before-and-after
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Player blasts free from overweight gamer stereotype
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. Teeth-gritting stereotypes aside, the intersection of fitness and gaming is something we've covered a fair amount here at WoW Insider. There's the player who set up a system of "leveling down" as he lost weight, although a visit to his blog these days doesn't turn up much action. There's the player who lost 100 pounds on a treadmill while he played WoW, before such exercise setups were relatively common. We even ran an entire series last year on shaping up, Buffing for BlizzCon. What we haven't run yet is a story on a gamer who's taken the weight off and kept it off while not only piling on new interests and active pursuits but also maintaining his love of WoW and gaming. A WoW player since the days of the original beta, Jonathan (aka Thundertotem) was a finalist in Subway Canada's Commit to Fit Ambassador search. While he wasn't ultimately chosen as the Subway representative and spokesperson, he says he remains a hardcore gamer even with his weight loss and fitness success.
Fallen Earth's art director talks about updating the apocalypse
When it comes to an apocalypse, you might think that you could bang up some destroyed buildings, slap some dirt on them and call it a day. But as we learned from a recent guest dev blog on Curse with Fallen Earth's Art Director, Chris Deavellar, there's a lot of work that goes into creating a believable, realistic apocalypse. Players who are currently finding their way in Fallen Earth will undoubtedly be glad to hear that graphical updates like the one above in the works, and will be coming to us down the road. Additionally, as part of the updates that they're working on, these new building formats and textures will help to reduce the memory needed to render all the original, legacy buildings. In all, it's a great post, offering up some frank "making-of" type information for those who are curious about how this indie studio is moving forward with their work on Fallen Earth. Also included are a series of interior and exterior images showing before and after - updates that will help to improve the overall look and feel of the game. For an apocalypse, we think it looks pretty cool, and can't wait until we ride into Embry and see all new, less memory-intensive buildings.
