High-res nipples

Bashiok has explained that the first wave of Beta invites is being targeted to "WoW veterans". I wonder what their definition is; and whether we might extrapolate any interesting pattern by looking at the data of which players got an invitation. For the record, I've been playing since 2006 and I got an invitation.

Or, perhaps the aim of this targeting is to give long-time players something to do. Or it could be any of the twelve other reasons why choosing experienced players is useful for a beta test. Speculation is fun!

We've been seeing some very active chatter on the subject of new character models. The way they're talking about it gives me a strong impression the expansion has entered crunch. They need to get as much as possible done before the end of the year when they promised to deliver the product they have already sold people-- the dialogue has shifted to become mainly about managing expectations and prioritising the most important things.

It's really interesting to watch the character model situation evolve, and to gain an appreciation for how tricky a challenge it really is. It reminds me of the way game sequels always tend to update the player character models-- they never look quite right next to the old ones. I always assumed it was because they were deliberately updating the style with each iteration, but now I understand it's simply hard to maintain a sense of common style between two different levels of detail.

But the most important update is complete: male human high res nipples/chest hair.

It's also interesting to note the emphasis on PvP testing this time, which has always struck me as an important thing to test because it's the area where class balance issues reveal themselves most prominently. One of the PvP beta realms has been set up for this specific purpose, with players who roll on this realm given an instant boost to level one hundred, but with all of Draenor's PvE zones disabled. Previous WoW betas I've been in always struck me as poor tests for PvP because without meaning to they were giving players the choice between brand-new pre-release PvE content or the same BGs they can play on live and receive real rewards for.

Is Wildstar going free to play?

I understand that if you make your headline into a question you don't have to actually say anything to back it up.

I keep hearing about this new MMO (WoW-clone) called Wildstar. Apparently it's pretty good. I would have been happy to give it a try, but the publisher is asking sixty fucking dollars just for the privilege of becoming a paying subscriber, and I'm unwilling to pay that much money into a long-form video game I don't even know if I'll play for very long.

Someone needs to tell this publisher what year it is, and point out that everyone knows that the box price (so appropriate a term) attached to an MMO released today is just an early adopter fee. They wont stop charging for it until enough people demonstrate that they wont pay for it.

Weird that buying full-price game software has become almost like some meta-MMO. Players keep paying for boxes with the hope that there's something wonderful inside, even when most of the time there isn't. Skinner would be proud.

More Mistweaving

I've been a bit concerned at all the attention the Mistweaver Monk spec has had in WoW's ongoing development. Mainly because I'm acutely aware of all the scandalous ways it overpowers other healing specs (at least until you need damage reduction), and although I can appreciate that nerfs are necessary, I'm really worried that some important things might be lost in the process of redesign. I truly love playing the Mistweaver class. It's my favourite way of playing my favourite game, and I don't want to lose that.

First, the ability to place Healing Spheres manually is being removed. I've written a few times about how overpowered this ability is, even considering its difficulty to use. All the other healing specs will be losing a major spell, so it probably seemed appropriate to kill this one for Mistweavers. (We got to keep all our proper healing spells.) My balls were never really as fun to use as to talk about casually during raids, reminding people to watch their health bars and when they go down make sure to grab my balls. -cough- Anyway, I'm not too sorry to see it go.

Mistweavers will no longer have a melee slow, and although this is another ability that I'm willing to concede was overpowered, as someone who plays 200ms behind the server, I always found it to be a huge asset in PvP.

The Mistweaver global cooldown is being raised from 1.0 to 1.5 seconds. This pisses me off. They are slowing down my gameplay and I think that sucks. Mistweaver is a distinctly active feeling spec and that feeling comes from having a lot of fun buttons to push, and lots of opportunities to push them. Longer GCDs means fewer button pushes means less gameplay.

Lastly, we are getting a brand new stance! Crane stance grants you attack power equal to your spell power, and causes healing from damage dealt! Incidentally, those are the same things that your healing stance no longer grants.

Or to say it in clearer terms; our healing stance is being nerfed to no longer provide melee attack power or any healing through damage. And of course the Crane stance restricts which healing spells you're allowed to cast. No more weaving Renewing Mist hots across the raid while melee healing. No more free auto-attack healing between instant casts.

Instead, stance dancing. They are giving my favourite class one of the most objectively clunky mechanics WoW has ever seen. Even though there are more classes that use stances than don't, each one seems to have gone out of its way to make sure stance changing is not part of gameplay. And there is a good reason for this: every single time stance changing has been incorporated into gameplay, it has sucked.

Currently the only class that still needs to change stances mid-combat to be effective is Demonology Warlock, ironically a recent change and part of the great Warlock revamp of Mists. I enjoyed Mists Demonology for a good long while. I levelled and then raided with it. Running around with a posse of imps is an awesome realisation of the class fantasy. But the stance switching always felt clunky; I never got used to it. And this is coming from someone who not only "got used to" but actually enjoyed placing Rain of Fire rotationally.

I can only hope that stances themselves are being changed in some way to make them easier to deal with. At least one other class (Warrior) is getting a new "optional" stance, which makes me hopeful that at least some development attention is being paid to improving the mechanic itself.

