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The Future of Storytelling
Someone recently brought the following to my attention:
narrativedesign.org/2008/11/masters-of-narrative-design-7.html
It's a fascinating interview with
Flint Dille
, but for those not interested in reading the entire article, I was drawn to a particular moment when he says “Storytelling in MMO's is the future”. Considering the limitations of running an MMO in a static, unchanging, endlessly repeating world, I found this to be an interesting philosophy.
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They're Everywhere...
Looks like someone over at
HP Labs
has been spending a little too much time in Azeroth. Click the image to see! :D
Edit:
Just in case HP takes the headline down, I've linked a screenshot rather than the front page of their website. :)
Anyone else seen WoW references popping up in unlikely places?
For those of you who don't know the reference, perhaps
this
will refresh your memory...
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A Tale of Two Tribes
Greetings fellow travelers of Northrend! Today I invite you to join me in my adventure into
Sholazar Basin
and experience a war between two rival factions. The
Frenzyheart Tribe
, who were forced to travel to Sholazar Basin because of the Scourge invading their homelands, have taken up arms against the native Gorlocs. The Gorlocs who occupy the basin are known as
the Oracles
, and consider themselves the guardians of the mysterious titan artifacts that litter their home. Though they know almost nothing about these artifacts, they worship and protect them from any harm.
Upon reaching level 76, you might find yourself trudging through the marshes and jungles of Sholazar Basin, surrounded by the warm atmosphere and rich, lavishing landscapes. I'm sure you have come across our little friends roaming the basin, shouting at each other and calling each other names like "Big-tongues" and "Puppy-men", and you may have thought to yourself, "How can I get involved in this growing conflict between these adorable little creatures?" This, my friends, is your answer.
So
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Wowhead Comic #2
It's Sunday!
This means it's time for another comic. This week it's a caption image, I find them somewhat more fun to draw. Although
Skosiris
' puppy proved a challenge.
Enjoy!
If you're interested to see the other silly things I draw, go
here
to visit my gallery website!
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Site Slowiness
So you guys may have noticed some slowdown on the site lately. Unfortunately, one of our webservers has suffered a major hard drive failure, and had to be taken offline, and the other two are a little overloaded trying to keep up. We have the team at the data center working on it, and it should be fixed soon.
Kindly bear with us! :(
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WoWInterface Pick of the Week for 11/23
This week, we're tackling
Ara Broker XP
(a new addon) and
WhispList
(an updated addon).
Ara Broker XP
This is a LibDataBroker plugin to display an ASCII representation of your experience bar. You can change which characters to use for the bar (could do ******* or >>>>>> or ~-~-~-~-~-~- even), how many times to repeat the pattern (how long the bar is), and what colors to use. Options are controlled in the lua file, but it should be fairly easy to customize it to your liking, and there are explanations on the addon's download page. Since this is just an LDB plugin, you will need a display to show it in. For more information on LibDataBroker, see
this PotW
.
To read more about it and download the addon, see
here
!
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Happy Birthday, WoW
Just a quick one for you guys today--Boubouille over at MMO-Champion was kind enough to inform the public that tomorrow is World of Warcraft's 4th birthday, and to be sure to log in for your
birthday present
. :D
That's
November 23rd
, in whatever time zone your server happens to be in. EU players have likely gotten their present already!
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Friday is Casual Day
To an extent, I have always been a social person. When given the option, I prefer to be hanging out with friends as opposed to doing something alone. I discovered video games before I turned 10 years old during a social gathering where some friends of mine were playing Super Mario Brothers on the
NES
. I was instantly enamored by the concept of electronic gaming and that fascination has carried on into my adult years. The social aspect of gaming has remained important, even to this day. Sure, I play a video game by myself every once in a while, but I have way more fun when I am competing with or against friends, or even when we're simply watching one another play a game.
World of Warcraft is no exception.
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What's Your Game?
