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Blizzard chief promises to 'rebuild trust' ahead of Microsoft takeover
Blizzard Entertainment boss Mike Ybarra has promised in a blog post to "rebuild your trust" in the studio.
Blizzard cancels BlizzConline 2022 amid sexual harassment scandal
Without directly referencing the sexual harassment scandal that has rocked the studio in recent months, Blizzard notes it plans to take time to “reimagine” BlizzCon.
'Diablo II: Resurrected' open beta begins on August 20th
Blizzard will hold two separate early access weekends ahead of Diablo II Resurrected's Septemeber 23rd release date.
Activision Blizzard CEO says response to harassment lawsuit was 'tone deaf'
Following nearly a week of internal unrest, Activision Blizzard has published a letter from CEO Bobby Kotick addressing the company’s original response to the sexual harassment lawsuit brought against it by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) on July 20th.
Hearthstone open beta pushed to 2014, closed beta opt-in still possible
Blizzard expressed hopes during Blizzcon that they would be able to launch the open beta of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft this month, but an update to the Hearthstone site's news feed explains that it's just not in the cards. "We believe the right thing to do for the game is to not rush it out into open beta, but to instead hold onto it a little longer to make sure it's ready for wider testing," the statement reads. "We're close to the open beta - very close." You can still secure your spot in the closed beta though - the same post explains that anyone who opts-in for the closed beta by January 7 will be invited in "at some point before the open beta begins." Anyone that signed up before December 16 for the closed beta but did not receive an invite should also check their spam folders, because Blizzard has sent invites to everyone that signed up before that date. If you can't find it, the post explains that Blizzard is constructing additional pylons a list of Battlet.net accounts that signed up for the closed beta, which will all be flagged for access "within the first few weeks of January." While the closed beta is for PC and Mac, Hearthstone will reach iPad and Android devices in the second half of 2014.
Blizzard details Myriam's Artisan abilities in Reaper of Souls
Blizzard has detailed Myriam Jahzia, a new Artisan that will help demon slayers rough up their prey in the upcoming Diablo 3 expansion, Reaper of Souls. Myriam is a Mystic, and shortly after players save her in Westmarch, she'll offer two services - the property-altering Enchanting and the appearance-oriented Transmogrification. Enchanting will allow a player to pick an unfavorable property on a Rare or Legendary item and then re-roll to potentially improve it. The post notes that "not all properties can be re-rolled," but most can, and players will be able to re-roll those as many times as they like after paying a material cost. Transmogrification will leave properties as they are and instead serve as a way to change just the appearance of armor and weapons. The Battle.net post states that "all items with a visual appearance" are planned for compatibility with the Transmogrification service, so long as the desired appearance has been unlocked. Keep in mind that item appearances unlocked in Normal mode will be separate from what you gather in Hardcore mode. Step-by-step procedures for using either option are written in full in the Battle.net post detailing the character, but the gist of it is that you'll need to visit her cart to have either service performed. You can also check out concept art of how her cart will visually progress as she levels up.
Forbes: Activision's dependence on declining WoW subs 'potential for a catastrophic situation'
With the recent news of World of Warcraft's struggling subscription numbers fresh on our minds, Forbes investigated WoW's primary shareholder and predicted trouble on the horizon for investors. "After looking into Activision Blizzard, Inc., we discovered an amazing looking company that is unfortunately almost completely sustained by the revenue it reaps from one game, World of Warcraft," the authors notes. "When considering that the same company has a 60% majority shareholder (Vivendi) looking to sell its shares in the company you get the potential for a catastrophic situation." Because Vivendi is having difficulty unloading Activision, Forbes says that any sharp decline in World of Warcraft's revenue will drag down Vivendi's stock severely. The authors also note that the company will suffer from the launch of Guild Wars 2: "The bottom line here is that gamers like to start on level playing fields. Gamers love to save money. Gamers are always in a frantic rush to play superior games. These three factors are the main reasons why Guild Wars 2 will win over market share from WoW." [Thanks to Mike for the tip!]
