characters
Latest
Deathwing and Arthas, and how different they'll be
Zarhym has shared a little insight about how much we'll see of the big bad Deathwing in the Cataclysm expansion. He says, rightly so, that Deathwing is a very different character from Arthas, and that while Arthas had no problem stepping in and trying to corrupt us (as he himself was corrupted) from level 71, Deathwing will be a little tougher game to play -- in his regular dragon form, he'd pretty much turn us to cinders rather than try playing mind games. When your opening gambit is to blow up the entire world, just how much subtlety do you really have?So as Zarhym says, he'll certainly have a presence both as we level and at the farthest endgame content (his presence will at least be felt everywhere, even if he's not standing right in front of you). Medievaldragon suggests we'll see him as Daval Prestor some more, but Deathwing seems almost completely lost to rage -- my guess is that we'll see more of his servants in the Black Dragonflight poking around in human form rather than the main man himself (plus, by now you'd think anyone with the last name "Prestor" would send red flags flying in the Alliance anyway). At any rate, it's sure to be a much different experience than what we've seen of Arthas so far -- and I can't wait. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgen to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.
All the World's a Stage: The art of the alt
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.With all the talk lately about starting new characters once the Cataclysm arrives, it struck me that most roleplayers already have more than one, including myself. Like most players, I started with one, a night elf druid, and focused on playing that exclusively for quite some time. It didn't really occur to me that I would even want to play more than one.Then, I began to notice that other people played more than one character, even within the same small group of friends. I had one friend in particular who had mastered the art of roleplaying multiple characters. She never said anything out of character to anyone in our group, and it took me ages to even realize that her characters were ally played by the same person in the first place. Each one had its own personality, and each had a different relationship with all our mutual friends. Knowing her made something click inside my mind, and I began to see other possibilities for myself too, other sorts of characters I could play with different weaknesses, strengths, and entirely different stories to tell. As my roleplaying experience grew, I began to feel as though one character couldn't contain all the ideas I had jumbling about in my head, so... I started another one, then another, and ... another. Little did I know all the pitfalls I could run into with so many characters, nor the quirky little tricks that could become possible with multiple characters, a small group of friends, and a bit of creativity.
BlizzCon 2009: Wow.com interviews Richard Knaak
On the second day of BlizzCon 2009, I got the chance to sit down with Richard Knaak, best selling author of countless novels, including many in the Warcraft universe, such as the War of the Ancients Trilogy, Day of the Dragon, and Night of Dragon. His upcoming projects include the Stormrage novel, as well as the Dragons of Outland manga trilogy. We talked about all this and more, and you can read our conversation below.So of course, the big thing on everyone's mind is the new Stormrage book. How's it coming along? Is it near completion?It's near completion, we're in the editing process, getting the OKs from Blizzard. You can find an excerpt in the latest volume of the Legends Manga, along with a story I wrote, sort of a Prologue that ties in with the book.Can you give us a sneak preview of what to expect lore-wise?You know Blizzard likes to keep these secret, so I am going to be very limited in what I can talk about. It is Malfurion. It is about the Nightmare. And it is very current. That's the three biggest things I can say about it right off the bat. You'll see characters you know from the game and obviously from other books, and places you know from the game, and it's very current, very relevant. Of course, that's about all I can say. You know Blizzard, they love their secrets!
