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More WoW, Major 2007 Announcement for Blizzard

Posted by Zonk on Fri Aug 25, 2006 09:22 AM
from the shocker dept.
Entertainment Games
Blizzard has announced their intention to follow up this year's Burning Crusade expansion with a new World of Warcraft add-on every year. While not terribly surprising, they have also announced that they're working on a major announcement for next year. Consensus seems to be that it will likely be another Starcraft game, given comments by Blizzard COO Paul Sams. "StarCraft is my absolutely favorite game of all time. As you probably already know, there is no doubt that we will continue the StarCraft and Diablo franchise, and trust me, I will be the happiest person in the world when we announce StarCraft 2."
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[+] WoW Burning Crusade Delayed until January 2007 290 comments
Wowzer writes "Blizzard today announced that the release date for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, the first expansion for World of Warcraft, is delayed until January 2007. From the article: 'By adding a few extra weeks to the development cycle beyond its original target date, Blizzard will be able to extend the closed beta test and further refine the new content that will ship with the game.' While disappointing now, what will this mean for the yearly WoW expansions long term? As Blizzard COO Paul Sams revealed plans in August that 'Starting with The Burning Crusade, every year thereafter we plan on bringing out a new expansion set.' 2008, 2009, ad infinitum?"
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  • Well.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Necreia (954727) on Friday August 25 2006, @09:26AM (#15978023)
    I'm very excited to see more of the Starcraft series, as long as it is not MMO.

    • Re:Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Cornflake917 (515940) on Friday August 25 2006, @12:58PM (#15979983) Homepage
      Many of the developers who created Starcraft split from Blizzard and went off to make Guild Wars. This scares me. I want too see a new Starcraft sooo bad, but not if it's ruined by people who don't know what there doing.

  • starcraft 2 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by legoburner (702695) on Friday August 25 2006, @09:28AM (#15978033) Homepage Journal
    Pleeeeease let it be starcraft 2, and have it be more fun than warcraft 3. I need more starcraft chips [replays.hu] and it seems they have stopped selling them at my local korean importers. There is the small matter of the game being as addictive as all hell too.

  • Geez, and this is news? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theRhinoceros (201323) on Friday August 25 2006, @09:29AM (#15978047)
    Wow. An announcement that there will be an announcement next year about a game that likely will not come out for a while after that, barring no (ahem) delays. Anything to get hits on a blog/AdSense clicks, right?

    • Re:Geez, and this is news? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ryan Amos (16972) on Friday August 25 2006, @09:35AM (#15978088)
      Yeah, from Blizzard's track record, if they announce Starcraft 2 next year, we'll see it around 2010. And I'm not kidding about that, actually.
      • Nah, they'll release the statement just before the end of Q4 to drive up interest and ad revenue to make up for lack lust x-mas sales. Gotta look good for the investor ;)

        -Rick
      • Either that or they plan on having finished building the world's first, full-scale, fully functional Yamato Cruiser by 2010. That way we can play live action. Hopefully they're not also working on a Zergling Rush... That would suck. A very squishy sort of suck.

      • Yeah, from Blizzard's track record, if they announce Starcraft 2 next year, we'll see it around 2010.

        If it's well done, polished, and fun to play, I will wait.

    • Re:Geez, and this is news? (Score:5, Funny)

      by happyemoticon (543015) on Friday August 25 2006, @10:34AM (#15978689) Homepage
      FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

      San Francisco, Calif., August 22, 2006: Happyemoticon today disclosed breaking news on behalf of Channel 2 that sometime, possibly within the year, there would be breaking news of titanic proportions reported by Channel 2.

      "We cannot overstate the magnitude of this 'newsish' report," Happyemoticon stated, his jowls flapping manically with the stress, "Although none of our reporters have yet been tasked with the assignment of finding this 'news,' current research by the boys in R&D suggests that we're onto something. We're not ready to disclose what this 'something' is, but rest assured, when we ascertain what this news is, the release of the news that our breaking news is ascertained will certainly be big news. Really big. News."