Global Chat: October 9-15, 2011
Welcome to this week's Global Chat! We love hearing what you have to say at Massively, and we love it even more when we can share the best comments with all of our readers. Massively staffers will be contributing some of their favorite comments every week, so keep an eye out every Sunday for more Global Chat! While almost all of our news stories and columns are game-specific, the conversation that follows in the comments often expands beyond the game in question. Discussion turns to mechanics, development styles, and industry trends. Even if the game in the original story isn't your thing, you may find some interesting conversation, so follow along after the jump to see what some of our readers had to say last week.
Global Chat: Choosing your path edition
Welcome to this week's Global Chat! We love hearing what you have to say at Massively, and we love it even more when we can share the best comments with all of our readers. Massively staffers will be contributing some of their favorite comments every week, so keep an eye out every Sunday for more Global Chat! This week's comments have proved to be all about decisions. Where do you want to go in a game that you purchased when you often have a broad variety of choices available? What game should you support in the hopes that it will succeed? Should you hope for another game to die so that your favorite one might live? Will you go down the creepy forest path or run back to the car? OK, maybe that last one wasn't in the comments this week, but the rest of them were. Jump on past the break to see some of the choice comments from the past week's articles.
Blizzard quashes speculation about a potential World of StarCraft
There's a very good reason why the now-infamous World of StarCraft mod had so many people so excited -- it seems like a pretty obvious project. After all, Blizzard has certainly made a big impression on the MMO world with World of Warcraft, so it seems like a no-brainer that their science fiction RTS might follow a similar path. Unfortunately, those of you waiting for just such an announcement have been told the exact opposite -- Blizzard currently has no plans to adapt the StarCraft setting to an MMO. According to senior VP Frank Pearce, it's not so much a case of not liking the idea as not having available staff and time to pursue the angle, with the company's teams currently occupied by Diablo III, the mysterious Titan project, further sequels to StarCraft II, and of course World of Warcraft. While the title remains in Blizzard's trademark arsenal, it doesn't look as if the company will be using it for a game any time in the near future. It's good news for players who want the series to remain as an RTS, but bad news for the many fans hoping to make their own mark on the galaxy.
The Daily Grind: Real ID disaster averted... or is it?
Well, it's all over after all. The evil dragon released by Blizzard has been slain by Blizzard again, after several days of people alternately cursing and staring slack-jawed in disbelieving horror. We can all go back to slaughtering Internet Dragons again, and the privacy issues are dealt with forever. Or if not forever, at least for now. Important lessons have been learned, lives have been ruined, and we can all go back to the way things were a couple days ago. Or can we? When your friend has a few drinks and smashes your entire living room to pieces but apologizes for it afterward, you usually aren't going to toss him a beer the next time he's at your house. Even though the unpopular decision has been reversed, it's understandable if your ire toward World of Warcraft hasn't cooled just yet... or if your trust in Blizzard isn't wholly restored. Are you willing to forgive and forget? Or is this the sort of thing you're going to remember for a long time?
Bobby Kotick muses about a Call of Duty MMO
Activision Blizzard owns one of the most profitable gaming franchises in the world with Call of Duty, and Bobby Kotick knows it. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Kotick was open about his ambitions with the series, saying that he wishes that they would create an online subscriber version. It's not a new sentiment from Kotick, as he's been saying as such for years, although it certainly is pretty straight-forward. Kotick threw a few logs onto the fire of speculation: "I would have Call of Duty be an online subscription service tomorrow. I think our audiences are clamouring for it. If you look at what they're playing on Xbox Live today, we've had 1.7 billion hours of multiplayer play on Live. I think we could do a lot more to really satisfy the interests of the customers. I think we could create so many things, and make the game even more fun to play." No stranger to controversial statements, it's hard to tell if Activision Blizzard's CEO was just shooting the breeze or hinting at an upcoming title from the publisher. In any case, a Call of Duty MMO would be major news indeed if it happened, so we'll be sure to keep our eyes on Activision -- and our ears on Kotick for any possible confirmation. [Via Eurogamer]
Blizzard unveils groundswell of new information on World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
If you play MMOs, you have some relationship to World of Warcraft. You may not be actively playing it, but odds are good you're watching out of the corner of your eye, especially with a new expansion on the way that promises to severely change the face of the game. Blizzard recently took the opportunity to hold a small press event in which they revealed several pieces of lore and gameplay information, and a great deal of it is fairly far-reaching -- especially as much of what's been announced includes scrapped plans. The "Path of the Titans" system? Scrapped, and replaced with an overhaul of the Inscription glyph system. Guild talents? Scrapped, with the benefits added automatically instead of allowing guild officers to specialize a given guild. Forcing 25-man progression to be locked together? Scrapped, after a fashion, as a raid lockout can be "split" into ten-person groups and can more easily be swapped. There's a lot of information, but we're not going to attempt to duplicate the excellent coverage of our sister site WoW.com -- instead, those curious should take a look at their roundup post, and the category with links to more in-depth analysis of each announcement.