What you missed in The Matrix Online pt. 2
Hiding in plain sight After the vampires and lupines were quelled, a new issue of the Sentinel and a concurrent game update brought new images into the Matrix. Colorful billboards advertising bug spray began appearing all over the city, confusing some and intriguing others. The first visual puzzle of The Matrix had been covertly unleashed on players. The solution wasn't hard, but far from obvious. The second page of the new in-game newspaper, The Sentinel, showed a colorful "terrorist alert level chart." While it was an obvious mockery of everyone's favorite homeland security poster, astute players saw that the same colors were being used on the in-game billboards. Each billboard contained a number somewhere in it's slogan, such as "Blue brand pesticide kills bugs four times faster than the competition!" These numbers, along with their corresponding colors and the terrorist alert level chart were the keys. Players took the numbers and re-arranged the terrorist alert level in that order. If the blue billboard had the number four on it, then it went fourth in the order. If red had one, then it went first in the order and so forth. As the chart was re-arranged, the first letters of the "alert" status began to spell out a word. Definite, Elevated, Likely, Possible, Huge, Imminent -- DELPHI. The final part of the puzzle was a small poster that had appeared in certain clubs, advertising an extermination service that could be contacted by e-mailing an address at Monolith Entertainment, the game's current developer. Players e-mailed the address, asking to consult The Oracle of Delphi. Wishes were soon granted as Seraph appeared in-game to not only fight players who solved the puzzle, but also wisk them away to meet with the Oracle herself. Other players got to consult the Oracle via their real life e-mail, creating an alternate reality game of sorts with The Matrix. Either way, the event made one thing clear: The Assassin was made entirely of blowflies and could be destroyed with specially designed killcodes -- bug spray. And that was just the beginning... This entire article has simply focused on two of the first events in The Matrix Online's storyline. Every bit of it was unrepeatable and lead to some amazingly memorable moments in the game. The type of moments that stay with you forever. Very few, if any, games are able to accomplish this phenomenon. Who cares if you kill Yogg-Saron? Who cares if you defeat the Witch King of Angmar? Other players are going to eventually do that in droves because the content is repeatable. But the Matrix was able to wrap everybody up into an evolving storyline, philosophy, and sense of community. Players worked together and fought one another on more levels than just PvP and PvE. They formed bonds with characters who didn't even exist while forming bonds with others around them that were willing to believe in the same things they did. They roleplayed willingly in order to keep the story going beyond what the developers had planned. All of this was amazing, and I can only hope to see another game take the same ideas and drive them to a level beyond what that Matrix could offer. These were amazing ideas, but just too far ahead of their time.
What you missed in The Matrix Online
Yes, The Matrix Online sucked. Its gameplay was an abhorrent pile of repetitive garbage that offered no real direction other than doing storyline-less missions until you hit 50, in which there was no endgame. The combat was interesting, as it offered scripted camera shots for insane kung-fu flips and hits, but it wasn't enough to "save" the game. I hear you.But if you think the above paragraph is all The Matrix Online had to offer, then you are sadly mistaken. You missed out on storyline events, PvPvE, amazing roleplayers, writers, and graphic artists. You missed out on philosophy, politics, memorable characters, and puzzles. You actually missed out on the bulk of what The Matrix Online had to offer, all of which makes the game's passing more painful.MxO wasn't World of Warcraft, and it certainly had enough dark spots in the game design. But the game and its developers brought a very different style of play to the MMO scene -- one that should be commemorated with a few looks back on some of the best events the game had to offer.
wowtwitter giving away a FigurePrint for a screenshot contest
We've talked about wowtwitter here on the site before -- they're the ones who created a whole other Twitter-like service just for your WoW characters (and that featured verification of your toons, so that no one else could claim or tweet as them). The site is definitely growing, but they wanted to give it that extra oomph, and so they're giving away a free FigurePrint to someone who joins up and posts a special screenshot. If you want a chance at the prize, what you've got to do is log in to the site and verify your character (as we said last time, it requires that you remove a piece of gear and then log out so the Armory can see the change), and then use their new screenshot uploading tool to post a screenshot with "wowtwitter" somewhere in the picture. Then they'll take the screenshots with the top three "like" totals (other users on the site can approve of your uploads), and the one they choose will win a real-life 3D sculpture of their character from FigurePrints.Seem like a lot of work? It does to us, too, but FigurePrints are still $130, so if you want a representation of your character but don't want to cough up the cash, this is probably easier. So good luck to everyone who enters -- the contest runs through July 31st, so you've got a little bit of time to get your picture in and get it voted up somehow.
Breakfast Topic: How old is your character?
