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Confirmed: no DVD playback for the Wii
Nintendo, in their almost-infinite tornado of news today, never mentioned anything on the promised ability for the Wii to play DVD movies. No mention in the press releases that followed their event today either? Hmm, how odd...So what does Nintendo's VP of Marketing Perrin Kaplan have to say about this? Well, apparently she confirmed to IGN that the Wii is going to totally toss out the DVD movie functionality all together. The decision to rid the console of this feature was apparently in the interest of delivering it at a cheaper price for the consumer. So Fanboy readers, is this a good or bad thing?
Joystiq Interviews Jeff Kaplan
Joystiq managed to get a interview with World of Warcraft's lead designer, Jeff Kaplan, (you may know him as "Tigole" on the forums) - and there's some interesting stuff here. Of course there's a lot of info here, but some of the most interesting talk revolves around the new PvP system. As was posted earlier, the system will consist of arena matches of 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5 which will can be alliance v. horde, alliance v. alliance, or horde v. horde and cross-server. And the honor system as we know it will be gone entirely - to quote Kaplan: It's a competitive-based ladder that uses a rating system similar to the chess ELO rating. One of the key differences is that we require a minimum number of games that you have to play. Unlike in the chess system where if you're on top, you can just sit there, we wanted to ensure that the No. 1 guy can be knocked off his top spot. But, we don't require too many games. We'll require something around ten games. Further, honor points as we know them will be significantly changed. There will be no more honor decay and instead of determining your PVP rank, the honor points you accumulate can be spent to purchase PVP gear. And other tidbits touched on by the interview include... News that there's been some thought about implementing voice chat in the game, though it won't be coming in the Burning Crusade. Dungeons (though whether all dungeons, or simply expansion dungeons) will have a "normal" and "hard" difficulty setting, and loot will be adjusted accordingly. They're currently anticipating new races with every expansion - though there is a finite limit on the number of races in Azeroth. I can't help but be excited about this news.