[1.Local]: Questions, answers from our readers
Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.The comments section is usually a cacophony of voices seeking to agree or disagree with the main post, discredit previous commentors or make some pointless point ("first" -- /facepalm). This week, readers pulled together in a more truly interactive relationship, offering up questions, tips, insights and well thought-out suggestions and ideas. Take a trip through the pickings this week on ways to make professions more interesting, more Star Trek Easter eggs, getting real about DPS, copyright issues, snappier headlines ... and even a post devoted exclusively to guild and player recruitment notices.
BlizzCon press conference with Mike Morhaime
Mike Morhaime held a press conference earlier this afternoon, which WoW Insider was able to attend. I arrived a little late since it started before I finished up the UI panel liveblog, but I managed to catch a majority of the Q&A. Unlike the various panels, most of these questions were aimed at the philosophy and business model at Blizzard. How they've operated in the past, and how they'll operate in the future.BlizzCon itself came up a lot throughout the conference, the big question being will this BlizzCon be a letdown? There haven't been any major announcements. Announcements, sure, but nothing on the scale of Starcraft II or Diablo III. Mike Morhaime actually seemed most excited about this particular BlizzCon, because it isn't just showcasing one game. All three of their primary franchises have something new on the way, and fans of all of those games are in attendance. Beyond that, he believes the community is extremely important, and gatherings like BlizzCon are important as well. Blizzard themselves were blown away by just how many people were trying to attend the convention this time around. The number of hopefuls completely dwarfed both last year's BlizzCon and the more recent Worldwide Invitational. Will BlizzCon continue to be an annual event? Maybe. They'll focus on this weekend first, and then they'll start talking about next year once it's through.What I found most interesting, though? Morhaime was asked what the most unusual, off the wall concepts they had for a game that simply did not work out. He mentioned a game titled Nomad that Blizzard was developing after Starcraft was first released. A game they had never mentioned or announced until now. It was a post-apocalyptic style setting, but each day they sat down to work on it, it was with a little trepidation. Eventually they asked themselves, "If we were going to work on just one project today, would it be Nomad or would it be something else?" They went with something else. That something else was World of Warcraft.
Second Life content creators face genuine dilemmas
Content theft has always been something of an issue in Second Life, though there seems to be less of it going on in per capita terms than in the physical world. That said, it is interesting to see Second Life content creators increasingly moved towards positions maintained by music and movie publishers in the physical world. "Why would anyone walk into a store and spend 400 or 500 Linden on a dress, if they can get a dress of similar quality for free or very cheap from a reseller," asks Ziggy Quirk.