      A variety of claims and speculation have emerged as people try to piece together facts in an attempt to determine what the news referred to by this news report is referring to, from aliens to typhoons to the Rapture, many of them in turn framed as news stories. Jim Joebob, a news theorist working for News Corporation (parent company of Fox Channel 2), theorizes that the news' news may be so new it hasn't even happened yet. "A contact in their lab mentioned they had a perpetual random number generator which they use to 'sniff out' incoming stories, by sensing local anomalies in causality as evinced by the frequency of 1 or 0. I am sure of the integrity of this device, as it is apparently powered by a hamster, gerbil, or some other rodent, known to be extremely high sources of entropy."

      "Apparently for the last two weeks," he continued, "they've been coming up with nothing but 1/2. If this hearsay news is news, then there should even be a news story about the news flibbilityblah."

  • This Just In.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by cjb909 (838363) on Friday August 25 2006, @09:30AM (#15978049)
    Blizzard announces they will be making a major Announcement!

  • Ladies and gentlemen.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Friday August 25 2006, @09:31AM (#15978051) Homepage Journal
    I have an important announcement to make...

    ..and that is next year, I shall make an important announcement.

    *bow*
    Thank you, thank you ladies and gentlemen, you're far too kind. I'd like to thank you all for being here today, I'd like to thank Rob Malda and everyone else who made this possible, and I'd like to thank my mom.
    *bow*
    Thank you all for your time, please enjoy the cocktails.
    • I'm hearing that python skit... where the *girl* keeps clearing her throat... "ahem, and my discovery is , ahem, [coughcough] that is to say, that I discoverd it and it is, ahem [cough] here it is, my work, ahem, aHEM, ahem, [coughcough]..."

  • Starcraft 2 ? Diablo 3? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Chaffar (670874) on Friday August 25 2006, @09:35AM (#15978092)
    You guys are all wrong... They're obviously gonna release Blackthorne 2 [wikipedia.org] :)
    • Monsters are no match for a man with a shotgun. I wonder if this is where Bruce Campbell got his insperation...
    • Don't tease me. I miss good platforming/adventure games like this, Flashback, and Prince of Persia.

      By the way, everyone knows it's a toss up between Lost Vikings 3 and Rock & Roll Racing Online.
      • Don't even JOKE about LV3... Lost Vikings was frickin awesome... granted I never played much of the sequal, but that game was gold. Definitly under appreciated.

  • We've Heard This Before (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Blakey Rat (99501) on Friday August 25 2006, @09:35AM (#15978096)
    They also promised that they'd release a patch every month for the at least the first year when the game came out, and we've seen how they've hit that goal. They also announced that WOW was a game intended to make casual players happy, before adding in that "grade-on-a-curve" honor system that casual players can't possibly excel at. Not that I have anything against Blizzard, but considering what's happened in the past, I would wait to get excited until it actually does happen. In fact... that applies to pretty much all of these press releases.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by rob1980 (941751)
      The grade-on-a-curve honor system cheesed everybody off because the only way you can make high warlord/grand marshal is to essentially quit your job and pvp for 14 hours a day. It wasn't just the casual players, fortunately. I guess they thought it would work, and after awhile saw that it didn't - a new honor system is going in with the expansion.
      • Yeah, and I'm very thankful that they're fixing it, being stuck at rank 7 despite playing every weekend. But it does kind of make you wonder what the heck they were thinking when they put it in in the first place. Oh well.

      • Re:We've Heard This Before (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Blakey Rat (99501) on Friday August 25 2006, @10:14AM (#15978490)
        Yes, but my point is that they've been selling WOW as "the MMO for the casual player" since it opened, while at the same time modifying the game to be *less* friendly to the casual player. (Adding in the honor system, adding in 40-man insane-hard raids, etc.) It's great that they're finally getting around to fixing that, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of WOW's press releases in the past have been almost-lies.

        BTW, I don't consider "25-man" good enough. IMO, they should add a new 5-man and 10-man for every 15 levels or so. All the new instances are level 60 instances, and that's not fair to people who are just starting-- they deserve new content too.

