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The Perfect Ten: MMO cataclysms
Today sees the launch of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, which represents a destructive "reboot" button on the world of Azeroth. The old has been made new by virtue of fiery explosions that have rent the very earth in twain, and WoW gamers will have to find their footing all over again. As you might imagine, it's made one big-ass mess, which is compounded by the fact that there are no janitor classes in the game to sweep it up (the next hero class, perhaps?). However, the notion of an in-game cataclysm is hardly the sole domain of Activision-Blizzard; on the contrary, large-scale apocalypses pop up all the time in MMOs. After all, nothing grabs the attention like the end of the world (but hey, you still feel fine)! In a list that in no way is meant to capitalize on any expansions that may or may not be on the market, we're going to strap on our Kevlar suits, slather our arms with 1000 SPF sunblock, and take a brief tour of 10 worlds that have dated cataclysms -- and lived to tell the tale.
Massively's World of Warcraft Cataclysm launch day round-up
In any discussion on MMOs, industry titan World of Warcraft always makes an appearance. Despite being in operation for over six years now, WoW still manages to maintain an unfathomably large lead in the MMO market. After all this time, however, the original content the game shipped with was beginning to look a little dated. In developing the game's two major expansions, The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard has refined its winning game design formula and improved the quality of new content being released. Until now, the old game world that came with the original game in 2004 has been largely unchanged. With the release of WoW's third major expansion, Cataclysm, all that has finally changed. In addition to new endgame content and the usual new areas expected with every expansion, Cataclysm contains a complete revamp of the entire old game world. Old quests and zones have been changed to bring them up to Blizzard's new design standards and hopefully breathe new life into the early game experience. The opportunity to replay the low levels in a changed world has attracted a great number of previous players who had previously become bored with the game. The expansion officially released today, with servers being unlocked this morning. If you've ever played World of Warcraft or are thinking of giving Cataclysm a try, take a peek at our launch day round-up to see what's new in Cataclysm. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Collector's Edition, unboxed We're still some hours away from the midnight launch of the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm. It won't be long before Deathwing wrecks shop, so we thought we'd take some of this downtime to share pics of the Collector's Edition which recently made its way to our doorstep. Peruse the gallery below,http://geeked.org/roundups/rounduppr-thumbnail-WI.html and stick around for a giveaway later today. WoW Rookie: What is Cataclysm? Sites like WoW Insider have been absolutely buzzing with information about the new expansion to the World of Warcraft. While we bloggers, journalists and fans are so accustomed to hearing about the upcoming Cataclysm that we don't think twice about it, a brand new player probably has no clue what the heck is going on. So with that being said, let's take a week and catch up our rookie brother and sisters by answering, "What exactly is Cataclysm?"
Conquer Azeroth in Civilization 5
Civilization Fanatics forum-goer Maze has designed a map pack for the recently released Civilization 5 that looks very familiar, and for good reason: the map mimics that of classic World of Warcraft, with the two main continents and the Maelstrom in the center. The map is actually very accurate, with precisely placed bodies of water and coastlines and small details like purple creep in Silithus. There are also details like Thoradin's Wall and the Deeprun Tram pointed out. Maze has created two versions of the map, with differing sizes for faster- or slower-paced games. Even if you aren't a fan of the game and don't plan on playing it, the graphics and attention to detail are pretty awesome. Check out some shots of the map in our gallery below. %Gallery-106850%
Blizzard unveils Cataclysm system requirements
Conventional gaming wisdom holds that World of Warcraft is such a lean, mean GPU-conserving machine that it will run on everything from a 386 to a scientific calculator from the early 1970s. Rumor has it that there are even some punch-card computers and difference engines that will run Blizzard's game with a bit of tweaking. Sadly, those days are numbered, as the forthcoming Cataclysm expansion is planning to destroy not only the world of Azeroth, but also any thoughts you may have had of running WoW on your older Mac or PC hardware. The official system requirements for the new expansion have been released, and -- skipping right over the minimums -- we find that the recommended setup is a dual-core CPU, 2 GB of system memory, and a graphics card with vertex and pixel shading capability. While it's not exactly state of the art, it may necessitate a bit of an upgrade if you're still puttering along with your Burning Crusade or vanilla WoW equipment. Check out all the details courtesy of our friends at WoW Insider.
The Daily Grind: What are your favorite player-run events?
