Posts with tag playable

Those players who dreamed of a future in which they could be naga had their dreams realized and crushed in less than a day because of foreign language interviews with Ghostcrawler. But instead of being disappointed in what we won't have let's talk about what races we want to see made playable in the next expansion and beyond.

Personally, I'm holding out for murlocs. Perhaps that MRGRGL sound we've been terrified of hearing for so long was actually a friendly greeting, a request for a hug or even just a handshake. Perhaps making them a playable race would be the first step towards reaching out in friendship to our semi-aquatic neighbors. Come on, Ghostcrawler, if you can't give us naga, surely you can make murlocs happen, right?

But that's probably a long shot. What do you think, readers? Which playable race is going to be headed to WoW next?

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Can't make it to BlizzCon but still want to check out Blizzard's latest offerings? Blizzard has appeared on the list of sponsors for Penny Arcade's PAX convention, which takes place later this year on September 4-6, 2009 in Seattle, Washington. PAX is a great time and a ton of fun -- I went a few years ago, and really enjoyed it. In addition to a terrific lineup of geeky musicians and demo panels from game developers, they always have a nice open floor full of the latest games to check out and play. And since PAX will be going down after BlizzCon (which takes place in two weeks), if you go, you'll likely have a chance to check out whatever Blizzard wants to put on display, be that Starcraft II or Diablo 3, or, you know... anything else they might announce.

Plus, tickets to PAX are cheaper and even easier to get than BlizzCon tickets anyway, not to mention that you'll be seeing way more games and companies than just Blizzard. In fact, why am I going to BlizzCon again? I'd almost rather go to PAX this year. I'd love to see Freezepop!

Oh, right, I can't miss our legendary meetup (wait until you guys see the giveaways we have planned!). But even if you're going to Penny Arcade's show because you can't make it to Blizzard's convention, stay tuned here to WoW.com -- we'll make you feel like you're there anyway.

And here lies the final chapter in the Taming of the Worgen saga: Mania reports that, just a little while after the troublesome Worgen Garwal was hotfixed to be untameable, Blizzard has magically changed all of the already-tamed Worgen to level 68 (or Hunter's level minus five) wolves. Why level 68? Because, Mania says, they've all been turned into Winterskorn Worgs, a level 63-69 NPC that wanders around the Howling Fah-jord.

So that's the end of that. Obviously, no one really expected to keep those pets as their own, and especially with all of the Worgen-as-playable-race speculation flying around, it wouldn't do for Hunters to have one of those humanoids at their beck and call. Some Hunters who went to the trouble of taming probably won't be too happy. But the good news is that the new white wolf in your stable is completely fixed -- it has all of the normal talent trees and abilities that wolves are supposed to have. Guess you and your pet Garwal were just never meant to be.

This Wrath 101 is very simple yet very important.

When can I exactly play this game I've been hearing about for 471 days*?

The answer can be made more complicated than you want to know. The short answer is at midnight in your respective time zones.

More complicated answers:

• Eastern Time Zone: 12:00:00 a.m. on Thursday November 13th, 2008
• Central Time Zone: 11:00:00 p.m. on Wednesday November 12th, 2008
  

Our BlizzCon Bingo game is back for its second year -- last year whether you won or not depended on what you saw, but people mostly were able to complete the necessary five across, with or without the help of the free space. This year, things are a little tougher, mostly because we just don't know what Blizzard is going to do -- will they announce the third expansion? Will they announce a new IP? Will they announce anything, or just treat the whole weekend as a Wrath preview?

Whatever happens, make sure you print out your bingo card before you go, and then throughout the weekend, cross off everything that you see on there. If, by the end of the weekend, you've nabbed five across, you win! And while last year, all you won was the satisfaction of seeing something cool, well heck, let's throw something else into the mix -- if you're the first person to personally show me a completed bingo card by the end of the convention, I'll have a prize waiting for you.

And no cheating! Trust us, there'll be plenty of Paladin complaining at the Q&As -- you won't have to go do it yourself.

As we announced earlier, BlizzCon tickets are on sale. Sort of. Kind of. If you can fight past the store servers. I know I've been getting nothing but the fail murloc pretty much all day. Still, I and the rest of WoW Insider's crack live team will be there come hell or high water, and we'll bring you the news you need to know. In the meantime, we're stuck here refreshing the Blizzard Store. To pass the time, we did a bit of speculation about what we might see in Anaheim on October 10th and 11th. Here's what we decided:

What we're sure to see

The Wrath of the Lich King Cinematic: Though we still have no solid announcement, Blizzard's already stated that they want to get Wrath out before 2008 is up. Considering that, they must have the opening cinematic pretty close to done. I would be surprised if we don't see it open the opening ceremony, to be completely honest. I'm expecting Arthas and/or a "rebel" Human Death Knight to feature prominently, as well as our first cinematic Gnome shot.

One of the things I love about this job is that your comments are full of ideas for future posts. LIke, say, this one! Inspired by this comment, I come to you this morning with the thought: does World of Warcraft need a third faction? Perhaps one with absolutely no common ground, dedicated wholly to the destruction of both the Horde and the Alliance? Commenter Finn suggests that he would like to see an expansion that let you play as part of the Burning Legion, and this got me to thinking: for all the people who think Warcraft is insufficiently warlike these days, with shades of grey in morality and no clear cut 'good' or 'evil' faction, would the addition of a faction that is purely nihilistic, cunning and willing to wipe out all life in the universe help push conflict back to the front lines?

I can't say I quite understand the ultraportable thing (why not just use a real computer?), but I have to admit that the Eee PC from Asus is a slick little device. Not as slick as the Macbook Air, but not nearly as pricey, so still pretty slick. And now it's even slicker- Dan from UltraMobileGeek has figured out how to install World of Warcraft on an Eee 701.

You can see in the video above that it's just barely playable-- you couldn't raid Black Temple (or even Karazhan, I'm sure), but for logging in and grinding or checking mail, it would probably work just fine. The process, unfortunately, isn't exactly simple-- you have to run modified drivers, overclock the PC, and run experimental code (plus, memory might be a problem, as you need an 8gb SDHC card and probably more RAM than you've got now)-- but if you're interested in pushing your Eee to the limit, it might be for you. One suggestion or Dan (and anyone else messing around with this): would the Wine version of WoW let you skip installing XP, since the Eee is Linux-based? Just wondering.

At any rate, sounds like a fun Saturday afternoon project if you've got an Eee to play around with and want your WoW ultraportable.