I never thought I'd be sad to see the booth babes go. Long a tradition of both ECTS and E3, these scantily clad women were nowhere to be seen this year. While it means the show didn't feel as cheapened as it has in the past it's a sad indicator of how ECTS is seeing less and less publisher and developer interest year on year, with even more absentees this time round. Anyhow, onto my look at this year's show. I was clever enough to forget my camera today, but you can look forward to shots of the show floor and the various things on show in tomorrow's article.
Blizzard Kick Up A Storm
Despite the numerous notable absences the show wasn't a complete downer. First and foremost, Blizzard announced their next big game (as if they do any other kind) - World of Warcraft, a Massively Multiplayer RPG set in Azeroth. However there wasn't much more revealed about the game other than what you've no doubt already read on the Blizzard site. It's set after Warcraft III which means there are currently only brief hints at the story line so as not to spoil Warcraft III story for everyone. It'll offer more action oriented combat than most MMORPGs as well as thousands of weapons, presumably meaning it'll have a similar system to that of Diablo 2.
One thing that I'm personally wondering is where this leaves the guys doing the Blizzard cinematics. They worked on the pre-rendered intro for the game which you can download from Blizzard.com but beyond that I can't see how their talents would apply to World of Warcraft unless they are working on game world content rather than pre-rendered CGI this time round. Blizzard would be mad to force you to download extra CGI in future game updates and it's also hard to even see where any CGI on the game CD would fit in the online game apart from as an intro. We'll see, I'm sure Blizzard aren't going to let their talented CGI department slack off for the next few years. Maybe they're focusing on pre-rendered movie content for another unannounced game. If you're interested in screenshots and movies of the game they're available on the Blizzard site, and GameSpot also has a rather in-depth article that looks like it was prepared with help from Blizzard before the announcement and they've also got different shots to the Blizzard.com ones. To be honest I was hoping they'd announce a completely new series finally, but at least this is a new genre for Blizzard so it should be interesting to watch how they tackle it.