The adage goes that no matter how fast developers put content into MMOs, players will blow through it even faster. The end result is a good crowd of antsy gamers with a lot of time on their hands and a desire to do something... anything. Enter player-run events, special games and activities created by players, for the players. These cover the gamut from parades to scavenger hunts to suicidal charges deep into enemy territory. Some of my favorite memories from MMOs come from participating in -- and even creating -- special events. Level one gnome runs across the world of Azeroth used to be a popular pastime in WoW, City of Heroes is well-known for its constant costume design contests, and not a day goes by without some sort of concert peppering the towns of LotRO. So what are your favorite player-run events? How have you seen the ingenuity of your fellow gamers blossom into memorable experiences? Did you ever run one yourself? Wake up, splash your face with scalding-hot coffee, and dish!
WoW Moviewatch: Azeroth - Land in chaos
Azeroth - Land in chaos is a sweeping, beautiful look at the landscape and design of World of Warcraft. I almost always enjoy these Discovery-esque tours of Azeroth and Outland, taking the time to really soak in the amazing, powerful artwork created by Blizzard. In the never-ending struggle for better gear and bigger numbers, it's a little too easy to simply miss the sheer beauty and creativity that makes up the game world. This is the first video presented in Gnomax3D. (It's not really 3D, please don't try.) While the author names himself after the style, I'll admit I had a little bit of trouble sorting out what are the distinctive characteristics of Gnomax3D. The movie was certainly beautiful to watch, but so are many others. If further tours like this are created by Gnomax, though, I'm sure we'll find out eventually. I'm definitely looking forward to a similar view of Cataclysm. Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an e-mail at machinima AT wow DOT com.
Video game world size compared
Digg recently featured a side-by-side comparison of video game worlds, and Azeroth as depicted in World of Warcraft found itself in competition against the sprawling universes of Grand Theft Auto, Guild Wars: Nightfall, Lord of the Rings Online and Just Cause 2. As is obvious from the picture, WoW seems to compare poorly when it comes to the sheer size of the worlds in question, but the map being used is both outdated and somewhat misleading. It's a pre-BC version omitting the Azuremyst Isles, Quel'thalas, Outland and Northrend, and it obviously doesn't include the acreage being added to the game with Cataclysm, either. Regardless, it's an interesting comparison, and other people have tried figuring out exactly how big Azeroth is, with some curious results.
Breakfast Topic: Unfinished business
Have you ever run through one of your favorite cities in Azeroth and wondered what is actually beyond half of those doorways you pass by without thought? Lately, I have been leveling my baby druid and as such have been spending quite a bit of time in Stormwind, most notably The Park. One day, while waiting for the dungeon finder to pop me into yet another run of Blackrock Depths, I decided to explore around my trainer. What I found surprised me. In The Park alone, there are many unused buildings: an inn, an archery shop, another shop with scrolls on the counters, and yet another shop filled with wine barrels. All lack NPCs and purpose. In fact, out of all of the shops, there is only one NPC in any of the buildings: a night elf herbalism trainer, whose name you cannot see because it clips into the shelves above. So I decided to actually pay attention to the rest of Stormwind. The buildings leading into Cut-Throat Alley are empty. There's a large hall in the Dwarven District that is also missing signs of life. These are just a few quick examples of unfinished areas in Azeroth. Other examples might include the unfinished dwarven farming area on the southern border of Wetlands, Old Ironforge or the upper ring of Undercity. Our beloved Azeroth, in all of its awesomeness, at times seems utterly barren and unfinished. With Cataclysm on the horizon, I for one hope many of these lifeless areas are revisited by the development team and given purpose. What is your favorite unused area, and what do you think the Blizzard developers should do with it? This article has been brought to you by Seed, Aol's guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. Watch for the next call for submissions and a chance to submit your own article. The next byline you see here may be yours!
The Queue: Your turn
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. There you go, ladies. I told you I wouldn't leave you out. Enjoy your Clooney, the classiest man in the world. And you thought I was going to inflict the Twilight boys on you again. Bah. Bah, I say. wulfishmojo asked: "When the Cataclysm beta hits, will the Ask a Beta Tester feature return or will The Queue field all of our beta questions?"
