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Funcom: WoW is McDonald's, AoC is steak

It's just in the nature of game developers to talk a little trash -- whenever you work on something for so long, you'll pretty much say whatever you can when someone asks you to compare your game to someone else's. So we'll forgive Funcom's Gaute Godager (game director of Age of Conan) for what he says about World of Warcraft in this Eurogamer interview.

WoW comes up first at the beginning of the interview, and Godager gracefully accepts props for AoC having the biggest launch since World of Warcraft. Which is true -- AoC has shipped over a million copies since launch (though Warcraft has gone on to sell nine million more, and AoC hasn't quite gotten there yet). But at the end of the interview, Godager really brings out the big guns -- he says that playing WoW is fun and all, but "if you've been to McDonald's for four or five years, and had your burger and your coke, sometimes it's great to just have a great steak and a glass of good wine."

Apparently Age of Conan is supposed to be that steak, and our little critically acclaimed and history-making game is supposed to be the culinary equivalent of McDonald's. Which isn't a bad comparison -- we can definitely see Age of Conan being called "steak." Especially since it was served so undercooked.

Samwise Didier on Blizzard's art and games


Eurogamer has interviewed Samwise Didier, Warcraft artist and icon, and the man who's pretty much defined the look and feel of Blizzard since even the early days. There's a lot of great stuff for Blizzard fans in this one -- I had no idea that an early build of The Lost Vikings had about 20 Vikings in it instead of the three we know -- and Samwise talks about his influences, including the way that Blizzard makes twists on standard genre conventions.

But the guy still stays incredibly humble, and acknowledges that as great as Blizzard's art is, the thing that really brings people back to these games is the fun factor. It's the humor and the enjoyment that Blizzard fans love, and Samwise's (and all of the other Blizzard artists') art make it that much better.

[Via WorldofWar]

Kaplan talks Wrath with Eurogamer


Recently Blizzard guru Jeff Kaplan sat down to talk with Eurogamer.fr about the upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Now, I don't know about you, but I have been positively drooling for any information we can get from the Blizz devs ever since the announcement was made at BlizzCon.

The interview asks some pointed questions about the problems encountered with TBC and what Blizz might have learned from them. How about the daunting attunement and access difficulties that hardcore players encountered when they first loaded the expansion onto their computers? Kaplan points to how they realized that access to the instances needed to be tweaked and they did so with recent patches. Blizz would like to have world events that include the whole server again, much like Ahn'Qiraj (and I couldn't agree more, as long as the guild that opens the event doesn't do it on Monday morning like they did on Elune), and they are looking to avoid with Wrath what Kaplan "personally consider[s] a mistake in the Burning Crusade."

In addition to world events and the possibility of unlocking an attunement for all a player's characters once one of them has achieved it, Kaplan also says they are looking into improving the trade skills with Wrath. He points to leatherworking as an example of a trade skill that received little lovin' in TBC. Essentially leatherworking became obsolete as players entered Outland and received dropped items that were superior to anything they could make. "In the Wrath of the Lich King, we want everyone to be satisfied with the trade they choose and we want it to be rewarding. Therefore we're going to analyse[sic] everything we did with The Burning Crusade and previously to work out what was good and what was missed out."

Continue reading Kaplan talks Wrath with Eurogamer

Blizzard Europe on server problems and more

The folks over at Eurogamer have managed to sit down with Shane Dabiri and John Lagrave to talk about the technical side of things. There have been login issues with many European realms for some time now; I've experienced unexpected outages, sudden queues caused by a lower player cap, and thirty-minute delays between entering my password and seeing my characters.

According to Blizzard, it's a problem of concurrency -- with additional players signing up over the holidays, the servers are under more stress, but they're working on new, improved hardware and network infrastructure. These things don't happen overnight but as a player affected by these issues it is nice to know that something is being done.

Other tidbits from the interview include the unveiling of "some exciting stuff" at E3 and the fact that expanding outside the PC is "not something we're planning on doing at this point". Also, if you're wondering when the Lunar Festival is going to clear off, that's February 14th -- just in time for the planned Valentine's events.


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