The stormy courtship of Blizzard/Activision
We've talked quite a bit about the merger of Vivendi's games unit and the publisher Activision, and what the newly formed Blizzard/Activision behemoth might mean for the industry. A proxy statement for the deal unearthed by the Wall Street Journal reveals that not once but twice did the deal come close to collapsing. It also reveals that there was a pretty clear winner in the talks - and it may not be who you think.The two close calls were all about business gamesmanship, the article notes. The first, in June of last year, came when talks apparently stalled over the issue of price. Activision's stocks were initially valued at $23.38 a share and at one point that summer Jean-Bernard Levy, Vivendi's CEO, phoned Activision CEO Robert Kotick to let him know "he did not think it made sense to continue discussions concerning a possible transaction". Then, in September, Levy phoned Kotick to say essentially the same thing. There were apparently a number of open issues still to discuss at that point, only two months before the official announcement went across the wire.Both of these delays were nothing more than stalling tactics as obviously both companies were able to put aside their issues and come to an agreement. Still, the Journal notes, Activision came out ahead over the course of negotiations. Those $23 shares ballooned to $27.50 each, a price 31% above the stock price before the announcement. Additionally, Robert Kotick (formerly of Activision) gets to be the CEO of the new combined company. It's easy to get blinded by all that Blizzard gold sometimes, but Vivendi (in this case) looks like it just didn't have all the cards.[Via FiringSquad]
Video game giants awarded at CES 2008
Several video games and their respective creators were honored at the fifty-ninth Annual Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards at CES 2008 in Las Vegas. The awards spotlighted some of the most groundbreaking titles in development of massively multiplayer online graphical role playing games as well as user generated content or game mods. The winners of the first category for development of MMORPGs were Sony Online Entertainment for Everquest (Laura Naviaux), Blizzard for World of Warcraft (Mike Morhaime) and AOL/Time Warner for Neverwinter Nights (Don Daglow).And the winners of the second category for user generated content/game modification were EA for Pinball Construction (Bill Budge), Id Software for Quake (John Carmack) and Linden Lab for Second Life (Philip Rosedale).Pictured from left to right: Daglow, Budge, Carmack, Naviaux, Rosedale, MorhaimeWe really only have just one thing to mention. If you're the representative of a multi-billion-dollar international corporation like Activision Blizzard, shouldn't you consider something other than raiding your dad's closet for a 1970's brown polyester suit? Although, only really rich people can afford to look broke, because they buy good stuff and wear it forever. So when Mike got it, it was probably very chic... in the 70's.
BlizzCast cometh
Podcast, vidcast, streamed content, or just the show: whatever you want to call the "new media" uprising. I welcome any of our overlords that enter the leet infoz arena. Blizzard has finally acknowledged the need to get with the times by launching a video podcast. BlizzCast is set to kick off the first week in January and will be produced by Blizzard. Viewers can expect hullabaloo from various Starcraft 2 and WoW developers with some Q&A rounds thrown into the mix and will top it off with glorious prizes. We do prizes too. We know you love them. I guess Blizzard is testing the waters, and will be keeping a close eye on how the show is received. If it doesn't take off the show might fizzle into obscurity. The first episode will see two developers yakking it up: Interview with Sam Didier (Art Director SCII): Concept Art for the StarCraft and Warcraft Franchises Interview with Jeff Kaplan (Lead Designer WoW): Highlights of Sunwell Plateau and Patch 2.4
MMOG Podcast Roundup: Dec. 1st - Dec. 18th
Every week, hardworking Massive gaming fans put their voices on the line to bring us news, opinions, and 'critiques' of their favorite games. Podcasts are a staple of many hobbies nowadays, and fans of online worlds are especially fortunate in this regard ... there are a ton out there. As such, every so often we'll try to update you on the podcasting world. Keep your eyes on this space for links to your favorite MMO-commentary celebs. Good and bad, straight-man or blue-mouthed, they all have something to offer about this amazing style of gameplay.This month more than ever the podcasters have spoken ... and spoken, and spoken. The huge update today is my fault, though. Thanks to a fairly spectacular PC failure last week my productivity has gone way down; some people have problems separating their gaming and work lives - I have a problem working if I can't game! Today's highlighted 'casts both talk about Sony Online Entertainment games - one of the exclusively. The official SOE podcast is the only thing like it in the Massive gaming space. It's not as big budget as Bungie's offering, perhaps, but it's still a fascinating look behind the scenes at one of the biggest MMOG publishers out there. Episode 27 is all about the holiday events in SOE games from the dev team perspective; holiday appropriate and intersting to boot! The other 'cast I want to highlight almost seemed like it had gone AWOL. EQ2-Daily has been a staple of the MMOG podcasting scene for some time - their 50th episode was back in October, and we haven't heard a peep out of them since Rise of Kunark launched. But rejoice, EQ2-Daily: Episode 51 was released just a few days ago. With news about the departure of EverQuest 2's senior producer and controversy about character transfers, their insights into the game are sure to be heartily appreciated.Check out the casts' of December, and make sure to have a great Holiday.
