In addition to being incredibly well-designed from a challenge standpoint, the new World of Warcraft dungeon, Zul’Gurub, marks the first time that the WoW level designers have taken away the walls as a visual element in a dungeon. They’re still there, effectively — huge cliffs with narrow slopes between areas keep content in discrete areas as usual — but it makes a huge difference visually. Not only is this place a ton of fun, it looks great, too.
Hats off, guys.
(If you look carefully at the picture, you can see a dead night elf rogue, which is always nice, too.)
Not included in the latest patch notes is mention of the holiday going on. Check outside Orgrimmar or Ironforge for a new quest. Given the feast nature of the holiday and its absence from the patch notes, I suspect we accidentally got the Thanksgiving event early, but we’ll see. Still, neat stuff:
OK, I’m told the Harvest Festival, with its references to “fallen heroes” is about remembering 9/11. That makes sense and is a class move.
 After several years, there has finally been a decision about the Bnetd “unofficial” Battle.net-like servers. This began during my tenure at Blizzard and I got called an awful lot of bad names at the time in my dealings with Blizzard fans.
For those who didn’t keep up on the situation, a group of hackers/Blizzard enthusiasts (depending on which side of the fence you were on) did some reverse engineering on Blizzard games, specifically Warcraft III, as I recall, but my memory could be playing tricks on me. This allowed them to cook up their own version of Battle.net, Blizzard’s free peer-to-peer multiplayer network, called bnetd.
If you were in favor of the project, you pointed out that this allowed players to connect to a network with far fewer players and thus faster connections and so on. If you were against the project, you pointed out that this allowed pirated copies of the games to be used in multiplayer games — not being able to play on Battle.net has historically been one of the big disincentives against using pirated versions of Blizzard software. Both of these were true, as was the fact that a lot of bnetd spoke to the hacker mania of “look at this cool thing I was able to do.”
The real motives of those behind the project will probably remain murky forever, due to the heated emotional climate surrounding the issue. (The religion of Open Source gets invoked almost immediately in that Slashdot thread, for instance, which is pretty much the end of substantive discussions in my experience. You either believe in Open Source, or you don’t. Neither side tends to want to talk to each other in any meaningful way, most of the time.)
The legal argument, of course, was that monkeying with Blizzard games like this violated federal law, in particular the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (That link is a PDF file.) And that’s what the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with last week.
(It shouldn’t need to be said, but none of the above, to my knowledge, represents the opinions of Blizzard or their parent company, Vivendi-Universal. I haven’t discussed this issue with anyone there in years and have no idea what their lawyers were saying behind closed doors or even what employees thought other than “wow, this case sure is going on a long time,” which is sort of obvious.)
Penny Arcade weighed in on the issue back in 2002.
Reading some blogs, I remembered some more key details. Yes, the bnetd guys did ask to be able to connect to Blizzard’s software that verifies authentic copies. Yes, Blizzard turned them down, meaning that cracked games were going to be able to freely run on bnetd. But left out of the current coverage that I’ve seen so far is why: Blizzard felt, probably correctly, that giving access to the verification system would just make it easier to reverse engineer how the CD-keys and such were generated to begin with. You’re not going to find a lot of companies trying to combat piracy by handing over the keys to the vault.
Speaking of virtual worlds and users going beyond what the companies creating them intended, On the Media addresses buying and selling virtual gold for real money in their September 2nd edition, “The Unasked Question.”
So, it was a weekend of one videogame (where I beat up a lot of criminals and probably have a lawsuit coming my way from various supervillains) and another (where I shot so many orcs, trolls, undead and cow-men that I was made a knight) and hot dogs and steak and barbecue sandwiches and soda and generally goofing off. So, naturally, I overslept on Tuesday.
And in other great news, the black widow population of Hesperia has finally found our home. After accidentally sticking my hand into a web this spring, I’ve been dreading this day. Somehow, poisonous snakes back east seem less threatening than teeny tiny spiders with non-fatal venom.
My baby brother Joel turned 34 this weekend. But he’s still not too big for me to kick his butt!
The New York Times calls World of Warcraft “a game that is easy for casual players to understand and feel successful in, while including enough depth to engross serious gamers, who may play a game like World of Warcraft for 30 hours a week or more.” The article discusses whether having the first mass market MMORPG is helping the market, by bringing lots of new players into the MMORPG genre, or hurting it, by snapping the necks of its weaker competitors. I have to say I think it’s a good thing — and if bad games don’t find audiences, stop making bad games. Good games will survive, and have. (BugMeNot NY Times ID and password: abracadabra605, pentape)
Via e-mail:
CELEBRATE THE END OF SUMMER BY SPENDING LABOR DAY IN PARAGON CITY!
Five Free Days to explore the dread forest of Croatoa and new Sonic and Archery power sets!
Labor Day just wouldn’t be complete without some fun-filled gaming! This holiday, enjoy five free days of heroic hi-jinx and new Issue 5 content while getting ready for the highly anticipated sequel to City of Heroes®, City of Villainsâ„¢ (see www.cityofvillains.com for details about the game). What a great way to end a super-human summer!
Just log into the game between 2pm (CDT) on Thursday, September 1st and 11:59pm (CDT) on Tuesday, September 6th and you will find your account reactivated FREE of charge!* Your hero characters will be waiting just as you left them the last time you played, ready to lead the charge against evil.
But hurry…this offer is only valid for a limited time, and once 11:59pm (CDT) hits Tuesday night, September 6th, your account will again be deactivated unless you choose to resubscribe.
So suit up and move out heroes, Paragon Cityâ„¢ awaits!
— The City of Heroes® Team
Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in.
Why the heck didn’t anyone tell me about this show? Every time I turn on MTV2, it’s always that stupid Mike Jones video. (Apparently, you no longer need to enunciate to be a successful rapper.)
Anyway, Video Mods is hilarious — good music as performed by video game characters — and, so far, no Mike Jones.
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