Bricu of WTT: [RP] put forth a pretty thought-provoking question the other day: How old are your characters? From one point of view, that's pretty simple. You do a quick /played, report back the number of days it returns, and there you go. But, especially for those of us who roleplay, it can sometimes go a bit deeper. Sometimes, we take our characters across games. Of course, this doesn't mean importing characters completely wholesale, you understand. On the RP end, you're still going to want to convert them to be born and bred citizens of Azeroth (or Outland), and either way, you may not be able to convert them to the exact race or class they were. There's just no Human Rangers or Halfling Monks in WoW, more's the pity.
wowTwitter is a Twitter just for your characters
I'm not sure how well this will scale, but it's an interesting idea: while it's certainly possible to just create a Twitter account for your World of Warcraft characters (so anyone interested can always see what you're up to), the folks behind a new site called wowTwitter have gone a step further, and recreated Twitter's functionality specifically for Azeroth's virtual denizens. It's very barebones right now, but basically, after you register, you can punch in any of your characters, "verify" them by changing something about them in the Armory (like unequipping the piece of gear on your wrist), and then you can send and receive messages on that character, with special channels created for the guild, your realm, and so on. I thought it used Twitter somehow, but it seems completely separate: they're running their own database and servers, so while the two work the same way (there are "@" replies and hashtags), they don't interact at all.Which means they'll also have all of the problems that Twitter has had -- when only a few people are using your database, it runs fine, but if it starts to scale up at all, then you run into lots of "Fail Whale" downtime. And I'm not sure we need a whole other system just for WoW characters (though this one does have the nice bonus of "claiming" your character so it can't get impersonated). At any rate, they're in beta right now, and actually hosting a cash money prize contest for the most characters verified and tweets posted, so a link from us will probably show them how ready their system is. If it's your thing, go forth and wowTweet!
The Daily Grind: How do you pick character names?
With the Aion EU beta coming up this weekend, it's time to think about names and what I'm going to call my Elyos avatar. Names are important, right? I recently became an auntie and the name of my newborn niece will shape her as a person, the same can be said for our toons. Of course some are obvious, every server will have its Legolas (and variants thereof). Sometimes names are more descriptive, like Banker for your level 2 druid who never leaves the mailbox and occasionally they are puns. For example, my level 4 Paladin is named 'Hikari' which is a Japanese word meaning 'light'. Quite apt eh? Meanwhile, Eshte and Auryn are minor characters in a series of novels I'm trying to write. As for Serisa, well it sounded good at the time and now I answer to it as much as I do to my own name!So, constant readers, tell me how do you pick your names? Do you pick ones that match your toon's faction? Do you take inspiration from novels or computer games? Do you use the internet to pick a suitable moniker or do you just create one which sounds right? Are they puns or do they mean something specific to you?
All the World's a Stage: The Art of Roleplaying
This week, David returns (again) to All the World's a Stage as a newly married man, feeling particularly happy and joyful, and overflowing with enthusiasm for just about everything he loves in life.The relationship between rolelplaying and real life is a multifaceted one. If you have read this column before, you've probably seen some mention of roleplaying as a creative art form, but for some readers, it might be a bit difficult to imagine roleplaying as an art. After all, some might say, it's just a bunch of people sitting around, pretending their characters are real people, having real problems and real stories, all in spite of a game environment in which one's character can't actually affect the world in any way that matters. Problems of continuity, such as instanced dungeons in which many people can slay the same monster at the same time over and over again, make some people feel as though there's no story value to the game at all, and that anything roleplayers do is a waste of their time.The trick for roleplayers is to think of roleplaying as something more like freeform play art, in which the main point of the art isn't so much the end product that results from one's efforts (as it would be in painting, novel-writing, or composing music), but rather the thoughts, feelings, and inspiration that come to mind when we actually engage in the process of the art itself. The closest parallel to another art form might be improv acting games, where the whole point is to make things up for you and the other actors to enjoy, rather than to deliver a performance for a separate audience; but if you've enjoyed something so simple as building a sand castle on the beach, then you probably have a good sense of what it feels like to roleplay. Fingerpainting, mandala-making or even just freeform music and dancing can all give a similar feeling like what you get in roleplaying: the sheer joy of creation.Some roleplayers need no more justification for their art than that they enjoyed themselves. But others look at their own roleplaying careers and see certain things that they've taken away from their roleplaying experience over time. These things are usually not as solid as an actual painting or recorded song, but they still have a kind of solidity in the roleplayer's mind, as they positively impact his or her real life in several ways.
