ShaneDabiri
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The masterminds of WoW on gaming
Have you ever wondered what the names and faces behind WoW do in their off time? In the recent interview 1up had with Shane Dabiri, Rob Pardo, Jeff Kaplan, and Tom Chilton, we get to find out a bit about that -- at least in regards to some of the games that they're playing right now. Two of them were really no surprise to me: Guitar Hero II and God of War. Those two have been all over the gaming media and are a lot of fun to play, so it makes total sense. The two titles that caught me off guard were several mentions of Viva Pinata and Rob saying that he plays the PopCap game, Peggle. They also covered some great background information from their gaming roots, to some ways they think WoW has changed the genre. Check it out!
Happy second anniversary, WoW Europe!
Shane Dabiri is a bit wordy about it -- talking about the arena system opening up on the 16th, the future opening of the Black Temple where players will encounter Illidan, and the growth of the European community -- I think his basic message can be summed up as follows:Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday WoW Europeeee... Happy birthday to you!And I think that's a sentiment we can all agree with. Congrats, Europe, for making it through two WoW-filled years. Try not to have too much fun celebrating your big day.
Battleplan Vol. 3
It's been months since the second edition of the World of Warcraft Battleplan had been released, so it was certainly time for an update. Here, lead producer Shane Dabiri gives us a look into the future of World of Warcraft's technical development path. So what's in store for the future of our favorite MMO? More servers and migrations to keep the population evenly dispersed, hardware upgrades for older servers (in order to handle increased load from the expansion), paid character transfers (some time this summer), continued performance improvements across all realms ("we feel its unacceptable when even one player cant enter the game, gets unexpectedly disconnected at a key moment, or experiences any other interruptions while playing"), an improved authentication (login) platform, and improvements to the hardware and software running the website and the forums. There's nothing here about in-game development here - but I expect to hear a lot about that at E3 very shortly.
