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BlizzCon 2008 to be Televised

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Jul 30, 2008 04:45 PM
from the g4-really-stretching-for-guest-hosts-this-year dept.
Media Television Entertainment Games
Blizzard has just started pushing their BlizzCon 2008 agenda in earnest and the big news this year is that apparently the highlights of the show are going to be televised. DIRECTV users will apparently be able to call up the show as a pay-per-view item and if you switch to the satellite service in August you can even get this item for free (I would love to see the numbers on how many people actually do this). Hopefully Blizzard continues to learn from their convention mistakes and capitalizes on the many new and exciting releases they have on the horizon. Tickets go on sale August 11.
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[+] "E For All" Game Expo Withers, PAX Thrives 64 comments
After the continued struggles of E3 this year, it looks like another IDG-based games conference will have its own troubles. BigDownload reports that most major game manufacturers are skipping E For All, in part due to their focus on the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) and BlizzCon (which will be televised). E for All will have major presentations by Microsoft and EA, but you'll have to go to PAX to see events and exhibits from other big publishers; for example, the playable Jumpgate Evolution demo, the Guild Wars tournament, or the Omegathon. The Seattle Times ran a story about Penny Arcade's creators and how PAX came into existence. Further competition for E For All is coming from the Tokyo Game Show, which runs in the beginning of October.
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  • Hopefully Blizzard continues to learn from their convention mistakes...

    What, exactly, are you referring to here? I went to BlizzCon last year and it was an awesome time, the best two days of my life. It can't even be that you're complaining about not talking about upcoming games, because there was a fair amount of material for both Starcraft 2 and WoW: WotLK at BlizzCon last year. Nothing on Diablo 3, but then, that hadn't been made public yet.

    What more do you expect, that they aren't delivering?

    • Starcraft 2, Diablo 3... Everyone's expecting them and (thus far) Blizzard isn't delivering :P

      • They had SC2 at BlizzCon 07, why wouldn't they have it at 08? I'm sure they'll have Diablo 3 as well. Blizzard doesn't generally talk about their products until they're good and ready to do so (they're rather like Apple in that respect), and that includes what you may or may not see on the agenda at BlizzCon.

        • Ahh, but they demo'd them, which is not quite the same as delivering them, at least I haven't been able to order or download a copy yet..

      • Starcraft 2, Diablo 3... Everyone's expecting them and (thus far) Blizzard isn't delivering :P

        Hmmm.. maybe that's because their release schedule is that it is done when it is done, rather than an release date set by corporate overlords who have no idea of when a game is finished.

        And they due deliver, just not on your timeframe.. Id rather wait a few months or so and have a kick ass game rather than a crappy game just to make the release date.

        • Hmm, Starcraft came out in 1998, it's now 2008... 10 years isn't exactly a few months :P Not that I seriously expected them to deliver any fully finished games at their Con, though it wouldn't upset many people if they did...

          • That's because Blizzard has always been more of a one-trick pony. They prefer to work on one project at a time and do that one thing to the highest standard possible. Instead of looking at the time-span between Starcraft releases, you need to look at the time-spans between all their releases.

            Although lately with WoW expansions, the impact of people they've lost is becoming more and more apparent as their QA has slowly eroded.

    • Re:Confused (Score:5, Funny)

      by Paralizer (792155) on Wednesday July 30 2008, @05:41PM (#24409761) Homepage
      The two best days of your life were at a video game convention? They better have had blackjack and hookers...

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        So, if the best days of your life aren't supposed to be spent on your hobbies and interests, what exactly are they supposed to be spent on?

      • In fact, forget the blackjack!
      • Mmm gambling and hookers in cosplay, wheres Tifa?

    • Re:Confused (Score:4, Funny)

      by geekoid (135745) <.dadinportland. .at. .yahoo.com.> on Wednesday July 30 2008, @05:50PM (#24409851) Homepage Journal

      "..the best two days of my life."

      And what a life it must be~

  • Cool, and watch it offline if we miss it while on vacation!

  • The Revolution will not be Televised (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2008, @04:54PM (#24409185)

    We interrupt this revolution to bring you BlizzCon!

  • The only Expo I would really care to watch on TV would be PAX. With the live shows and what not, I would think it would be very interesting.
  • TV gets more interesting when it airs BlizzCon. BlizzCon doesn't get more interesting when it's aired on TV.

  • Great! And now Activision and Blizzard... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Channard (693317) on Wednesday July 30 2008, @05:22PM (#24409545) Journal
    .. are the same company, maybe someone can step up on TV and ask them why they've cancelled or put on the back burner the releases of Ghostbusters, Brutal Legend and 50 Cent: Blood On The Sa...

    Actually, just ask them about Ghostbusters and Brutal Legend.

    • While they are under the same name, and both under the Vivendi, they remain autonomous entities. The Activision in Activision Blizzard has nothing to do with the Blizzard in Activision Blizzard.

      Hows that for a cumbersome sentence?

      Vivendi is too smart to mess with Blizzard, they make FAR too much money to fiddle with their business model (they haven't either).

