World of Warcraft patch 3.3 trailer

I believe no game but World of Warcraft would be granted a cinematic trailer with full voice over, just for a new patch release. That’s right, patch 3.3 for World of Warcraft is out, and so is the trailer for it.

But that’s OK, that means I get to her the voice of Earl Boen again. They guy who does the voice for the zombie pirate LeChuck in the Monkey Island games, and the narrator in World of Warcraft. Seriously, that guy must have the coolest voice in the world, perhaps only beaten slightly by Christopher Lee.

Somebody won World of Warcraft

Somebody reached the end of the world… of Warcraft, and it was an Asian person (no racism intended). A very dedicated player from Taiwan has managed to earn all the achievements available in the entire game; ranking as the only player that has ever managed to do so.

There are 986 achievements available in the game. Among other things, these achievements include killing 390,895 monsters; dealing 7,255,538,878 damage points; completing 5,906 quests (which means 14.62 quests a day on average) and raiding 405 dungeons.

Obviously, there is one achievement, called BB King, that the player received by mistake and didn’t earn fair and square. It is therefore debated whether he (I assume it’s a he) really deserves the title of the one who earned all the achievements. Let us hope this important matter can be settled peacefully.

I any case, I cannot stress enough how terribly sorry I am for this poor individual. I wonder if he knows what the sun looks like at all. And yes, I mean the real one.

No more trees for Diablo 3

According to recent speculations, the well tried and well experienced skill tree is pretty much out of Blizzard Activision’s famous (or infamous) dungeon crawler. This comes from a twitter message posted by the game’s lead designer Jay Wilson himself, who states that the skill system revision is in full force. Trees begone! I think it might be a winner.

An action role playing game without a skill tree? That’s almost like eggs without bacon!

The wonderful thing about a traditional skill tree, is that it’s so simple to understand and get into. The intuitive way of presenting the possible character progression is eye candy to most players who don’t want to dig themselves into some complex manual.

Diablo pretty much set the standard for most role playing games with it’s skill tree system. It was further developed in World of Warcraft, which all must agree on has been quite a success, and adapted by most action RPG developers and many traditional RPG developers. Even the hardcore role playing game developer Bioware used this very traditional system in their latest RPG Dragon Age: Origins.

However, Dragon Age: Origins does draw a lot of inspiration from games like Diablo and World of Warcraft, although most harcore Bioware RPG fans probably will refuse to acknowledge this fact. There is a lot of World of Warcraft in Dragon Age: Origins gameplay.

Anyway, where is Blizzard going with this? Are they trying out a more way of dealing with skills, like the system in The Elder Scrolls games? Or have they invented some new incredible skill sytem that is even more intuitive and easy to understand? Final Fantasy XII had its chessboard stystem. Is that a possible source of inspiration?

At any rate, it ought to be something interesting, since the developers obviously had allready worked out a traditional skill tree system in Diablo 3. Maybe they actually found some kind of meat that actually goes better with eggs than bacon does!