Blizzard’s recent experimental streak on World of Warcraft has brought about two huge shifts in content through unique modes of play – Plunderstorm and the upcoming Mists of Pandaria Remix mode. Both of these take interesting and different approaches to World of Warcraft – in the case of Plunderstorm, by not being very WoW at all short of asset usage, and in the case of MoP Remix, by being a twist substantial enough that it is far more than what it appears at first glance. This week, I accomplished two things related to these modes – I finished the Renown track in Plunderstorm for all my rewar ..read more

Blizzard’s recent experimental streak on World of Warcraft has brought about two huge shifts in content through unique modes of play – Plunderstorm and the upcoming Mists of Pandaria Remix mode. Both of these take interesting and different approaches to World of Warcraft – in the case of Plunderstorm, by not being very WoW at all short of asset usage, and in the case of MoP Remix, by being a twist substantial enough that it is far more than what it appears at first glance. This week, I accomplished two things related to these modes – I finished the Renown track in Plunderstorm for all my rewar ..read more

We are getting, by most estimates and the timetable provided by Blizzard in the WoW roadmap for 2024, close to The War Within launching in alpha. If this alpha test ends up like most modern tests, once it escapes Blizzard’s hands and gets to content creators and Wowhead, we’re going to see a truckload of design details, actual content, and get a general sense of where the expansion is going to end up going. To their credit, Blizzard has been releasing big details of the major gameplay feature for everyone, the Hero Talents, but there are still a handful waiting to be shown and I expect that al ..read more

PAX East is this weekend, and the Final Fantasy XIV team is going to have a global livestream from the show that will, in all likelihood, include the start of pre-orders and the availability of the Collector’s Edition boxes. The patch 6.58 data from this week includes the pre-order incentives, other pending news items like the full release of the Xbox version of the game have been resolved, and we stand likely 3 months and change out from the actual launch of the expansion. Dawntrail is going to be in an interesting spot, as it will demonstrate what the vision of the FFXIV team is for the futu ..read more

10.2.6’s big surprise is live as of this week, and…uh, it’s interesting. The lynchpin feature of this new patch is an addition to retail WoW playable by anyone with a WoW subscription – a 60-player battle royale called “Plunderstorm.” You roll in as your Battletag, can customize any of WoW’s playable races to suit your needs as an avatar, and play matches either solo or queued with a friend and try to be the last ones standing among the 60 players entered. Battle Royales are hardly new, and as a genre they’ve been a bit down as of late, with juggernaut Fortnite not being quite as compelling, e ..read more

When Blizzard mentions that they want something to both have flavor and also be a source of player power, it is usually a sign of trouble. Hero talents for The War Within are starting to kind of fall into this trap, where they are a mixed bag with some bags having flavor, some having good player power (in theory), and some having or even lacking both. Today, now that one of my most-played specs in Dragonflight has both of its trees published and I’ve started debating what spec I intend to play next expansion. The Tug of War Between Flavor and Power Blizzard’s core issue with this, which crops ..read more

The War Within marks Blizzard’s first time trying something new with the release of a World of Warcraft expansion since they moved to simultaneous global release – an Early Access window. This has, predictably, been a bit of a mixed bag as an announcement. While early access as a thing is not new to games or even MMOs, it is, in this case, somewhat conspicuous because WoW doing it marks an interesting change. WoW is, also, quite a time-sensitive game, and thus a 3-day headstart on expansion content seems like it could create a state of relative imbalance, where the people who start early get a ..read more

Today, ahead of the drop Season 4 of Dragonflight (date TBA), we received a huge announcement about dungeons, dungeon difficulty, and the tuning of rewards and difficulty in Mythic Plus for Dragonflight Season 4…but also news about changes to both Heroic dungeons and Mythic base-difficulty, what ends up being called M0 by the community. Blizzard’s approach here is both smart but also potentially challenging, and it also continues a legacy of Season 4 filler arcs being full of testing changes that end up sticking around. First, the Change Sans Editorial Blizzard’s changes are aimed at recalbrat ..read more

During the crushing lows of Shadowlands, I listened to a podcast, I want to say, from Blizzard Watch. The hosts were sort of riffing in a weird way about displeasure with Shadowlands, noting that, “two expansions later everyone will talk about how they miss things from it,” and basically putting forward the idea that displeasure with WoW in the present-tense is not long-term or serious, because those same people will have nostalgia for it later. It was offputting to me because it was very dismissive of the real and substantive criticism Shadowlands was catching at the time, but it also kind of ..read more

WoW lives on a cycle of hype that moves between live patch releases and PTR excitement, as datamining slowly nudges out new content well in advance of the actual launch. 10.2.6 for Dragonflight has been a bold experiment for Blizzard – no public testing, no patch sitting open on CDN servers to be datamined. For all intents and purposes, 10.2.6 is a black box, inside of which we only know of two things – the vague idea of a skull-and-crossbones piece of content, and the data needed to make Season 4 of Dragonflight work. However, since the launch of 10.2.5 in mid-January, WoW has basically been ..read more