Farewell and thank you, WoW.com
I've told this story a few times before: I actually started out on WoW.com as a comment troll. A few years back, Jennie Lees was the lead blogger here, and she posted something silly about a wallpaper or a plush doll, I don't remember. I was also reading the forums at the time, and Blizzard had just dropped new priest patch notes. "Why are you posting this junk," I commented angrily, "when the priest notes just dropped?" She was nice about it -- she actually emailed me and said that the priest updates post was coming soon. And I felt so bad about it, I never activated the comment. But a little while after that, when WoW Insider posted that they were looking for some new writers, I applied, and said that I was sorry for that comment, but that I was working on becoming a writer and could help out with posting on the site when needed. When I started writing for WoW Insider (now WoW.com, obviously), I was working retail in Chicago, writing part-time in the evenings. The site itself got only a few thousand hits a month, with one or two weekly features and maybe ten comments per post. Now, over three years later, I'm a fulltime freelance writer, I've been to three BlizzCons, I've written over 1.7 million words in over 3,300 posts here about everything in Azeroth, and the site itself rivals some of the best blogs on the Internet, routinely garnering millions of hits a month. I helped build this site with my own two hands, and while I definitely can't claim all the credit (there was and is a huge team of people who keep this thing running), it's with a fair amount of sorrow that I'm here to tell you today will be my last day on WoW.com.
WoW.com's gift guide for 2009
It's that time of year again -- if you (like me) haven't gotten gifts for everyone on your list, it's time to start scrambling to find something nice to get under the tree this year. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about finding something good for the World of Warcraft fan in your life: we've got you covered there. In the gallery below, we've got a nice bunch of gift ideas for everything Warcraft, from the cheap to the expensive, from the silly to the practical, from in-game presents you can wrap with shiny paper, to out-of-game classics that you can... also wrap with shiny paper. If you need to give a gift to a WoW player this year, you'll find it below for sure. And if you happen to be a Warcraft player, faced with the annual awkward question of "What do you want me to give you this year?", just feel free to drop this link surreptitiously as a reply, maybe even with a hint or two towards a specific item. We've included links to everything and kept it easy to understand even for someone who hasn't visited Azeroth before. That's our gift to you. Happy holidays, and good gift hunting! %Gallery-79856%
The best of WoW.com: October 27 - November 3, 2009
That right there's a big ugly frost dragon named Sindragosa, and with the newest patch headed to the World of Warcraft (we expect it sometime this December), we'll be bringing her down. It won't be easy, but then again, WoW players have Joystiq's own WoW.com to guide them. You can read all about that fight, the new patch, and other popular stories in the World of Warcraft on our weekly roundup after the break.
Blizzard posts Quel'delar preview
Blizzard has posted a preview of the upcoming Quel'delar storyline that we'll be observing in Icecrown. Quel'delar, you'll remember, is the twin of the old Quel'serrar blade that we put together way back in the days of vanilla WoW. For those of you who are spoiler-sensitive, details are behind the break. Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to the Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
WoW Ratings lets you rate anything in Azeroth
I had an idea like this one -- a site that would allow you to rate anything at all (from a new movie to the casserole your aunt makes), and then let other people share their own opinions about whatever you rated. My idea never got off the ground (standard operating procedure for the idea mill I call my mind), but reader Antoine apparently had the same idea, and built it specifically for the WoW universe. WoW Ratings is kind of a silly site with some interesting outcomes: basically it's a database of everything in the game, from bosses to zones to game features or what have you, and you can come along and rate whatever you want on a scale of 1 to 5. The ratings don't actually mean anything (though Antoine has them listed as qualities from Uncommon up to Legendary), so it's really just a broad temperature-taking of the World (of Warcraft) at large.The most interesting screen is probably the "Best and Worst" screen (which you can reach by clicking on the toolbar at the top of the homepage -- note to Antoine: permalinks are your friend, scale back on the javascript), where, as of this writing, Hakkar the Soulflayer is sitting on top of the heap, and the Voice Chat patch and Darnassus are sitting in the bottom 10. No Fandral Staghelm yet, strangely, but I'm sure things will get shaken up after all you readers head over there (and if the site's a little shaky under the flood of our link, give it time to get back on its feet). Sure, it's a little silly, and it's not so much a "resource" as it is just a free-for-all of player opinions, but it is interesting to see kind of a meta-overview of what players do and don't like. Useless features for the loss, old school raid bosses for the win.
The best of WoW.com: October 6-13, 2009
It's an exciting time over at WoW.com, Joystiq's site for everything World of Warcraft. The Public Test Realm (a.k.a PTR) is in full swing, which means we're swimming with all of the new features and items and dungeons that will come out soon in a brand new content patch to the game. While you're waiting, whether you're a WoW veteran or newbie, head on past the break and check out what's new in Azeroth.
