The Rumpus Machine is the latest offering from Oblivious Films, of The Grind fame. It's the story of what happens when an easily-frightened dwarf and his friends stumble upon a "metal pig" which seems to grant their every wish. It's not a follow-up to The Grind storyline, but rather a new, self-contained story. It's kinda like what O. Henry would have written if he'd only lightened up a bit. The moviemaking here is top notch and the storytelling is quite funny with everything from sexy dancing girls to throwback dungeons. Make sure you stick around throughout the entire credits roll for some final jokes at the end.
Drew "Drewbie" Syring from Oblivious tells Moviewatch that Macheath made this film for the BlizzCon machinima contest and, for you Diablo III fans, "yes, that is really the real Deckard Cain who was kind enough to lend his voice talents to our production." How'd they manage it? Just watch it, you'll see.
Updated: In case it wasn't clear to anyone who watched the film: The filmmakers want you to know that they got the actual voice actor for Deckard Cain to perform in their film.
Author Christie Golden has posted a little more information about the Arthas novel coming next year -- she lists the release date as April of 2009 (Arthas will probably still be alive then -- if "alive" is what he is now), and says that it'll be a nice hardback edition, which should be cool to see. She also says that while they were considering throwing a sample chapter in the BlizzCon goodie bag, all they were able to get in is a little postcard art of the book's cover. Too bad -- it would have been fun reading a little preview of the book while waiting in line to play, say, Diablo III.
And for the Starcraft fans, she's also got a Dark Templar book coming out a month after that, in May 2009. It was supposed to be out sooner, but apparently Arthas' book got pushed forward, and she had to switch up schedules a bit. So two good pieces of extended universe fiction for Blizzard's games to look forward to next year.
DIII.net has a great writeup of everything Blizzard has said so far about the new Battle.net features, and while most of the information applies more to Diablo III and Starcraft II, there's some good tidbits in there for WoW fans as well. Battle.net is Blizzard's oldest online service -- it predates WoW by a few years and was notably used to play Warcraft 3,Diablo 2 and Starcraft online. It's making a return with a revamp for the release of Starcraft II, and in addition to the previously mentioned ability Battle.net will give playes to track achievements across all Blizzard games, the system will have a much more social feel than the previous incarnation of the service.
Player accounts, avatars, icons, and friend lists are all planned, and odds are that services like the Armory and even the WoW sign in may be tied to your Battle.net account in some way. Tournaments and rankings will be included (though it remains to be seen how this might be implemented in World of Warcraft), and Battle.net will even offer players the ability to save and share replays of Starcraft II games, and other e-sport-like features.
That last feature would be a perfect fit for WoW's Arenas, of course, but as much as players would like to be able to spectate Arena matches, odds are that there would have to be a lot of behind-the-scenes coding done on Blizzard's side. Starcraft is being built from the ground up to record matches, of course, but WoW's Arena system doesn't have that ability built in, and putting it in might be more work than Blizzard wants to do on that one area of the game. No word yet on when we might get the new Battle.net (odds are it'll come out right around the Starcraft II release, whenever that is), but from the look of it, Blizzard has big plans to expand the social networks they've built into World of Warcraft towards all of their properties.
GamesIndustry.biz recently had an opportunity to chat with Frank Pearce, co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, about World of Warcraft and their other properties. At the Games Convention in Leipzig, Pearce was asked if he found WoW's performance since launch interesting to watch. He doesn't quite say no, but he doesn't say yes, either. "I don't know if I'd describe it as 'interesting' as much as exhausting," he says. He goes on to detail just how much the company has grown, up to 3000 employees worldwide, with 130 people on the WoW development team trying to sate our 'voracious appetite for content.' World of Warcraft is almost directly responsible for that growth.
Pearce talks a bit about Blizzard's other franchises and projects, specifically Starcraft II and Battle.net, suggesting a brave new world where World of Warcraft players could crack out a quick 15-20 minute multiplayer round in Starcraft II while waiting for their WoW raid. That sounds like an awesome time to me, but perhaps that's a little too much Blizzard in one evening for most folks. Then again, maybe not!
BusinessWeek spent some time examining the indisputable success of our Blizzard overlords. At the very beginning of the article, BusinessWeek credits Blizzard's mastery of gaming to the often-spoken, often-hated "when it's ready." In a quote from Jay Wilson, Blizzard says that if "a product isn't good enough, we cancel it."
