Posted by Spooner | 7 Comments

WoW Patch 3.3.0a Deployed

Just a minor bug fix patch folks. Whatever was not able to be taken care of through hotfixes is being worked into this very small patch. The downloader did take 10 minutes though to get it applied which was somewhat odd because the file size is pretty minor.

I’m not exactly sure what the changes are but hopefully it’s going to be just small remedies for the technical problems like graphics bugs, choppy lag (but no latency issues) and other system errors. That’s been driving me crazy I don’t know about you all, video card is perfectly fine and no lag on the web but suddenly WoW will freeze and chop then quickly catch up again.

This patch brings the game from version 3.3.0.10958 to 3.3.0.11159.

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Posted by Spooner | 5 Comments

Official Patch 3.3 Confirmation for Dec. 8th (UPDATED)

SERVERS ARE NOW COMING ONLINE but there’s a 99% chance you’re going to get stuck on the loading screen. Also send in any pictures of your baby corhound pup if you get one in the mail by chance. Spooner at spooncraft dot com.

So the people telling me yesterday that I was off-base and had no proof to backup my claim that Patch 3.3 was coming out today, I bet you feel pretty silly right now huh.

The servers last night were getting a little unstable and Zarhym announced the release of Patch 3.3: Fall of the Lich King. I had more news here and the entire patch notes but for some reason it has become broken and the post itself will not display. Anyway I hope your background downloaders were running in the past few weeks as mine was because that means the patch will take all of 6 minutes to download and install. The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/.

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Posted by Spooner | 3 Comments

New Cutscene coming in Patch 3.3

We all loved the Wrathgate right? Well of course there’s going to be a few of you out there that didn’t, whatever, general consensus likes that cutscene in our gaming.

Actually that’s one of the things I really liked about Aion, cutscenes explaining the quest sometimes instead of always having the text. Now there’s a fine line between doing nothing but freaking cutscenes and voice over stuff that slows down the action considerably or the opposite when you’re reading the entire encyclopedia brittanica just to find out how many boars to kill.

Anyway, it looks as if we’re going to get another epic and awesome cinematic when Icecrown ships.

GameInformer: I would agree that the game has gotten much better at showing rather than telling, but Wrath of the Lich King also saw the introduction of cutscenes to the game. It’s obviously much easier to tell the story in that, but you’re also taking the player out of the game. Do you think that those will keep showing up future expansions as well? Is it something you’ll use sparingly?

Jeff Kaplan: Cutscenes will always be something that we use sparingly, yes. We never want to interrupt gameplay too frequently or for too long of a period of time. The Wrathgate cutscene was a big experiment for us. It was our first foray into in-game cutscenes in World of Warcraft. I don’t think we’ve fully refined how we want cutscenes to work with future World of Warcraft content.

We debate like crazy. We debate the length, we debate the frequency, and we have a lot of theories, but Blizzard is a really iterative development house. I think what’s going to have to happen is that you’ll see more cutscenes come into the game for us to really refine our strategy with them. We definitely have an eye toward more cutscenes, but at the same time, we don’t want to become just a cutscene game.

Even before Cataclysm, in patch 3.3, there’s going to be a really exciting cutscene moment that’s going to be our next experiment with that.

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Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

New Bosstiary for Icecrown Online

Sup my fellow lore-nerds. Blizzard went ahead and added in a little character bio section like they have in the past for some of the bosses you’ll encounter in the Icecrown dungeons coming up in Patch 3.3.

We saw this heavily used when Ulduar first came out which was kind of nice because few people knew jack shit about the instance or it’s many encounters.

Anyway here’s the link, go check it out if you’d like some more fodder for that fan-fiction you’re writing. So far it’s just the three 5-man dungeons but I’m pretty damn sure we’ll see the raid put in soon after I post this.

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Posted by Spooner | 2 Comments

New WoW LFG Tool Explained

I caught this video over at WoWRaid and I tip my hate to Teza for putting it up. The new system looks really solid and seems to be the perfect solution for cutting away more of the time sink wastes and getting groups up and running faster. Sure there isn’t a filter for bad players or ninja-looters and the likes; but those are issues that a computer program can’t do a thing about. The new voting system in groups might be the solution where you can vote to have a player removed and replaced and then instantly teleported into the dungeon right there with you.

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