Allegedly Destiny killed the Titan star

Blizzards Titan has finally been canceled, it will no longer be worked on after nearly 7 years and who knows how much money.

The rurmor is that Destiny a game published by Activision/Blizzard was too simlar in scope and that Titan just wans't fun.

So what next for Blizzard ?

I guess they can put all their focus now on printing more Hearthstone cards cause it not going to make Warcraft Expansions or that final Starcraft expansion get done any faster =P

Cutting though the BullCrap: Virtual Realms

Blizzard announced Virtal Realms today:

Virtual Realms are sets of realms that are fused together, and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Players on the same Virtual Realm will be able to join guilds, access a single Auction House, join arena teams and raids, as well run dungeons or group up to complete quests.

Sounds like a fancy way of saying, Merging servers with out the word merge.

Warcraft Only Down 100k Subscribers

Down to 10.2 million in total.

I actually thought it would be a lot worse than this when you compare it to the others:

• Q1 2011 - 600,000 subscribers lost
• Q2 2011 - 300,000 subscribers lost
• Q3 2011 - 800,000 subscribers lost

The annual pass has helped but considering Blizzard are up against there biggest competition in ages this has been a surprise. Also I feel the direction that Cata has taken since 4.3 has really helped with new and interesting content opened for everyone.

This year is a big year for Blizzard, we should see the Launch of Diablo 3 in the Q2, also Heart of the Swarm is coming and finally we should see Mists of Pandaria by the end of the year.

Diablo 3 Delayed .... Again

 There’s a lot of work left to be done, though. We’re constantly tuning and making balance changes; it’s a massive task. Some of these changes can be seen in the beta, like changes to item rarity, the levels at which we introduce affixes, and how many affixes enemies can roll up. Some you can’t see in the beta, like balancing the difficulty of the entire game for four different difficulty levels, adding tons of new affixes, creating legendary items, filling out crafting recipes and itemization, working on achievements, and implementing Battle.net features. We’re also working on a number of other large systems changes -- specifically with the skill and rune systems. We're not quite ready to share what those are just yet, but we look forward to being able to do so in the near future.

We want Diablo III to be the best game it can be when it launches. To get there, we're going to be iterating on designs we've had in place for a long time, making changes to systems you've spent a lot of time theorycrafting, and removing features you may have come to associate with the core of the experience. Our hope is that by embracing our iterative design process in which we question ourselves and our decisions, Diablo III won't just live up to our expectations, but will continue to do so a decade after it's released.

Will they haven't annocuned a relase date, its sounding more unlikely its going to be ready for March. 

Whats up Blizzards Sleeve ?

I think I ask myself this ever year and I am disappointed as each Blizzcon comes and goes with nothing really new.

The schedule for Blizzcon 2011 has been released and on close inspection things seem dull but its this dullness which has me interested.

Why would you put World of Warcraft Preview on the Main Stage just after the opening if there is nothing to preview. The entire schedule is full of nondescript World of Warcraft refences.

Pandera's in the mist ?
Wouldn't it be awesome if they got sigourney weaver to announce that.

Delays and Release dates

The Delay:

Diablo 3 has been delayed until 2012. I am hoping this is so they can rethink the always connected DRM which I have heard from the BETA sucks.

I do not mind having to log in to play a game. Steam does this seamlessly and doesn't bother me. Starcraft 2 was ok as well but with Diablo you are playing online and are relying on that connection for your enjoyment.

At launch of Starcraft 2 I was constantly getting messages that I have disconnected from Battle.net and that achievements would not be tracked or something and thats about it. My guess is Battle.net could hold the load. With Diablo 3 if this happens you will be kicked from your singleplayer game, loosing any progress since the last way point. You won't loose any items but you will have to hack your way across the map again. Also you can not pause in singleplayer because its not really singleplayer and if idle you will be auto disconnected from Battle.net.

This is why I am against Blizzards Diablo 3 DRM its full this increasing sort sightedness the company has been having since around 2006. Where is the voice of reason in BlizzHQ or did they all leave to go work on Torchlight 2.

The Release:

In other news, now that EA know Blizzard won't have Diablo 3 out this year, The Old Republic has a Launch Date.

December 20, 2011

Unless you live outside of America and most of Europe. Then its unknown. What is known is the subscription costs are the same as every other MMO.  $14.95 USD per month.

If I was a Bioware network engineer I would be totally pissed off with EA/Bioware right about now. As they won't be getting a Xmas this year.

As mentioned a paragraph above, there is no talk on the release date for OZ/NZ. They won't even comment if the delay is because they are securing server space for us down here. I am not fussed, the game has lost a lot of its magic from a few years and my excitement is nearly gone. I put this partly down to Rift showing just how generic MMO's have become.


Summing up, I think Blizzard have played their cards well. The old republic will be out over Xmas then at a guess Blizzard will try to release around the 1 month anniversary of The old republic, tempting people to cancel there subs.


Bioware better hope that their game isn't a two week ride to the level cap. There needs to be enough content there to last 3 months on a single character. My guess is there isn't and they are hoping people will just rolls alts until  more content shows up.

Wow subs continue to decline, Morhaime Speaks

"As our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content," he recently said.

"And so I think with Cataclysm they were able to consume the content faster than with previous expansions, but that's why we're working on developing more content."

Yesterday, Morhaime made clear Blizzard’s response to this trend. The company pledged to flood the game with new content as a matter of urgency.

And he misses the point. For all its 'epic' 'huge' 'expansive' ness, Cata was small. They made level 1-60 take a week and then made 80-85 take less.

The problem for me, was bugs and the same old stuff I had been doing for years. I never made it to 85. The whole story and quest chains were just boring. There was the same old bottleneck quests where you had to wait. Mobs were respawning in less than 5 seconds so just getting anywhere in those bottlenecks was a pain. Some quests never appeared for me even though I follow the chain correctly.

And Deepholm was just a huge hole in the grown of boring stuff.

While the game does need more content, it needs to be real continue. Why do I feel they are thinking more Raids, dungeons and daily quests. What the game needs is new ways to play it. Epic public quest zones, housing, boats, control point pvp. More open pvp zones with objectives.

What we don't want is ' do these quests once a week for 7 days so you can do more repetitive quests cause we are lazy ', eg the tournament.

Blizzard trademarks Mists of Pandaria

Wow Expansion, new game, Titan ?

Guess we have to wait for Blizzcon.

Diablo 3 - Cash Auctions

First off, what the ?

Don’t Need It? Put It Up For Auction!
Nearly everything found in the game, including gold, can be exchanged with other players directly or through the auction house system. So say you’re a witch doctor and you’ve just found an incredibly rare, incredibly powerful axe that only barbarians can use. In the previous Diablo games your best option might have been to sell the axe to an in-game vendor, but in Diablo III, you now have the ability to list that axe in the auction house for your fellow barbarian players to bid on. And you know another player will probably appreciate the true value of that axe more than some heartless vendor who’ll likely just melt it down for scrap….

 Even gold ?

Then I saw this:

The Choice Is Yours
Use of either the real-money or gold-based auction house is completely optional -- that decision can be made on a per-item basis, and both versions of the auction house are functionally the same. In addition, players have the option to simply sell the items they obtain to in-game vendors for gold. They can also trade items to other players through a direct character-to-character trading system in the game in exchange for gold, other items, or just an overwhelming sense of goodwill.

Real money for in game items. Its supposed to be only for the auction house and its optional but what the hell has Blizzard become. Its become Blizzard ActivisiSUN this is just a vailed layer of the pay to win model and my interest in Diablo 3 is almost all but gone. The players make no money out of these auctions and Blizzard just pockets the profits themselfs.