511 characters per quest
One of the most interesting things we heard from Jeff Kaplan last week (besides that he agrees the Green Hills quest sucks; won't do that one again) was that quest designers are given only 511 characters (not words) to put their quest text in.It's surprising to think that they've created all the backstory, throughout Azeroth, in just 511 characters at a time. But even Kaplan said the limit is a good thing: it means Blizzard has to show story to the player rather than tell it.Still, doesn't seem easy to Crap. Out of room -- that's 511 characters. Of course, they can fudge things a bit by having those "story quests" where characters can use multiple pages to build up their background, and the 511-character limit doesn't apply to all of the dialogue -- some of the later quests have pages and pages of dialogue as the quest goes on. But squeezing enough information to keep a player interested in just 511 characters is quite a feat.
Upper Deck hosts a Spectral Safari event for the WoW minis game
Haven't gotten a chance to play last year's Game Product of the Year yet? You're in luck -- Upper Deck is hosting another "Spectral Safari" event about a month from now, on March 14th, and you could pick up a Spectral Tiger, one of the hottest TCG items in history. Entry for the big tournament costs $20, but not only do you get to take home a WoW minis booster, but you have a chance to win prizes, and everyone who plays in the tournament will get entered in a contest to have an official mini made of their very own ingame character. That's pretty wild.They've just sent us the list of where the events are taking place, so if there's a tournament going on near you (there are locations all over the world), now's the time to make your plans. The game is a lot of fun -- it's kind of a cross between a turn-based strategy game (in that both players take turns with their characters to move and attack) and Arena battles (in that you move around on a field using the various abilities and weapons available to your character's class). An event like this is a great way to check it out and possibly even win some prizes for playing well.
The Queue: From Hell's heart I stab at thee...
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.To the last, I will grapple with thee... From Hell's heart, I stab at thee!For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee!Iceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Stooooooone!Dyluck asked..."I was wondering, do the EULA and TOS really change each patch?"
Champions Online customization inventively revealed via 'Rate My Champion'
By allowing everyone access to tons of in-game superheros via a voting system on their official site, Cryptic has found an ingenious method of simultaneously showing off Champions Online's character creation complexity and web integration tools. After poking around the available characters, we're really quite impressed with the variety of tech, mutated and magic heroes being shown.As lovers of steampunk and sci-fi in general, we're all for the powersuits and gadgetry goodies. But with that being said, there's a lot more than tech gear offered options-wise in Champions Online. The game is filled with stuff like demons and armor-clad angel warriors strewn throughout the gallery as well. Not to mention delightful aberrations like "Rudy The Red-nosed Pain-Deer" which is rightfully sitting in first place as of the writing of this post.Between costumes, nemeses and power customization we're starting to sense a future where things like sleep and proper nutrition are replaced by an endless stream of freshly designed characters.
WoW Code: Better than a pocket protector
If you've ever woken up in the morning and said to yourself, "Gee, I'd like to appear nerdier today," then do we have the story for you! Scare your real life friends and confuse even the staunchest gaming nerd. Use "WoW Code" in your forum signature!N: Sephare, M:Pa73, Mb: 3/56/5, Mr: Hu, S: Ravenholt-US-RPPvP, G: Twilight Empire, Pvp–, Pve+, Y2005.5, DC, Ori-MC/B, TBC-Kara, WLK-Nexus/B, L++, C-Wl/DK, R-Ud, RP++. :), V0.3What you see above you, besides a whole pile of utter confusion, is actually a World of Warcraft character broken down into very basic terms using the WoW Code method. Everything from name, to talent build, date joined, and player preferences are included!We'd take the time to break it down, but TyphoonAndrew at The Eye of the Storm blog has already done that in an easy to read format. Now if you could excuse us, we're going to go break out our Tandys and play some extreme World of Warcraft: The Molten Core on our Atari 2600s..