The Queue: Wherein we learn new slang
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Today we're going to hit a bunch of quick, short questions, which means today's edition of The Queue might be a wee bit short compared to some of Allison's epics. Picture above completely unrelated to anything written below. It just looks pretty freaking sweet, doesn't it?ikandiman asked..."I have been trying to get the last Brewfest achievement for my Warlock, but every time I get smashed and jump off the elevator in Shattrath (with my Skyguard's Drape to slow fall) I never get the bloody Drunken Stupor achievement. Had no problem with my mage and paladin. What gives?"
Chinese WoW wraps up closed beta, to start charging soon
It looks like the long saga of World of Warcraft's transfer of operatorship in China is almost finally over -- NetEase has announced that the closed beta period is done with, and that they're just about ready to open up normal registration and bring the game back to for-pay status. They're still pending government approval there, so they're not quite online and running yet, but they have closed off registration to new players, and will only bring it back online when they're ready to start charging yet again. Of course, their pay scheme there is different from here in the US and EU -- they often charge per hour to play rather than a constant monthly subscription. But however they decide to charge, NetEase seems sure that by the end of the month, things will finally be back to normal in China's version of Azeroth.Meanwhile, the former operator of the game, The9, has announced that they are extending by a month the option for former players to get refunds for their prepaid game cards. That option was originally planned to end on September 7th, but players of the game who have unused cards will have another 30 days to redeem them back for cash. All of this back-and-forth originally started back in April of this year, but it seems like, five months later, the game might finally be getting back to normal.
The future of the ingame Darkmoon Faire
Larisa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn misunderstood the news we posted the other day about the Darkmoon Faire live event in France being canceled, and instead thought that the actual ingame event had been shut down for good. And that brought up an interesting question to her: so what if it was? The original Faire was an interesting idea, a way to bring the fun of a regular holiday (along with the usual quests, special items, and even a reputation to grind) around every month or so. But just like having Christmas every month would get old after a while, the Faire has sort of worn out its welcome -- players really only go there for following some arcane questline, and when they do get there, they're undoubtedly disappointed by how barren the place is.So what to do? Larisa suggests that the Cataclysm might just claim the whole thing -- Azeroth gets rocked, and no more Darkmoon Faire. I'd actually like to see the story go the other way: if there's a traveling group of performers with vast magical powers that's allowed to move at will between Horde and Alliance lands, wouldn't it be great if they were actually part of a secret society that had bigger interests rise to the top in a disaster situation? I'm sure Blizzard has more than enough on their plate for the next few content patches, but the Faire itself is due for an update, too, and it'd be nice to see it included in the larger storyline somehow.
Upload and browse screenshots at WoW Screenshots
From the makers of WoW Achievements comes a new site that's designed to collect and catalog nothing but screenshots from the game. WoW/Screenshots (clever) is a new site that's super barebones right now -- all you can do is view a few different uploaded screenshots or jump in and upload your own. But obviously, there's a lot of potential there -- if they can assign a rating system to screenshots, then you could have a Wowbash-style Top 100, with extra cool shots to check out from around the game. The website also says they're planning to put together monthly contests as well, so right now the idea just seems to be to populate the database, with the best entries coming to the top later.Of course, this isn't the only project designed to archive some of Azeroth's beauty -- we talked about the wallpaper project the other week (though that's more a project designed to hit every individual zone), and of course our great Around Azeroth daily feature has collected tons of great pictures from the game. But this seems like an interesting crowd-sourced way to do it, and with the WoW-Achievements folks behind the idea, it'll be fun to see what they come up with.
All the World's a Stage: The new character experience in Cataclysm
All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.As you know, the Cataclysm is going to bring major changes to the whole world of Azeroth. There will only be 5 new zones for leveling above 80 and one new zone for each new race -- the rest of the work they're doing involves changing the old zones, bringing them up to the standards of zones in The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, adding new quests that are more appropriate to the current timeline, and completely rebuilding the areas that just didn't work so well.You are also probably aware that this is a much-needed improvement. The 1 - 60 leveling process (except for the draenei or blood elf starting areas) has long been fraught with serious flaws. Going through it the first time wasn't so bad, since exploring everything felt so new, but doing it the third and fourth times meant sheer boredom. I remember many times going to a zone, completing many or all of the quests there, and leaving without ever feeling as though I had really "been" there. Except for a few real gems, quests mostly involved spending a lot of time running long distances in order to kill more nameless bad guys -- they felt more like pest control than adventure. Just being there seemed to remove me from the story of Azeroth, and dump me in some other world where there was nothing important happening. Vast stretches of land on the Azeroth map meant absolutely nothing to me as a roleplayer: no character, no story, no meaning.