I just really hope they don't screw up my favourite class while trying to fix it. It's already brilliant.

Ghostcrawler leaves Blizzard!

Yes, I do feel that heading deserves an exclamation mark.

Ghostcrawler is someone I've respected for a long time. As Lead Systems Designer, he was the front-man, so to speak, for all the fantastic gameplay innovations that World of Warcraft introduced over the past few years. Of course, this also made him the target for any complaints that dedicated players had about the state of the game, the common meme being to claim that "Ghostcrawler must play a blank", with blank being whichever class ended up more powerful in the current patch.

The obvious question is of course: did angry fans finally cause this man to give up?

No, I really doubt that. Ghostcrawler's a pro. And he's been doing this for years, so I have to assume he's developed a hell of a thick skin when it comes to ridiculous complaints.

The explanation provided on GC's Facebook announcement was that he has "a great opportunity for something new and exciting". So in other words, the same bullshit reason any well-known executive leaves any big company.

So, speculation time! Now, the explanation which immediately occurs to me is: perhaps Activision Blizzard isn't as awesome a place to work as Blizzard once was. We've all heard stories about how cutthroat the video games industry is and Activision has been an obvious villain for quite some time.

Or, perhaps the WoW development environment has become too iterative. The upcoming expansion doesn't have any new classes to throw a wrench into the balance mix... maybe the core World of Warcraft gameplay is now as close to "complete" as it is possible to get, and there just aren't many systems left to design.

Or maybe he's telling the truth. Maybe Mr Street has found a job which is somehow more exciting than being at the forefront of designing one of the most influential video games in the industry.

We'll all find out soon enough. I have to assume the MMO Champion guy is actively chasing and/or confirming the information as I type this.

Doctor Who trained me for this

Okay. Okay. I totally get it now.

Bear with me. The Dark Portal links the two worlds of Draenor and Azeroth, but because the timestreams of these worlds are completely seperate, the point in time that one arrives in when stepping through the Dark Portal to Outland is and always has been "arbitrary", so to speak.

So what Garrosh actually does is something like recalibrating the Dark Portal so that it points at a different "place" in time on Draenor. The reason it's not technically time travel is because relative time between the two worlds isn't a thing.

Garrosh's new portal leads into Draenor's "past" only in the sense that we consider Outland as the "present", neither is technically relevant outside of the world in question. From our perspective, we're only stepping from one place to another.

I mean I suppose if a person originated in Outland, exited through the old Dark Portal to Azeroth, then took Garrosh's New Dark Portal back to Draenor, then that person would have effectively time traveled to the past... y'know, by way of two interdimensional jumps. One might argue that time travel alone would be less interesting.

Interface ruins my immersion.

Am I supposed to believe that in my fantasy world my hero is constantly followed around by a huge chunk of metal with gryphon bookends, containing what appear to be a collection of icons representing her various spells and abilities. Give me a break.

And for some reason whenever I move into a geographically distinct area floating words appear in the air which name the area that I just entered. You want to talk about immersion-breaking?

A man walked up to me and said "greetings". I was about to reply when a perfectly round white cloud materialised above his head with the words "hey there" mysteriously inscribed there on, while he only mouthed silently and gestured at me. What is this bullshit in my MMO?

What's more, every time I look at an enemy a weird red circle appears magically on the ground around it. I've found I can't even cast a single offensive spell unless my vision is targeted precisely at an enemy so I don't even have any way of getting around or turning off this awful horrible immersion-breaking laser circle.

Hearthstone

Last week I finally received a Hearthstone beta invitation. I've been cautiously optimistic about the game since the announcement, maintaining a deliberate aloofness to Blizzard's attempts at building excitement for this game within a demographic that doesn't seem sure whether to care about online TCGs. But I also have a very clear understanding that Blizzard does not make bad games, and also that I'm the kind of person who really enjoys that specific kind of game.

Hearthstone is a clone of Magic The Gathering (or whichever game invented that genre) but with much better rules. While Magic is a really great game, there are just so many counterintuitive or obtuse rules, like responding on other players' turns that, with the benefit of hindsight, Hearthstone has been able to design around.

The behaviourist vibe I get from this game is powerful. Hearthstone's interface and art style feels like every "social" game I've ever played. Opening a booster pack stands out as a very deliberate ritual; you drag the the leather-bound wallet into the centre of your screen, where it explodes into fireworks to reveal five floating face-down cards, which you then need to click one by one to reveal.

They're already accepting real money for these booster packs, with the promise that although all beta cards will be wiped, the value of any money you spend in beta will be refunded as in-game currency when the game is properly released. To me that seems like pretty good value, since you'll get twice as much card-opening (which I now understand is the important part) for your money.

All that said, the game is spectacular. Blizzard has once again proven that you don't need complex rules to create gameplay depth. I feel like I need to dedicate more words to expressing how good it is, but I just don't think superlatives are that useful past the first one. You either have played it, and know exactly what I mean; or you haven't played it, in which case you now have my highest recommendation.

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/ is the link to register for beta access.