Runes of Magic reaches 100k characters created on first day of open beta
As we mentioned last week, the highly-anticipated Runes of Magic fantasy MMO from Frogster Interactive has just entered open beta on December 15th. Normally the news of a small free-to-play MMO would be mentioned, and then subsequently forgotten as the larger, big-budget games continue to hog the attention. Yet Runes of Magic has an announcement that they're quite proud of: 100,000 characters created in the first 24 hours of the open beta.Not only that, but out of the total 220,000 registrations to date, 20,000 accounts were created on Monday alone with more than 2 million quests completed. Just to be clear, this is not 100k accounts created on the first day. It's 100k characters created by 20k accounts. Still, it's great news for Frogster Interactive and we expect those accounts to rise throughout beta and into launch, which is scheduled for release in Q1 of 2009. For the complete press release and more information on the game's features, continue reading after the cut below.
Breakfast Topic: To re-customize or not
Paid customization has come to the game, and with it, some big decisions for a lot of players. We've asked for a long time to be able to change our gender or look in the game, and now that we can, we have to decide if we will or not.Personally, I'm torn -- way back when I first started the game, I created a female Night Elf Hunter, thinking along the old classic lines of "if I'm going to stare at someone's backside for hours and hours, it might as well be a woman." But since then, I've gotten a lot of flak for being a dude playing a female character, and since I've played all male characters since then, I think I better identify with male characters anyway, even if the view isn't as good.But on the other hand, I'm used to my Hunter now -- she's looked the same for almost 80 levels, and it would be weird to suddenly see a Night Elf guy on the screen in her place. So I'm torn -- change my character to a male and make being social in game much easier, or stay the same and keep my character familiar to me?What do you all think? Are you facing the same situation or is the choice easier (or even harder) for you?
Free character migration for EU realms
We're just now coming out of our Thanksgiving turkey-induced haze here at WoW Insider, so if you've seen this already, forgive us, but Blizzard announced late last week that there's relief on the way for EU characters tied up by queues -- they've got a whole mess of free migrations in the mix. We've got the whole list of transfers after the break as well.Argent Dawn appears to be in the worst shape, as Blizzard is sending players from that realm onto three different realms. Magtheridon seems to be the least busy -- all they're transferring off there is the Horde-side players. They're also transferring players off of a few different realms to the newly-created one, Chamber of Aspects, so if you're looking for a new start, there you go.These migrations are going until December 2nd, so now's your chance, EU players, if you're on the selected realms and have been waiting to jump ship.
BlizzCon 2008: A followup with FigurePrints
Last time we talked to Ed Fries, he was a man setting out with a brand-new company, new not only in terms of age, but new in that they were doing something no one had ever tried before: bringing 3D printing to retail. FigurePrints started printing 3D figurines of WoW characters last year, and since then, they've been through good and bad (the earliest figures were plagued by quality concerns, but the company is doing well enough that they've even raised the price since they started already). So we were very curious to each up with Ed at BlizzCon and see how things were going. Was demand still up? Has the process changed at all? How's the quality thing being dealt with? And we were perhaps most curious about just what people were putting on their figures when they got them printed.Ed answered all of our questions and more: demand is still up, quality is getting better, and people are dressing in.. tuxedos and beer steins? Click the link below to check out our second interview with Ed Fries, founder of FigurePrints, and catch up on the company that promises to bring your virtual WoW characters to real life.
Daedalus Project updated
Nick Yee's excellent MMORPG survey and data site, the Daedalus Project, has been updated with new survey results on the following topics: Guild demographics: What influences players to choose certain guilds, how attached they become, the likelihood of their knowing guildies in real life, and how long they stay. What I find fascinating here is the graph displayed above -- 26% of surveyed players have been with their guild 2 years or more. Alex Ziebart mentioned the other day that his guild has been together so long across multiple games that guild chat's gone from talk of teenage dates to coaching expectant parents through morning sickness. I get the feeling that this is only going to become more common in long-haul games like Second Life and WoW. Character creation: How players choose characters, the elements of character selection they consider most important, and whether classes and races tend to be researched extensively before they're picked, or chosen based on impulse. Character class seems to matter to the most people; starting area the least.
