BlizzCon Blog Posts

Thanks to the coverage on Main Event I have written a pile of blog posts over the weekend. You can find links to all of these via this post. They are aranged in the order I wrote them.
Day One
BlizzCon Begins
Mike Morhaime Interview
Class Discussion
Blizzard the Company
Starcraft 2
World of Warcraft World Design Interview - Alex Afrasiabi
Ghost in the System
The Contests

Day Two
World of Warcraft PvP Panel
Jeff Kaplan Interview
Interview with Felica Day
World of Warcraft Dungeons and Raids
World of Warcraft Gameplay Panel
Closing Ceremony
It's a Wrap


Because these posts are based on the Main Event coverage I don't have pictures to associate with the posts so my apologies for the walls of text.

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It's a Wrap

Well BlizzCon is over, the coverage anyway. I really enjoyed watching all of the coverage, there was plenty of great information on the World of Warcraft and Direct TV did an excellent job of the coverage. Sure I missed a couple of panels but even if I was there I would have missed tons of stuff. I was also surprised how much I enjoyed hearing about Starcraft and Diablo. I will defiantly be picking up a copy of Diablo 3, it looks like an excellent game. I get the impression that Diablo is like playing through a really good fantasy novel. I don't really understand how it works but it seems that you can play through it with a friend. Perhaps Alassiel will get a copy too and we can play through it together.

Starcraft also looks really worth getting; I used to play a ton of real time strategy games and really enjoyed them. The inclusion of a branching quest system and compelling story might just win me back into that area. Of course the best bit of all gaming is playing with a friend and the same will go for Starcraft so I’ll have to con my old RTS buddy to grab it as well.

The highlight would have to be Warcraft panels, I enjoyed them the most. Only one thing was completely missing, that was the 3v3 Arena competition. Watching professionals in the arena would have been quite a valuable incite. Hopefully I will go to next years BlizzCon then I can get to experience it all first hand.

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Closing Ceremony

Paul Sams closed up the evening with a farewell, video highlights reel and thankyous to the Blizzard guys who worked hard to put the convention together. This was followed by Kyle Kinane (comedian) who livened up the crowd with some humour vaguely related to the convention and Blizzard but just generally funny. Patton Oswalt, also a comedian, followed him with more humour. Less amusing, in fact much less amusing more inappropriate and annoying. Patton was the voice of Remmy, surprising because he didn't seem to be able to go for long without swearing or saying something really uncool. How this guy managed to score such a high profile gig is beyond me.

Thankfully the Level 80 Eilete Tauren Chieftains were a lot better, in an amusing kind of way. The band is made up from Blizzard employees; they certainly got an excellent response from the crowd. They played The Power of the Horde, Terran up the Night, Rogues do it From Behind, Night Fall, Diablo(Raise some Hell) and I am Murlock. Their show also had some semi stand up sketch stuff as well. Nice work guys!

To close up the days coverage was Video Games Live. Video Games Live is a live orchestra, band and choir which perform the music from video games. The performance included music from all the Blizzard games past and present and it was all absolutely fantastic. In fact I was taken by how much just the music stirred my emotions. A perfect way to close it all up!

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The Contests

At BlizzCon they have several fun stage contests, costume, dance and/silly. To begin there was the costume contest. There were some stunning and extravagant costumes, obviously a lot of people have spent a great deal of time working on them. Some of the Draenei costumes were very effective also by picking a simple armour participants were able to craft them really well. There were some very cleaver costumes such as a paladin bubble hearthing and a tauren hocky player and a few good double entries such as a hunter and their pet.

The entries were overwhelmingly Warcraft related, with only a couple of Starcraft and Diablo entries. Additionally most of the entrants were female.

My favourite and the winner was the female Draenei shaman in season three arena gear on a full size animatronics riding turtle complete with shield and weapon.


Original song and movie contest presentations were also made. Neither the songs nor movies were shown so I can't judge them. The only exception was the over all winner Snacky's Journal 4. I have seen some of the Snacky's Journal episodes and they are quite good. Hopefully they post all the songs and movies on the Blizzard site for us to see.

Sorry I was enjoying the jokes too much to dictate them into this blog. Well except this one “what class in World of Warcraft do women like the most... male enhancement shaman”.

These were followed up by the 'profession' comedian Jeff Lewis also know as Vork from 'The Guild', You Tube, TV show. Finally the day was closed off by the MC presenting the winners of the /silly (the shaman joke got 2nd). The only contest remaining is the dances; the footage appeared to cut off as though there was more about to happen so I can only assume that will be broadcasted tomorrow.
1:30pm

EDIT: A very short dance contest package was aired Sunday morning, a girl doing the undead dance won but there was plenty of other great entries.
EDIT 2: Snacky's Journal was show later on the second day of coverage, it's very well put together, amusing and very deserving of it's overall winner status.

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Mike Morhaime Interview

Direct TV interviewed Mike shortly after the opening speech. A fair amount of focus was placed on Diablo 3, but there was also some discussion of the upcoming film, apparently there is a script. Mike gave no strong confirmation to anything, which isn't too surprising. There will be another BlizzCon at some stage and yes there is another MMO in development but, apparently, we won't be hearing much about it for a while. We can also expect more ads along the lines of the ones staring Mr T and William Shatner, one of the celebrities has the initials OO, could that be Ozzy Osbourne? There was also a video of his office; it was touching to hear how the company was founded on a loan from his grandmother.

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BlizzCon Begins

Time counts down, fifteen minutes to go. It is 4:45am and I haven't really slept all that well. The excitement builds as the coverage hosts banter back and forth about the upcoming day. It seems like this weekend should be a coffee drinking, sleep lacking, marathon.

Finally the opening ceremony begins, and a humble Mike Morhaime apologises about the ticket debacle, apparently they sold 15,000 tickets in 15 minutes, and welcomes the audience. Its a tough crowd and even getting a sentence out is tricky with repeated interjections of cheering. After his opening spiel there is a highlights reel from WWI earlier in the year in Paris. This is followed with a replay of the Wrath cinematic. Then some Diablo news, another class is announced for the third game, The Wizard.

Mike did a great job, gamers are a tough crowd and without a massive ground breaking announcement he was somewhat unarmed. Sure a new class for Diablo 3 is nice but that only satisfies a portion of the crowd. This is however only the introduction perhaps the panels later in the day will hold more Warcraft information.

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