at present it is a working strategy in-game that can be used to more quickly move you from point A to point B.

Listings for Starcraft: Ghost are up on the web sites of mega-retailers Best Buy (thanks, Gazoo) and Toys "R" Us (thanks, Rich) -- do a search on either site for "Starcraft" to see them. As most of you probably know, SC:G was announced as a planned console title in 2002, but "indefinitely postponed" in 2006. It was to be a first-person shooter set in the Starcraft universe, with a Terran Ghost as the main character. Do these listings mean tomorrow's announcement is going to be the long-awaited continuance of Ghost?

When I had only seen it on the Best Buy site, I was thinking not: the versions listed are for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube, all last-gen systems. If Blizz was working on a new console game, wouldn't they do it for new consoles? But then I was reminded that if this is in fact SC:G, it has been in development for a very long time, and what are now last-gen consoles would have been current during most of its development history. And then I saw it on a second retailer's site, Toys "R" Us; this is far from proof, but it is more suggestive.

The release date according to BB is 6/15/07, while TRU has it as 8/15/08. That's a pretty large discrepancy, but what is more interesting to me is the closeness of the date. Blizz never announces a project that close to shipping. Then again, there's a first for everything, and they've certainly had long enough to make this game. TRU has the game at $49.99, but BB has it at a strange $47.49. Sam said he worked for BB and never saw games priced like that...hm. And Mike says that the listing has been on BB ever since the game was announced, and the odd pricing means that pre-orders are not currently being accepted. Anyway, what do you guys think? And can you find listings for this on any other sites? Has the TRU listing been there a while as well?