How Would a Third Person Diablo Game Look?, Rhykker's S9 Builds
Battle for Gadgetzan Tournament!
We're Closing Our Doors
Dave Kosak Moves to Hearthstone Team
Dave Kosak was the Lead Narrative Designer on World of Warcraft, but has now moved to the Hearthstone team.
Argus Lore
Our friends at Gamepedia have a nice article and video covering the lore behind Argus! We will be heading to Argus in Patch 7.3.
Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Ghostcrawler Tweets
Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.
Originally Posted by MMO-ChampionCan you talk about mobility creep in games, not just League as I’m seeing games like Overwatch, WoW, Dota2 etc with like hyper agile heroes that completely dumpster the immobile one because they can just dodge any of their damage out put and dish out a fair amount of their own. Why not make everyone mobile
In my experience it keeps happening because mobility (especially high-speed windowed mobility) is fun. As a player, it gives you a lot of interesting decisions about initiating a fight or running away from one. You can get to where you need to be quickly or get out of what you need to get out of quickly. Movement can help band-aid some bad decisions you made a few seconds ago. I think it’s totally natural that almost every game ends up with a mobility creep problem. But then as a designer you catch yourself. You don’t want to go add mobility to every character, because that’s just admitting defeat that there aren’t more attractive mechanics out there than mobility. So you get a little stubborn because you know you’ll come up with something… someday. I also think it’s the case that even when a slow-moving character is demonstrably viable or even stronger than the fast-moving character, that players still opt for the fast-moving character. Humans like to go fast. (Source)
About the PvE aspect of lots of online games, especially big MMOs, do you think that there is a window of opportunity for a competitive PvE scenario? Maybe a monetized scenario like the most financially successful PvP ones?
I think competitive PvE is a hugely unexplored space. We did live raids for awhile at Blizzcon (though they were a logistical nightmare) and even did a race a couple of times.
If I was working on a group-based PvE game (I’m not), I would try and figure out how to make it competitive. I would try and figure out if it could be an esport. There are several sports that are compelling to view (for some folks!) where the opposing sides don’t directly interact much: golf, bowling, track and field, most races. Those kind of feel like the live equivalent of competitive PvE. (Source)
Dark Legacy Comics #562
DLC #562 has been released.