Posts with tag youtube

The official Heroes of the Storm Youtube account highlighted a familiar voice earlier this week in its Building the Nexus segments. Travis Willingham is a man of many voices, having lent his pipes to an incredibly diverse list of characters in anime, animation, and video games alike. In Heroes of the Storm, he takes a different direction from the usual heroic-voiced roles and takes on Gazlowe, a goblin that WoW players should be plenty familiar with. The NPC was the Chief Engineer of the Horde back when Orgrimmar was being built after the Third War, but later moved to Ratchet, where he stays today. Affiliated with the Steamwheedle Cartel, Gazlowe now hands out quests to Alliance and Horde alike. He's also one of the few goblin NPCs in the game with unique voice files.

In Heroes of the Storm, Gazlowe charges into battle armed with a load of mechanics and explosives strapped to his back, and a volley of well-placed quips to hurl at opponents. The latest edition of Building the Nexus features Community Manager Josh "Rokcet" Rester-Zodrow having a chat with Willingham about the game and the unique challenges of bringing a character like Gazlowe to life. We don't usually see a lot of voice actor highlights, so this is a pretty cool behind the scenes -- I'd love to see some of these done for Warcraft as well. Take a look at the video above, and if you like it, be sure to check out the rest of what the Heroes Youtube channel has to offer.

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YouTube is set to acquire Twitch.tv for $1 billion, according to sources at Variety. At the moment, there are few details about the deal, but the acquisition would make sense. Since Twitch's launch, it has become the de facto livestreaming service for gamers. Gaming channels are also some of YouTube's most popular content, but their own attempts at provided a livestream service have left something to be desired in comparison to Twitch. Joining the services rather than attempting to compete is the obvious choice for YouTube. With this acquisition, Google will become an even more dominant force, owning the largest video sharing site on the internet in addition to the largest streaming service, combined with their marketshare in smartphones.

The news of the acquisition has raised some concerns about potential Google+ integration. There has been no word about that happening as of yet, but the gaming audience considers its integration with YouTube a nuisance at best. Maintaining a separation of real identities and online identities has long been a sticking point for gamers, as displayed by the Real ID incident back in 2010, when Blizzard intended for real names to be used on the Battle.net forums, a decision that the company reversed before it went live.

How this acquisition impacts Twitch, for better or for worse, will be interesting to watch. Many games released in recent years, Blizzard's Hearthstone among them, owe at least a portion of their popularity to Twitch streamers. With 45 million unique viewers per month as of January 2014, Twitch's impact on gaming is substantial.

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It may be the "all your base" of the WoW world, but the Leeroy Jenkins meme will always be with us. Recently, the Worldwide Film Festival asked three directors to reimagine some of the world's most notorious viral videos as short films, and Finn O'Hara chose the Leeroy Jenkins video for his.

O'Hara's version of Leeroy Jenkins, featuring the raid members as bank robbers and Leeroy as, well, a Leeroy, is certainly faithful to the dialogue of the original. Sadly, O'Hara chose to leave out "At least I have chicken," but one could see how it wouldn't really fit in with the rest of the film.

Another entrant of note is Jeff Chan's Charlie Bit My Finger, which will result in flashbacks for anyone who's ever been overrun by zombies in a first-person shooter and totally ruined the cuteness of the original.

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

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YouTube user and Minecraft enthusiast Haasth22 has replicated some of the human starting experience in popular indie title Minecraft, complete with blockified tier 2 Judgement armor and quest NPCs. Sure, it's heavily edited, but who doesn't love seeing Azeroth all blocky with that recognizable Minecraft charm? Whatever you do, don't watch the movie while playing WoW, because you will alt-tab into game to see if you got a message or a whisper (like I'm doing right now) while listening to the sounds of the video.

If you've got other cool recreations of WoW in Minecraft, we'd love to see it. You can always use our tip line to send us videos, questions, and suggestions. Heck, you could even shoot us a compliment. We love compliments.

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Last week in The Daily Quest, you may have seen a YouTube video of a recreation of Darnassus in Minecraft. If you thought that was cool, there's more where that came from. In addition to Darnassus, YouTuber kattooMC and his servermates resresres1 and nessy27 have also created a scale model of Deathwing (which has made the rounds once before) and, much more recently, Molten Core's version of Ragnaros.

These Minecraft builds do use game mods or third-party tools, and there are blocks incorporated into the designs that cannot be placed by players (such as the blocks of Coal in Deathwing) -- but cool is cool, regardless of how something is made. Many viewers of the Ragnaros video have commented that he looks a bit ... green. However, kattooMC assured everyone it was just a result of video encoding. As a Minecraft player myself, I'll back him up on that. I know what yellow wool blocks look like when I see 'em.

