While forums and websites are already swarmed with news and discussions, the mmorpg-side of the market looks quiet without anything substantial being revealed or getting announced. But then the E3 isn’t even the best place to hype mmorpgs.
“OH NO PS3 HAS A TARD PACK”
Right now all the attention is on the PS3. The prices are high (q23emote1 and q23emote2), the controller “rolled back” to the standard dualshock but without the shock and the new screenshots of the games aren’t even remotely close to the movies of Killzone and that other motor-thing game that hyped the E3 2005 like crazy.
QT3 masterpiece thread (an awesome read from the first to the last page, realtime comments from the Sony presentation).
Squaresoft released some infos about the upcoming titles like “FFXIII” and “versus FFXIII”. Repeating again the double-title strategy of FFX and FFX-2. With the difference that this time the two will be released at the same time. “FABULA NOVA CRYSTALLIS Project” aka: how to double the sales by cutting down the production costs by a good amount. I would be interested, but I never like when Square moves away from fantasy to do awkward sci-fi. I hate guns in FF. No FFXII till October. Meh.
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Only mmorpg news from WoW. Some infos were released about the alliance race but I won’t comment before they release something REALLY official and tangible. No hopes about Blizzard announcing something else beside the WoW’s exp.
EDIT: image 1 – image 2 – The images aren’t good but the model looks rather disappointing.
EDIT2: Confirmed, Eredar. Like Dranei, but with an even more generic feel. (murales1 – murales2) It’s possible that the new Alliance starting zone is Mt. Hyjal.
Added: Illidian murales.
EDIT3: We got (blurred) character creation – The model doesn’t look so great.
EDIT4: I’m mirroring The Burning Crusade E3 video. The video isn’t so great. Nothing about the flying mounts and just a quick glance at a couple of zones that look similar to what’s already in the game. I noticed the walking animation of the blood elves is still not perfectly in synch and they slide on the terrain.
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Blizzard also announced a movie, though. A project like this one was already in the air but I thought they was going to do it in CG, instead it will be done with real actors. I’m not sure how this choice is appropriate to the look & feel of WoW.
There are two interesting comments from Paul Sams:
“We try to make big, epic, immersive games at Blizzard, and we have a track record of making some of the best games in the world,” Paul Sams, Blizzard’s chief operating officer, said in an interview. “Similarly, our goal is to make one of the best films in the world. With Legendary, they have a creative and management team that is so attuned with us it was like we were separated at birth. We want to make a movie that will not only appeal to our existing fans, but will also bring in people that have never heard of Warcraft before.”
“But it never really felt right,” Sams said. “We never met anyone that really understood our franchise, that got what we do. With Legendary, we found a company that specializes in building a small number of big movies. It’s very similar to what we do. Blizzard only makes a small number of games; we focus on making big, meaningful games. It’s a very similar mentality.”
This fits perfectly in the recent discussions about the “portfolio strategy”. Blizzard mirrors exactly what I wrote in my “do one thing” and I think they current and past successes testify that the idea isn’t so foolish.
This is how you create mass culture. A swarm of games will never “win” the hearts of the players. Aiming for high churns is like trying to anesthetize the players. It works on the short term, like a temporary infatuation that everyone will forget when something more significant is available and makes you remember the reason why you play. The movie could become a huge marketing tool, but how far in the future?
I wonder how WoW will be in three-four years.
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Still about Blizzard. An interesting blog post was linked on FoH’s forums showing many screenshots taken from WoW’s alpha and beta to demonstrate that all the content we have seen was already sitting there in a half-finished state. Some places looked even better than how they look now, see for example the Scarlet Monastery, Ironforge (this was really great and much bigger, even if more dispersive and confusing) and Darkshore.
So hopefully you’ve now realized that the game haven’t really changed much contentwise since the early alpha 2003, so what have Blizzard been adding to the game each patch?
They’ve added a few more quests, a few more armors, redone the graphics on some armors, released a few already finished instances, some holiday material and most notoriously, they’ve done class and talents changes each patch, and even redone some completly.
This, and the standard bug fixes, has been all the changes that have been done to the game since 2-3 years ago, and that’s the reason why I say there haven’t really been any new content implemented to the game, just reworked some of the old.
The extremely slow release of the Burning Crusade confirms that Blizzard is having a few difficulties to actually produce new content that isn’t just a copy-paste of old assets.
The article has a lot of insight and is interesting beside these considerations.
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Nintendo ROCKS!
Just watched the presentation and it owned Sony for good. No fact sheets or technical details, full focus on games and the crazy stuff you can do with the controller. 27 games playable right at the E3. No price announcements but the console should be out by the end of the year.
They showed dual-wielding swordfighting and the Red Steel FPS where you control the camera with one hand and the gun with the other.
And great slogans:
“MORE FUN FOR LESS MONEY”
“Expanding total number of people who play games”
“Wii and the DS represent that same thing: risk. Change is good.”
“Playing is believing.”
“It’s not about the look, it’s about the feel.”
Btw, I got a HUGE deja-vu watching the conference. There’s a movie titled “The Age of Success” that is closer to the reality than the reality itself. It’s incredible how the Nintendo conference seems coming right from this movie. The director is Jang Sun-woo, one of the greatest Korean directors ever. All his movies are masterpieces but this one is visionary (it was made in 1988).
EDIT: I slept and dreamt about the presentation. It really had a strong impact on me. Someone knows if the full video is available somewhere?
It was like watching the Willy Wonka of the future. Unbelievable. Those Nintendo guys are GENIUSES. I was intimidated and amazed. I’m in pure joy. They’ll save the world.
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Not E3 related but still kind of interesting. There’s a test of the Ageia PhysX card that is supposed to become a standard in the next years. Well, not only in the test it just moves generic debris, but it doesn’t even “accelerates” anything. In fact it slows down games:
Certainly those who just spent upwards of $250 on a brand new discrete physics processor will be a bit surprised to see that their maximum, average, and minimum framerates all dropped compared to the results they saw with no PhysX hardware. Granted, the scenes using the BFG PhysX card were full of more debris and detail which further burdened the system. However, given the relative simplicity of that debris, we would be very curious to see how the CPU would perform using the same physics settings.
Vaporware? As if PC weren’t already pricey enough. We don’t need even more specialized stuff for the geeks. We need easier accessibility, both in usability and entry prices.
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Sigil has an E3 blog. Nothing in particular to report about it for now.