        Also IMO, they should add in an auto-level system so that the game can, say, run Deadmines as a higher level dungeon by bumping up the levels of all the monsters. When you enter with your group, the instance would create monsters designed to give you at least a little challenge. (This scheme works in Oblivion; why not put it in an MMO?) That would make it so when you're level 60, you can run any instance in the game and have a good time.
        • Also IMO, they should add in an auto-level system so that the game can, say, run Deadmines as a higher level dungeon by bumping up the levels of all the monsters.

          This would also prevent higher-level players from farming in lower-level dungeons.

        • The problem with WOW is simple - Blizzard listened to their fanbase. Too much. Casual players don't spend hours a day complaining on the forums. Many hardcore players do. Thus, any feedback that Blizzard recieves is invariably from the hardcore players.

          Of course, hardcore players only represent about 2% of the overall WOW population (look at Census data; only about 10% level 60, and that's slanted because hardcore players are on more often and are thus more likely to be counted).

          Blizzard should have been ad
        • "All the new instances are level 60 instances, and that's not fair to people who are just starting-- they deserve new content too."

          That doesn't make any sense at all. If they were just starting, the old content would be new to them. The old content is actually pretty freaking amazing, too.

  • -1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. (Score:4, Informative)

    by base3 (539820) on Friday August 25 2006, @09:46AM (#15978198)
    Remember bnetd, boycott Blizzard/Vivendi.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by CrazyJim1 (809850)
      I think the Slashdot community was/is wrong with bnetd. Bnetd allowed circumvention of Blizzard's copy protection and thats about all it did. I played on it when I couldn't get into betas of various Blizzard games, but I eventually bought the legit game in the store. If Bnetd was not shutdown, it could have spawned to support millions of players. That is to say, millions of people playing without first paying for a copy of the game.

      • Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by base3 (539820) on Friday August 25 2006, @10:14AM (#15978479)
        Just because you happened to use it to avoid paying for the game doesn't mean that the people who were getting together on their own servers using the software they paid for were all committing copyright infringement. Blizzard used an unconstitutional law to persecute an open source project, and they will never see another dime from me. Unfortunately, there are plenty of sheep unwilling to vote against their war on freedom with their wallets.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by toddestan (632714)
            Could you come up with some other reasons for bnetd?

            Sure. Blizzard was (probably still is) terrible at policing their own servers. Back when I played Diablo II, cheating in the form of duped/hacked items, as well as cheating by using programs like Maphack were rampant. Blizzard made a token effort to stop it every once and a while, but for the most part they simply didn't care. On the other hand, there were bnetd servers whose admins took a hardline stance against using hacks. Also many of the bnetd ad

      • Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. (Score:4, Informative)

        by egburr (141740) on Friday August 25 2006, @10:46AM (#15978807) Homepage
        I ran a bnetd server at home, so my friends and I could play. Battlenet was useless. When using battlenet, we would spend an hour or more trying to login, and then not be able to see each other even though we were all in the same private chat room and all on the same server. When we could see each other, often starting a game would fail. When we actually managed to play a game, we would usually lose our battlenet connecting during the game, so after the game ended we had to start the whole painful process over again. When I ran my bnetd server, we could all get on quickly and never had trouble seeing each other or starting games. We went from playing one or two games in an evening to four or five games, sometimes even more depending on if the next day was a workday or not. When Blizzard shut bnetd down, we quit playing Starcraft on a regular basis, and switched to Age of Empires. Now we occasionally will play a game or two of Startcraft, and find the battlenet servers to be decent. I figure that is probably because people have moved on to other games so battlenet isn't as overloaded as it used to be.
        • You should try using Hamachi. [hamachi.cc] It creates virtual network cards that connect to each other and make your computers think you're on a private LAN. Starcraft LAN games don't go through Battlenet, so it should be just as quick as with bnetd. I use it all the time with some friends to play Worms without having to use their servers. It's a great program and very easy to use. Works on both Linux and Windows, although it isn't open source.
          • I'm impressed! I did attempt something like that at the time. Unfortunately, I could only figure out how to do it between linux boxes, and most of my friends had only windows, so my solution didn't work for the group. I'll have to keep this in minde for other games, though!
          • Dang! When bnetd went down, I figured something like that would appear, but I was never able to find it then and haven't even looked for a few years now. Thanks for the info!

