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What is World of Warcraft?
On December 23, 2004, I rolled my first character in World of Warcraft. It seems almost impossible to imagine that this was a little over nine years ago, but I still remember the day clear as a bell. A friend told me where to make a character and what faction to use, and offered me a guild invite the moment I logged in -- an Alliance guild that, to my knowledge, no longer exists. That began a journey that was a long, impossible at times, climb to level 60. Along the way, I made a ton of friends both in the guild and out, and when I hit level 60 it seemed like an incredible accomplishment. But as I shook off the haze of congratulations and cheers, I realized I had little to no idea what came after you hit level 60 -- and frankly, neither did anyone else. Ironforge was the place to be. If you were Alliance it was the only place with an Auction House. Players spent hours upon hours outside the front gates dueling each other. There was no PvP as we know it today -- Battlegrounds didn't exist, so PvP was relegated to long, drawn out battles between Tarren Mill and Southshore. The options seemed to be as follows: Run Stratholme, Scholomance, and UBRS to collect your blue dungeon set. Go raid either Molten Core or Onyxia's Lair. And ... that was it. Needless to say, my next option was to roll an alt and find a raid guild. What other choice did I have, at the time? As the game has progressed over the last nine years, those choices have expanded into a flurry of content that dwarfs everything that has come before it. And that makes me wonder -- just what is World of Warcraft, now?
GamersFirst to preserve old APB customizations
Good news is in the offing for APB fans, above and beyond the fact that their favorite game is rising from the dead. GamersFirst CEO Bjorn Book-Larsson has checked in with his weekly APB Reloaded blog entry, and while the piece is shorter than what we've become accustomed to over the last couple of months, the discussion is quite interesting. First up is an official confirmation of the fact that the new version of APB will let players keep all of their customizations from the Realtime Worlds version of the game. Book-Larsson acknowledges the fact that this might lead to some weird pairings (i.e., players may have items that fall outside of the new progression systems), but he supposes that most veterans will be OK with that. "You will basically be unique thanks to you having played the game "back in the day," and our goal is to make sure your many gazillion hours of investment do not go to waste," he writes. The second item up for discussion is endgame PvP. Book-Larsson indicates that this is an ongoing challenge for the GamersFirst devs, and as such, the new system(s) probably won't show up in the closed beta. The goal is to give high-level players something to do after they've survived the grind and to eventually turn APB Reloaded "in to a platform for many different unique experiences."