The BusinessWeek article talks a lot about the overwhelmingly involved culture of Blizzard employees. The developers play their own games, both on the clock and off the clock. Dedicated "strike teams" spend lunch cruising the games' latest builds. Players in beta provide instant feedback, which executives and designers hungrily consume to make the best possible decisions. And if a game isn't deemed "fun enough," it's sent off to black-can land, where it will never see the light of day.
According to the article, though, Blizzard still plans on releasing a new expansion every year. This is in addition to Starcraft IIand Diablo III. While we can obviously expect these games to show up "when they're ready," it paints a very active, competitive future for the Activision Blizzard group. The article does credit a new milestone for our beloved World of Warcraft. According to BusinessWeek, the subscriber base is now nearly 11 million. With the Recruit-a-Friend benefits, I hope we see this number grow to 12 million by the end of the year.
Tamara Chuang from Blizzard's hometown Orange County Register has been following the BlizzCon ticket story here at WoW Insider, and she finally heard back from her queries to Blizzard about what happened earlier this week. The Q&A is up on her blog right now -- Shon Damron of Blizzard's PR team responded to a few questions about what happened on Monday and Tuesday at Blizzard and what they'll do differently to sell tickets to their events in the future.
Not surprisingly, Blizzard says they just weren't prepared for the demand -- last year, tickets sold much slower, and the close release date of the next expansion, in addition to the growth of WoW over the past year and, on the horizon, interest in Starcraft II and Diablo III, pushed fervor for tickets to a high. Blizzard thought by adding in more space and selling more tickets they'd account for demand, but they say a review of the entire process is now in order.
Damron says a lottery (like the one they plan to use to sell the extra 3000 tickets) will be a definite possibility. We'll have to see exactly how that process works as Blizzard sells off the rest of the tickets for this year's BlizzCon, but it does definitely sound to us like they are taking serious considerations to make sure that buyers of BlizzCon tickets, many of Blizzard's biggest fans, don't go through what happened earlier this week again.
Now that the scramble for tickets is over, it remains for the wounded and battered veterans of the battle against the Fail Murloc to gird themselves and march forward, looking for succor where they can get it.
Luckily, a list of panels for BlizzCon 2008 has been released, giving us something awesome to look forward to as we count down the days. For those of you who can't make it, be sure to check WoW Insider. We'll have liveblogs and notes from each WoW panel so you'll know exactly what was said and how it will affect your gameplaying experience. For the Diablo III and Starcraft II stuff, you'll be able to get the same treatment from our sister site, Joystiq.
Check after the break for a complete list of panel titles.
As we announced earlier, BlizzCon tickets are on sale. Sort of. Kind of. If you can fight past the store servers. I know I've been getting nothing but the fail murloc pretty much all day. Still, I and the rest of WoW Insider's crack live team will be there come hell or high water, and we'll bring you the news you need to know. In the meantime, we're stuck here refreshing the Blizzard Store. To pass the time, we did a bit of speculation about what we might see in Anaheim on October 10th and 11th. Here's what we decided:
What we're sure to see
The Wrath of the Lich King Cinematic: Though we still have no solid announcement, Blizzard's already stated that they want to get Wrath out before 2008 is up. Considering that, they must have the opening cinematic pretty close to done. I would be surprised if we don't see it open the opening ceremony, to be completely honest. I'm expecting Arthas and/or a "rebel" Human Death Knight to feature prominently, as well as our first cinematic Gnome shot.
So how do you design Diablo 3 anyway? Bargain Bin Reviews has an idea -- just retrofit World of Warcraft. Shift talent points to spells, decrease enemy health and damage and increase the number of enemies by a factor of 10 or so, do away with healing spells and tanking, and you're essentially done. It's a bit silly and a bit tongue in cheek, yes, but it also brings up a good point. In the end, WoW is probably influenced by Diablo 2 as much as it is by Warcraft 3, if not more.
At the Worldwide Invitational, MTV interviewed two Blizzard executives: Paul Sams, Chief Operating Officer, and Frank Pearce, Executive Vice President of Product Development. It's an interesting read -- if not the best interview I've ever read -- which includes more info on Diablo 3, mobile apps, and thoughts about MMOs in general. The duo leaves the door open for Blizzard to create an MMO that might "cannibalize" the WoW player base, although for some reason they are not convinced that Diablo 3 will impact that base. (I, for one, disagree. The huge response we got to the Diablo news on WoW Insider tells us that there is a huge amount of crossover between the franchises.) They also don't believe that there's much overlap between Starcraft and WoW. Frank stressed that, regardless of what the marketing research might say, "those aren't necessarily the data points that we use for decision-making when it comes to the games that we want to make."