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If I remember correctly, the bnetd guys asked Blizzard about checking legitimacy, and were told no way. They then asked about including the CD-Key checks, and were again told no way. I think the arguments were:

        1. Wouldn't check across all the bnetd servers people could possibly be running.
        2. Since people had the source, they could just comment out the check code, and go on with life.

        #2 is the flimsiest one, I think. The people that would take the time to download, edit, and recompile the source are th

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by base3 (539820)
        No they didn't. Just because the server emulation happened to have the side effect of enabling people to play for free doesn't mean that Blizzard had any moral right to shutdown a project that wasn't infringing its precious intellectual property. By your logic, the VCR and any other device "enabling" copyright infringement should be subject to being sued out of existence.

  • Wow churn (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BrookHarty (9119) on Friday August 25 2006, @09:47AM (#15978205) Homepage Journal
    I've been playing since beta, and checking the stats on my server, the number of total online players have been going down hill for the last year.

    Many of the large guilds are gone, they dont play as much, and people just pop on to talk to friends.

    I cant wait until the expansion when they disconnect honor/rank from pvp'ing and allow smaller groups for instances. Non-instance pvp, The casual player suffers from wow's (l33t guild) attitude.

    I think many people are just paying but not playing, soon people will finally just cancel the accounts.
    • They're hurting really bad. Which is why their subscriber numbers are still rising (they hit 7 million yet?).
    • My biggest problem is that my level 46 paladin had way too many elite and dungeon quests and very few normal quests that I can go out and do on my own. I'd like to see Blizzard dual rank these quests so I can attempt them on my own or with a group if I choose (adjusting the difficult accordingly).
    • http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html [mmogchart.com]

      The population of one server droping says NOTHING of the population of other/new servers.

      Sure, the oldest servers are going to lose players, but as long as the new ones *gain* players faster, it's a net gain.

      WoW is *still* growing faster than any MMO, ever. You're gonna have to come up with something more than anecdotal evidence to discount the volumes of evidence of that.
  • It's a meta-announcement.

    I wonder if we can get slashdot to come up with a topic icon for "slow news day"
    • Actually, they would be better off callng it Galaxy Of Starcraft and having some kind of spaceflight (probobly not player controled, just "jumps" from one planet to the next). Anytime they run out of content, they just open up a new jump and new planet.

  • Ob. Futurama Quote (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 25 2006, @10:04AM (#15978374)
    Hermes: Sweet gorilla of Manila! A letter from the Central Bureaucracy!

    [Hermes takes a piece of paper out of the red tube.] Attention, Hermes Conrad: You are about to receive a letter from the Central Bureaucracy.

    [Another red tube appears and Hermes takes a piece of paper out of.] My God! It's from the Central Bureaucracy!
  • Everquest has what, 12? In seven years. And Everquest 2 has 2 "real" expansions and several small ($7 iirc, I'm at work) expansion packs as well and has been out just as long as WoW.

    • Indeed, hooray for Blizzard and their habit of adding content to the patches instead of charging subscription fees AND for paid expansions every 7 months or so.
      • Yeah, remember how loooooong we had to wait for LoD? Or 1.10? Blizzard is slow as molasses when it comes to generating content and revamps... 1.10 was in excess of a year late.
  • Starcraft 2 is going to be more welcomed, but I believe the announcement is Diablo 3. Diablo is a established name, and there's been little hint of Starcraft 2 even being worked on (why did they basically kill ghost, or at least delay it?)

    Actually a big announcement would be Starcraft Ghost coming out next year for the 360 also... but that would just piss off the fans because what we really want is Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2.

    • Sorry, Blizzard, I loved Starcraft I and II, Diablo I and II, but ..

      So... you loved their PC games, including one that never existed (perhaps you mean StarCraft: Brood Wars, not Starcraft II?), but you will only buy the game they have yet to announce if they release it on a system that has yet to be released and you have yet to actually play?

      Please tell me there is some sort of sarcasm or humor that I'm missing...

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