Greetings from 33,000 feet! BlizzCon has now completed, and I have had an opportunity to gather my thoughts about the whirlwind event. In my first report, I addressed a little about the epic nature of the event, the large number of attendees, and what was being shown by Blizzard. Today, I'd like to refine some of my observations, and give an overall impression of how the event stacks up to its competition.

Yesterday I reported that StarCraft: Ghost is a game in the mold of Metal Gear Solid. This was based on the single player experience and the stealth element involved. The truth of the matter is that this game is an absolute ton of fun in multi-player, and its multi-player experience might rival that of Halo's. The number of different game modes that Blizzard has implemented into the multi-player portion of the game is going to make it a contender for best FPS shooter on a console platform.

Although Ghost is a great game, the big news, as discussed yesterday, is the expansion to World of Warcraft, entitled Burning Crusade. Unfortunately, I don't have much new to report on this today as the items I discussed in my Day One report are still the only details we have on the expansion to date. I'm not sure what this says about a possible ETA for this expansion, except that late first quarter of 2006 is probably a decent guess. We were unable to receive any information on the second race that the expansion includes and unable to receive concrete information on new classes, hero classes, or "hero" abilities.

While the World of Warcraft expansion and StarCraft Ghost games were obviously the buzz of the event, there were several rumors floating around which were neither confirmed nor denied by Blizzard Public Relations. First and foremost is the rumor of a StarCraft MMO. This rumor is an interesting one as Blizzard has reportedly claimed that because the cost of the Battle.Net service is so egregiously high, they would never create another computer game which allowed players to access Battle.Net without charging customers a monthly charge. This would mean that a sequel to StarCraft would indeed have some sort of monthly charge associated with it. This rumor has extended to Diablo III as well. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, LQGaming Services: has been unable to either confirm or deny this rumor, nor have we been able to verify that a sequel to either StarCraft or Diablo II is presently in the works.

Turning away from the discussion of what was at the show, the only thing left to discuss is my impression of the show itself. While BlizzCon was definitely a big hit, I was left a bit dumbfounded at how little was actually available for show attendees to do. For 8000 show attendees, the only hands-on opportunities at the show included waiting 3 hours to play the expansion for 20 minutes, or waiting half an hour to play Ghost. You could also wait two hours to play one round of a World of WarCraft BattleGround. Finally, you might elect to try and play World of Warcraft with your friends, but at a price tag of $120 a person, I question why anyone would attend the show just to do that. If you didn't have time to wait in the lines for the hands on experiences, you had only 5 other options. You could attend a developer panel (in which the discussion was mostly on information gamers already knew), you could watch a tournament being played by professional gamers, you could browse the Blizzard Store, or you could browse the pen and paper section. That was the complete extent of the activities. The activities were pretty lackluster in all.

The show's conclusion was both its lowest and its highest point. Its lowest point was having a raffle among 8000 peoples for 20 prizes. In my opinion, that was a near slap in the face of the show attendees. Certainly, one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but the majority of these prizes were valued at less than 200 dollars. I find it hard to believe that Blizzard couldn't get better prizes for this event. This oversight was somewhat remedied by the truly awesome concert that The Offspring put on later that evening. Blizzard hit the nail on the head by including an alternative rock band to play at the end of their event, a stroke of marketing brilliance.

All in all, this was Blizzard's first fan event, and all things considered, it was run rather well. The lines were a pain, the lack of activities caused a severe disinterest during the second day, but in the end, the juggernaut that is Blizzard Entertainment managed to put together a show that mirrored its most popular game, World of WarCraft. Like the game itself, the show was nothing revolutionary, but it did nearly everything well.



- Deathstryker