According to kattoo via Twitter, Stormwind is next on their Warcraft to-do list. I, for one, can't wait to see it.

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Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play?

The machinima and streaming communities built around World of Warcraft are filled with some of the most talented and creative people in gaming, from awesome musicians to dedicated streamcasters. The first time I ever got to experience the WoW beta back in 2004, I was watching someone stream footage of their human warlock messing up mobs in (if I remember correctly) Westfall. Streaming is beneficial to gaming, MMOs, and e-sports because of video games' competitive nature and spectator-oriented design.

You've probably heard of Senate bill S.978 already, most likely from many video game blogs and news outlets or YouTube campaigns fighting against the passage of this bill. Bill S.978 aims to institute a "10 strikes" policy, making the unauthorized streaming of content a felony, resulting in potential jail time. The main purpose of the bill is to strengthen the law and punishments available to organizations such as the MPAA and other content conglomerates to stop illegal streaming of millions upon millions of dollars in stolen entertainment. As is the way of things, gamers might be caught in the crossfire.

Some of you fine readers sent me a few messages on Twitter asking me to weigh in on the 10 strikes streaming bill and maybe give a basic analysis of the thing, so I shall oblige. Lawbringer this week is all about the odd future of bill S. 978 and what it could mean for MMOs and WoW.

The WoW.com crew has been hard at work on full walkthroughs of the worgen and goblin starting experiences in the Cataclysm beta, and in the process we've built up a few videos that we simply don't want to sit on any longer. You'll see these videos in our guides as planned, so consider this a sneak preview. Obviously almost every single one of these videos is heavy with Cataclysm spoilers. Don't want to be spoiled? Don't watch.

Embedded above is the quest The Great Bank Heist. You can head over to our YouTube channel (or click the links below) to see:

Worgen Starting Zone

• Meet Lord Darius Crowley
• Sacrifices
• Fun With Placeholders
• You Can't Take 'Em Alone
• Tunnel Rats
• Transformation Animation

Goblin Starting Zone

• Hot Roddin'
• The Great Bank Heist (embedded above)
• Monkey Business
• And more to come!

We've already said it a few times since the beta started, but we do strongly recommend subscribing to our YouTube channel. While most of the videos that are uploaded there will find their way here eventually, subscribing is a good way to get a sneak peek at upcoming features ... and catch the few videos that don't make it to our front page.

The video embedded above, WoW.com's Lich King Tutorial, marks the arrival of Jerome Phillips (also known as Vodka's Kinaesthesia) to our team. He has a lot of talent and a lot of ideas, so we're happy to have him. You've probably seen some of his work before, most notably his trailer for Patch 3.3's Frozen Halls. This Lich King tutorial is just the first of many projects we'll be doing together, so we hope you enjoy it and find it useful. Due to the length of the encounter (and thus the tutorial), it has been split into two parts. The first part is above, and the second part is behind the cut below. As is true with all things in life, these videos are best when viewed in HD.

This video is just the beginning of a larger project here at WoW.com. We're working to bring more video content to the site in all areas, raids and otherwise. We have big plans for Cataclysm in particular. With this in mind, we've made it a point to make our video content easier to find and navigate. Any videos made by the WoW.com staff will be posted to our new YouTube channel rather than scattered across the staff's personal channels willy-nilly as they have been in the past. Check it out, and if you're feeling especially kind, go ahead and subscribe, too.

At the end of the summer last year I had this crazy idea: to make a TV show about a raiding guild. I was inspired by the relationships and interactions in my current guild and how much they impacted me personally -- both good and bad. I fleshed out the idea over beers (many beers) with some friends. We talked about logistics, equipment, participation, but most importantly, the goal. I wanted the show to be about the people, to be about the interaction between the raiders. And I don't mean ninja-looting drama-mama QQing. I wanted to explore the things that go on in a group of people trying to work together online to accomplish something great. There's more to raiding than drama. Things like, as I'm fond of saying, "the soul crushing 1% wipes and the absolute exhilaration of taking down a new boss for the first time."

I worked on a pitch and reached out to friends & family in "the biz" but I spent most of my time trying to explain concepts such as a "raid" or a "boss" or that when I said "guild" I meant a group of MMO gamers and not an actor's or writer's union -- which made for some very confusing conversations at first. Frustrated, I wasn't sure I'd ever convince anyone this was an idea worth doing. But I knew it was.