the net raiders

Day 2 at Blizzcon was quite a bit different than Day 1. First off, the closing ceremonies of Day 2 obviously trumped those of Day 1. More on that and Ozzy later. I will admit that while those at the conference that got up for the costume, song, dance and imitation contest of Day 1 have much large balls than I, most in the dance and imitation were down right embracing. But this is just me being cynical.
So let’s talk Day 2. Jeremy and I met up with Ryan at 10am. No sense in waiting in line for over an hour again. Besides, at this point I had a good sunburn going. And we went in for the first panel, the Diablo 3 Q and A. While I appreciated a good handful of questions. Some were horrible, questions already answered by the dev team when the game was first announced, and some were not even questions at all.

We learned, or at least were hinted in on Azmodan and Belial taking part in the game. This makes perfect sense since these are the only “evils” still alive at this point. And Big D himself was hinted to being at the end of the game. We learned that Tyrael and his actions at the end of Diablo 2: LoD were seriously frowned upon by the Heavens. So there are going to be some repercussions for him going rogue and helping the humans of Sanctuary. Then we started getting the really idiotic questions, or the long winded questions that ended up getting a simple “no comment” response from the dev team. But the question that really takes the cake for me, was this one kid that came up to the panel and had this to say about Diablo 3’s blood and gore. Given I am quoting, how I personally remembered it…

“So I was playing Diablo 3, and I found that all the blood and guts was really excessive and it was hard to see what was going on with my screen…”

Crickets chirped. A tumble weed rolls by… I looked at Ryan, and then Jeremy, and I shook my head. For starters this wasn’t a question… this was a personal opinion. This kid was waiting in a line for about a half an hour to give his opinion, when people just want questions answered. Second, this was not a question. But you had all this time to formulate a question. Surely you could say it once or twice in your head before you thoroughly confused the dev panel. And third, this is Diablo… the entire franchise is built on blood and gore. There is nothing pleasant about the world of Diablo. And more importantly, no one in the audience agreed with you. If there was a giant hook used in old-timey performances to yank people off the stage, this would have been a great time to use it. It’s like going to a StarCraft panel to ask a question and saying you don’t really like the Zerg. I applaud the dev team for spending as little time as possible to recognize this kid’s ability to waste everyone else’s time. If you prefer less blood, please go play World of Warcraft. Sorry, I know there wasn’t anything professional about what I just wrote, but I had to get that off my back. And after looking at the transcripts from Diii.net, I have to point out that they didn’t even bother adding this into their post. A smart move if I don’t say so myself. And for the most part Diii.net cleaned up a lot of the responses. I was completely shocked with how many rambles and tangents some people went down….

After that, the day was really dedicated to playing StarCraft 2, Diablo 3, and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Based on my experiences from Day 1, most of the panels provided very little ground breaking information. With that, I turned my attention to playing some games. I started to get pretty good at the Wizard in Diablo 3. My play through with the Witchdoctor was a bit of a let down since his DPS seemed to be pretty broken. I hope they fix it because I was dead in the water with that guy. I found myself getting very well acquainted with the Barbarian, Monk and Wizard. I was reminded how much I suck at StarCraft, when Jeremy was able to beat me twice in a 1 v 1 match. I think most of my problems were remembering how to play StartCraft again, and reading the tool-tips to figure out what to build to move up my own tech tree.

I will eventually touch on each of these games in separate. But the real highlight for me was finding the “artifact” in Diablo 3. Which is a sort of Blizzcon item drop that yields real life loot. So I was able to walk away from one of our 20 minute play sessions with an autographed poster of Diablo 3, signed by all the devs, and 2 video cards by PNY. The day was shaping up to be pretty good. After dropping off the winings at the hotel, we headed back to the front of the main stage where we waited a an hour and a half for the main even, Ozzy Osbourne!

While we waited they showed us the stats from the tournaments. Korea destroyed everyone in both the Starcraft and Warcraft tournaments. But atleast the Americans brought home something for the World of Warcraft 3 v 3 arena tournament.

Before Ozzy, came Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain, Blizzard’s in-house band. They weren’t bad I will say that. Of course the lyrics were all Blizzard game related, and they did a great job using humor to win the crowd over. They made it very clear that they knew everyone was there for Ozzy, not them, and that sort of angel with the crowd got a lot more people to sing along. A pretty good tactic to take when you have over 20,000 Ozzy fans waiting with baited breath.

When Ozzy finally came out, it got pretty crazy. Especially right in front of the stage where Jeremy, Ryan and myself were located. He played all the classic songs, and even one from his newest album. He then proceeded to hose the crowd down and throw big buckets of water on everyone. I even saw a girl get on a guy’s shoulders and flash Ozzy. But of course I don’t have a pic so it didn’t happen right? =) Was I really at a giant gaming convention or a rock concert? It was getting wild, and us nerds knew how to party.

The concert ended, and while there was speculation as to an announcement of the brand new project Blizzard was working on, we didn’t get it. