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No pain, no gain: Bungie on cross-platform development
Bungie has pushed live another lengthy edition of its long-running Mail Sack feature, this one covering questions from the community about board games (the team likes them), podcasts (Bungie's shall return), Destiny's best moments (all too spoilery to reveal), and the reveal date for the release date of the studio's upcoming next-gen shooter-MMO hybrid (totally sometime in the future, maybe). Also discussed? The reason Bungie built Destiny as a multi-platform release. According to the studio, creating a game that isn't exclusive to one console gives the Bungie community an opportunity to "welcome new players who may have never experienced a Bungie game before." Bungie contends, "Developing a cross-platform game is hard, but the perks outweigh the pain." The other likely bonus of going multi-platform, in which a developer practically doubles the potential install base of a title, was left unsaid.
Developer Q&A on Thursday, April 25
Yesterday evening the WoW official blog announced there there will be a CoverItLive Q&A session at 5:30 pm PDT with Blizzard developers Dave Kosak, Ion Hazzikostas, Brian Holinka, Cory Stockton, and Greg Street on the subject of Mists of Pandaria's gameplay and design. Familiar community managers Bashiok, Crithto, Daxxarri, Rygarius, and Zarhym will be your friendly neighborhood moderators for the event. The session is scheduled to last around 45 minutes, though I'm certain many more minutes worth of questions will be asked! I'm excited to see this event come around, Blizzard has hosted a few CoverItLive chats in the past and they're always very interesting to see. The real-time interaction is fun and gratifying, and we always learn new things about the game and Blizzard's approach to development. For those of you who may not have seen one of these before, you can check out WoW Insider's transcripts of previous live developer Q&A's to get a sense of what to expect: Mists of Pandaria preview, Oct 2011 Class Balance and Design, Nov 2011 Customer Service, Dec 2012 Get your questions ready for Thursday, and we hope to see you there!
Mists of Pandaria live developer Q&A transcript
Blizzard held a Mists of Pandaria live developer Q&A this evening. It was moderated by Community Manager Zarhym, with most of the questions being answered by Cory "Mumper" Stockton and Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street. The questions ran the gamut from serious to silly and offered a lot of great insight into the upcoming expansion and the inner workings of the development team. Highlights include, but are not limited to: The new Pandaria faction hubs New guild levels and perks New talent system Pet Battle system, including a possible spectator mode The possible abolishing of prime glyphs Ghostcrawler's feelings on #OccupyGregStreet Matticus. Just ... Matticus. The developers have already expressed interest in holding more of these chats, and I know I'm all in favor of it. For more information on the content of this evening's chat, check the official site, or stick with us after the break for a complete transcript.
Shifting Perspectives: Developer Q&A touches on resto druid issues
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we turn our attention the most recent developer Q&A ... and we all know what happened the last time we did that. I spent the weekend being a trifle distracted (and then heartbroken) by the Women's World Cup, but at least we can feel good about the winner. Oh, and for all those of you who utilize musk deer glands in your health regimen, please remember to check them for steroids, in much the same fashion that one would check flour for boll weevils and rice grains for moths in one's pantry. This has been a public service announcement by your friendly local World of Warcraft blog, which takes an interest in this matter because a commenter once accused it of fomenting unrest in North Korea. What the hell is this column supposed to be about? Oh, right. Anyway, the final developer Q&A was published this past Friday, and within it were a few nuggets of interest to restoration druids. We didn't get any questions that specifically dealt with our spec, so I am not required to Hulk out over the lack of answers that Blizzard has traditionally provided to such questions, so let's spend today being happy and relatively sane.
Shifting Perspectives: Why the tank Q&A sucked
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we started writing this column last Wednesday. Don't get me wrong: It's not that I don't like the developer Q&A sessions. They're a great idea, and although they don't make up for Ghostcrawler's absence from the forums, they're a nice insight into the developers' thought process and a peek at the issues that matter most to players. The effort's appreciated even when players ask pointless questions (of which the need to do so appears to be a congenital disorder) or use the opportunity to grandstand about issues no one cares about. But the tank Q&A was ... not Blizzard's best effort. To borrow a phrase from Harry Knowles, I love hard-working Blizzard, I'm blown away by creative Blizzard, and I'm in awe of big-dreaming and overreaching Blizzard. But I freaking hate lazy Blizzard.
En Masse answers twenty TERA questions
Amira over at TERAfans.com has published a lengthy question and answer session with En Masse Entertainment's Brian Knox. En Masse, North American publishers for the forthcoming BlueHole Studios MMORPG, was formed by veterans of both Blizzard and NCSoft and their first project is localizing and distributing TERA to the western market. Knox drops a few interesting tidbits, including a brief mention of TERA's political system. "TERA's endgame will involve the full spectrum of things you expect from an MMO, including battling in dungeons with PvE instances, taking to the battlegrounds to fight for honor, working the economy with crafting, enchanting, and playing the market. In addition, players will be able to influence the history of each server by participating in the in-game political system," he said. Check out the full interview and stay with Massively for more TERA coverage in the coming weeks.