Read on to see what Blizzard says about time between game releases and new MMOs.
You may remember that we recently told you that Worldwide Invitational attendees would be receiving a Tyrael pet as part of their goodie bag haul as soon as patch 2.4.3 went live. The PTR servers when down for a little bit of an update a while ago, and when they came back up, WoW Insider commenter Darkra came through with the picture of my new favorite pet, which you can see above.
It's actually pretty strange, he looks both cute and bad ass at the exact same time. I'm not sure how it pulls it off, but I suppose that's just the awesomeness that is Tyrael. Congratulations to all you WWI attendees on what is surely the coolest non-combat pet to date, and for those of us unlucky enough not to make it to the WWI in person, let the Ebaying begin!
Every time a new game comes out, we have a decision to make. Do we try the new game while still playing World of Warcraftmost of the time? Do we take a break from WoW to give the new game all of our attention? Or do we continue to play our favorite MMO? My guild had an attendance problem when GTA IV was released and I know a few people have given Age of Conan a good try. With Warhammer Online probably coming out in the fall, we will have to make another choice then.
Now, I think that the Wrath of the Lich King expansion will probably come out in the Winter, hopefully this year. I think that Starcraft 2 will be released approximately a year after that and my guess is that Diablo III won't come out for another 2 to 3 years, unfortunately. But what if Blizzard were to do the unthinkable and release WotLK at the same time as the sequels to Starcraft and Diablo?
For me, I think Diablo III would take up most of my time for a month or two. Happily (or not), I won't have to make that choice. What would you do?
The identity of the free pet that Worldwide Invitational Paris attendees received with a code in their goodie bag has been a closely guarded secret, with the identity not known even at the WWI itself. Yesterday, Bornakk broke the silence on the pet and announced that after patch 2.4.3 goes live, WWI attendees will be able to turn in their pet codes for their own miniature version of Diablo's Archangel Tyrael!
Tyrael, as you may remember, is an angel that assists the Horadrim -- and later the heroes of Diablo 2 -- in fighting back the Prime Evils as they attempt to assault and take over the world of Sanctuary. He is one of the few angels who will directly assist humanity in fighting Hell, even when he is specifically forbidden from interfering by Heaven itself. He eventually destroys the Worldstone after Baal corrupts it at the end of the Lord of Destruction expansion.
So far, his fate after that has not been told, although it seems practically a given that he will appear in Diablo 3 in some capacity, as the official Diablo 3 site features his visage prominently.
Reader Oleg was kind enough to send along this Diablo III screenshot, which he found over on Blizzard's main site about the new game they announced this weekend. As you can see up in the corner, the game's internal code name apparently was Hydra, so that answers the question we posted way back in September of last year about someone overhearing the name "Hydra" being bounced around the Austin GDC.
And we also know now, of course, that Diablo III isn't an MMO, which means that Blizzard still has at least one secret project running: that next-gen MMO that we've been told about via job listings. Unfortunately, we probably won't hear much about it for a while -- unless Blizzard wants to ramp up their production, three titles at once is a lot for them to work on, and even at BlizzCon later this year, we don't really expect to see a new game announcement (although they might use the occasion, if Wrath really is released by then, to announce the next planned expansion).
Still, that's one mystery solved. Maybe we'll overhear another codename this year in Anaheim, and the rumor wheel can start spinning up yet again.
By now you have probably also heard that there really weren't any other announcements at the opening ceremony. Don't get me wrong, Diablo 3 is awesome. But as much as we're Blizzard fanboys (and fangirls) here, we're all about the WoW first, and we need some WoTLK news to sustain us too -- and we still don't know what that mysterious "next generation MMO" in development is either -- it seems most people are assuming it's Starcraft now though. Me, I'm not convinced. After all, there's a Starcraft game in development too, so it could presumably be either franchise, or simply an updated World of Warcraft 2.
DIII.net has a great writeup of 
Tamara Chuang from 
As we announced earlier, 
At the 
Subscribe