  • Blizzard's calculated destruction of WoW and fans' the irrational warlock hate-fest will now be publicly available on TV!

    • Warlocks need to be nerfed.

      • prot warriors need to be able to solo more effectively
        • I'll bite on the prot warriors, they could use some help for grinding. But if any of that help means more PvP buffs, I'm putting my lock into retirement for a Death Knight, maybe then I'll get some happiness in killing everyone.

          • actually, I have a warrior and recently tried sword-n-boarding it up for amusement.

            If you use the same rotations you use when tanking a boss, you can aoe grind just like a paladin...

            shield block -> revenge your way through a crowd of 5-7 mobs.

            • I find you can last a very long time but its slow going - paladins kill stuff much more quickly.

              • wow that's really saying something!

                • haha well prot paladins do get economies of scale due to loads taking damage at once so averaged across all of them its reasonably fast....whereas prot warriors are still mainly dpsing one target at a time

        • no, that's not their point.

        • PvE needs to be completely removed, along with battlefields and arena. Bring back the days when it was fun- when people did world PvP, and when gear meant jack shit. In other words, the pre-MC days.

          You can get your wish then too- with no more PvE, no reason to spec prot. I'll even sign the petition to replace it with a useful tree.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Endo13 (1000782)

            That's never going to happen. Even for the biggest proponents of it, world PvP is only fun for so long. You just won't have very many people at all who will sit there and do the same world PvP over and over for years on end, with nothing else to mix it up. You need that gear-drive to keep people playing long-term (as in years rather than months). What they do need to do however is bring a lot more balance to PvP and PvE. Pre TBC (but post MC) there was far too much emphasis on PvE to be able to participate

            • Actually, no. World PvP never grows old. I can have fun doing that for hours. PvE and instanced PvP gets boring after 30 minutes or so.

              Oh sure, gear drive will keep some people playing- but it makes as many people quit. I'm in a guild full of such people. I know a few dozen others, just in my circle of friends. In fact, I know far, far FAR more people who agree with me than who actually like PvE or gear grinds. PvE and gear RUINED the game. The game was fun when gear meant shit because it was a dif

              • Actually, no. World PvP never grows old. I can have fun doing that for hours. PvE and instanced PvP gets boring after 30 minutes or so.

                I know my prior post didn't give that impression, but I'm right there with you. Battlegrounds drive me up a wall, and arena is worse. Raiding is better, but not by much. World PvP is definitely where it's at for me too. The problem though is, much as I enjoy World PvP, it still grows old after a while, especially if there's nothing else you need to do in the game that pulls you away from it periodically. If world PvP is literally all there was to do, I'd have lots of fun with it. I'm sure I'd even stick aro

          • Why is it that people always want to force other people who don't want it into PvP? Does it really harm you that some players might prefer PvE or playing with a friend cooperatively against the environment? It seems that usually when people are forced into PvP, it's because some high level wanker wants to feel cool. For instance, with WoW, what would be the attraction of being a level 70 that can go to a newbie area and kill some level 1 new player?

            This isn't quite possible in WoW as it is, but the case

  • direct TV on demand PPV, or live sat PPV, or sat push PPV?

    Why can't they show it for free on the 101?

    FREE SHOWTIME, HBO, and STARZ is better then this.

    • Yes yes, you broke your agreement, and they retaliated and you lost.
      Clearly they're SOBs

        • I'm pretty sure GP was talking about your reference to Blizzard being one of the first to use the DMCA hammer. IIRC, their use of it was to try to oust players using WoWglider (which any brain-dead idiot should know is against the ToS). Unfortunately the link in the DMCA reference is blocked here at work so I can't check it to be sure.

          • Correction:

            their use of it was to create a court precedent saying you can't make generics using your own talent.

            They claimed DRM violations when BNETD didn't break their DRM at all.

          • If EFF is blocked for you, I'd seriously suggest finding another employer. I hear there's positions in China that allow much more liberal access to information.

            However, just looking at the URL makes it obvious that the link is in fact not about the relatively recent WoWglider debacle, but the much older BNETD controversy.

        • Actually, you were negligent by not logging in. There was no agreement that they would store your data forever. It is an 8 year old game. Sucks that you lost all that "work", but your expectations are unreasonable. To me it is amazing that they still maintain servers for this long.

    • MMO for the non-windows users anyone?

      I'm not demanding linux support or anything, but I use a mac, and their clients are all ".exe"

    • Blizzard didn't abuse a damn thing. People were using that software to circumvent Blizzard's CD key authentication and pirate the game. People deliberately used this software to enhance the experience of their pirated games. Blizzard allows a variety of software to interact with their games, but they go after the software that ruins the their customer's experience, or the software that encourages and facilitates piracy of their games. It would be foolish for them not protect themselves in this manner.

      A

        • I don't see the problem here. This is a free service. They have full rights to delete unused characters. On a game with such a large userbase, the character database must have increased by several tens of thousands every day in the early years of its release.

    • What kind of stupid logic leads your from PPV to D3 being under a subscription model? WoW is an MMORPG, of course it is pay to play. Get a better job if $15 a month is too much for you to handle.

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