So Blizzard has added two more celebrity WoW commercials to their lineup for World of Warcraft, one featuring Ozzy Osbourne (the Prince of Darkness) and one featuring Steve Van Zandt (of
The Sopranos
, and of Bruce Springstreen's
E Street Band
).
Now I love these commercials as much as the next guy. But to me, the genius of this whole thing is much bigger than just some good commercials.
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Skills to Pay the Bills: Fishing
Skills to Pay the Bills
is a three-part feature that will cover the important details of leveling the secondary tradeskills of Fishing, First Aid and Cooking in Wrath of the Lich King. These posts are written for the player entering Northrend with all secondary professions already maxed (at 375 skill). For information on leveling tradeskills prior to 375, check out the
Profession Leveling Guides
sticky on our
forums
!
Part 1: Fishing
Fishing
is one of the easiest professions to max out, though it can be fairly time consuming. Most players opt to raise fishing casually when they find themselves with free time. You can train
Grand Master Fishing
from a
Grand Master Fishing Trainer
located in
Borean Tundra
,
Howling Fjord
or
Dalaran
. You can typically expect to spend somewhere around three to five hours raising your Fishing skill from 375 to 450. Skill-ups are gained typically every 10-15 or so suc
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Back in the Good Old Days
I'm not sure offhand what percentage of World of Warcraft players also played
Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos
and the expansion pack,
The Frozen Throne
. But
I
certainly did--for a while, Warcraft 3 and Diablo II were the only games I was capable of playing. I was never much GOOD at Warcraft 3, but I enjoyed it a great deal even when I was losing. In fact, my primary reason for picking up World of Warcraft in the first place was because I was excited to see the familiar characters, locations and battles from my old favorite game writ large--I wanted to see Warcraft 3 from the Footman's point of view.
My choice of race in Warcraft 3 was the
Undead
, and it was that reason (and that reason only) that saw me on the Horde side of the game rather than on the Alliance side--which to this day is where most of my friends remain. My first
character
was Undead, because I really wanted to get in and see the Scourge mobs and buildings in huge, life siz
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Lorebook: The Nathrezim - Otherwise known as the Dreadlords
Your lovable Skyfire has signed up to blog (woe on him?!). I'm the Master Bookkeeper, and this week, we're going to tackle a serious subject that you may not have thought on before: The Nathrezim, more commonly known as the Dreadlords. You should know who they are -
Varimathras
and
Balnazzar
among them, and the
random mini-boss
of course. But do you know where they hail from, or their original purpose on Azeroth? If you don't, read on...
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Journey to Northrend - Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra?
Now that Blizzard has officially released the expansion, millions of players have already begun upon their journey to Northrend. However, for many there remains a question, one which must be addressed before traveling:
Howling Fjord
or
Borean Tundra
?
Check out our rundown of the two zones after the break.
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WotLK Raiding - Lacking in Options?
When you place the raids available to us at the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King on a platter and compare them to Burning Crusade, it shows us that there aren't as many options--and perhaps even less creativity--when compared to its predecessors.
At the very beginning of Burning Crusade we had the following 10/25 man raids accessible to us:
Karazhan
,
Gruul's Lair
,
Magtheridon's Lair
,
Serpentshrine Cavern
,
The Eye
, and
Hyjal Summit
(excluding world bosses). In WotLK we have
Naxxramas
,
The Eye of Eternity
,
The Obsidian Sanctum
, and
Vault of Archavon
, which is based on the results of a
Wintergrasp
battle, and which may or may not be available to you every week.
While TBC only had two more compared to WotLK, don't forget that three out of the four WotLK raids are merely single encounter bosses. That means even less time to learn the instances, and more time waiting for the next one to arrive. Also, give
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Return of the WoW Player
The launch of Wrath of the Lich King makes me think of waiting in line at 11:00 PM on November 23, 2004 to get into a EB Games store to pickup my pre-order. Here I was with a bunch of fellow gamers. I had just driven 30 minutes south to a nearby city, as my city of 10,000 without a video game store just won't cut it. There are about 50 people in line waiting excitedly. People are talking about what class they are going to play, did they play in the beta or not, are they going to play Horde or Alliance, what server are they going to be playing on. The comments and questions from one random gamer to the other were flying around furiously. Here we are, almost 4 years later, and I have been hearing the same story happening at nearly every game store on the continent.
