Tuesday, October 14, 2008

BlizzCon Day 2 Thoughts

First thing: I posted my gallery of photos just to the upper right. You can also see them here. You can see all the pictures I took on Saturday.

Looking back at BlizzCon, I'm really glad I went. It was a lot of fun. I got to play some StarCraft II, got to talk about World of Warcraft a lot, and even played a session of Diablo 3 (not really my cup of tea, but sorta fun nonetheless).

There's not a lot of new WoW things from BlizzCon. A little bits of information here and there. The new raids will be fun. Sounds like they will continue to do something like ZA, where there's insentive to go back to master "easy" dungeons with either faster times (like ZA) or taking on more parts of it at once. There's some neat technology that will go on behind the scenes for that as well.

The one major thing that I heard (and can now remember) about Saturday was that "soon", mounts won't dismount in water. Finally! Horses that can get wet. Thank the developers there, folks.

But, I have to say that Saturday was a pretty big dissappointment. Friday night with Jay Mohr MC'ing was pure comedy. Saturday night was pretty much a disaster. The two comedians that they had were "meh" at best. Kyle Kinane was the first guy. And he was admitedly 31 years old, he looked like he was 45 or so. His whole routine was basically how much of a waste his life is. Umm... ok. And then Patton Oswalt's routine was basically his highlights on how he's not very popular, and then a bunch of geek jokes.

Ok, I don't get it. Does Blizzard think that little of the attendees that they thought they could all relate to these two geeks? While I may not be the "typical" BlizzCon atendee, I consider myself a professional at what I do, and not a "waste of life" as these two guys seemed to profess. Furthermore, looking around at a lot of the people there, there were some other very successful people, that certainly couldn't relate either. WoW is pretty main stream... you might not want to put down your "typical" player as a geek. Just a thought, Blizzard.

My other "favorite" part was when Patton decided that he should start bashing Bush and McCain. What in the world does politics have to do with World of Warcraft anyway? And he admitted that he doesn't even play video games anymore because after 6 hours of Sonic, he couldn't get up to answer the phone. Sorry buddy, but even though you've had some successes in your life, those stories can all be labeled as a big, giant "L" for loser. And shame on Blizzard for thinking that was a good idea.

Moving on in the night. We had pretty good seats since 2 of our group (not me) sat up close for the Diablo 3 Lore and Art. So, we didn't want to abandon the seats. I think we were all interested to see the Video Games Live, which was an amazing show. And as dorky as it sounds, it was neat to see the songs performed live. A full orchestra of some of the music that I've listened to for the past few years... it was just cool. But to get to that part in the show, we had to suffer through Level 70 Elite Tauren Cheiftan. /sigh.

Maybe I'm just getting too old. Maybe I actually care about my hearing and what may become of it. But it was just too loud. Even with my ears plugged, it was still plenty loud, and I could feel the bass throughout my entire body. I'm sure the effect is worsened because I'm not a fan of the music. I like the lyrics, but the heavy metal has just become unpleasant. There are so many great songs that could be performed at BlizzCon (Big Blue Dress, NPC, Hazzyrd and Moonxtal, to name a few songs and bands), but instead all the Blizzard Boys get to prance around on stage.

Oh well... at least the rest of it was good.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I too am glad I went. I guess it goes to show that different folks enjoy different things. I loved L80ETC, even if that type of music isn't my favorite. And my guess is Blizz didn't know exactly where Patton would go with his routine.

Anonymous said...

Hee hee hee... I love the photo of the group with the raid symbols. That is hilarious.

Sounds like you saw some cool stuff there, and that it was a good time overall. Not sure that I'll make it to a convention any time soon, but I'm checking the VGL tour dates now. :)