When I first started playing I had about 20 real life friends who were also playing. Over time some have left, others joined. As of last week I didn't have any real life friends who still played the game regularly. Then all of a sudden -- Wrath launches. Counting on all of my fingers and all of my toes, I have over
30 friends
who are playing again. When
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WoWInterface Pick of the Week for 11/17
Hello Wowhead Blog readers! I am a moderator over at
WoWInterface
, one of Wowhead's sister sites. Every week over at WoWInterface, we do something called the Pick of the Week where we dig through the new/updated mods from the week before and pick out one (or sometimes a few) that pique our interests. With the creation of the Wowhead Blog, we now have the opportunity to share the PotW with the Wowhead community! This week's pick:
Death Knight
mods!
After the break you'll find this week's addons.
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Michael Bay Presents: World of Explosionscraft!
For those of you that don't already know,
Warner Brothers
announced around May 2006 that they had a World of Warcraft movie in the works, and eventually, it was wormed out of them that they predicted a 2009 release. The project since dropped off the radar, and it was discovered this year at Blizzcon that the movie is in fact currently being written, or at least that's what they say among other such vague-ities as “there are still plans for...” Who knows if it's actually happening, but it's certainly not happening in 2009.
Now, you don't quite know me well enough to care what I
think
about this (at least not yet), so let me settle for
telling
you a couple things. If you're like me, at some point you thought “Isn't making a film out of World of Warcraft going to be difficult?”, since so many people play the game at different levels, there's no unified narrative, and lots of other reasons why it's not an intellectual property that you can make a movie out of.
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Changes and Additions in 3.0
As I'm sure everyone knows, there are many new features and additions to the game with the recent expansion. Some changes occurred pre-release and some we had to wait for to experience. It comes as no surprise that perhaps some of these changes have been overlooked or received little recognition. Today we're going to look at some of these changes and hopefully bring them to light so everyone can benefit from them.
First of all, we have some major game mechanics changes. Hit rating, critical strike rating, and haste rating were all changed to be more or less the same for melee and caster classes. Damage and healing have been combined into spell power. Health and power (e.g. mana) regeneration have been changed to update in real time! Furthermore, spells no longer receive any "pushback" after a second hit--the first two hits taken give 0.5 sec penalties, so they stack for a total of 1 sec longer casting time.
Next is bag space. Precious slots have been freed with the addition of the "Currency" tab on the Character Sheet. Honor and Arena points, Battleground Marks of Honor, and even Badges of Justice have been converted to tracking via this tab. All of the actu
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Music Makes the People Come Together
So you may not know it about me, but video games are but
one
of my twisted obsessions. The other big one is music--and I will always have a special spot in my heart reserved for the place where those two loves meet.
I wasn't the first kid in my school to have a Nintendo, by any means. That honor belonged to my friend Chris, who was kind enough to invite me to his house to play (at a time when
everyone
wanted to come to his house to play). We played the original Super Mario Bros. until all hours of the morning, and sure--the game was fun. I had a good time. But it was the
music
, written by the honorable
Koji Kondo
, that convinced me that I
had to have one
. That song is still with me, and considering how many cellphone ringtones it continues to grace today, I'm clearly not the only one.
When I first started playing games I had the musical joy of games like
Super Mario Bros
. and
Legend of Zelda
, the
Mega Man
series, [url=
http://en.wikipedia.org/w
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Wowhead Comic #1
Hi there! My name is Noxy and with this wonderful new blogging system, I will be bringing you a weekly webcomic, featuring the
Wowhead team
, myself, and maybe even a few guests!
Without further ado, here's the first one!
Huge thanks to Skosiris, Malgayne and Miyari for letting me do this, and to use their wonderful website as a guinea pig for my silly art projects.
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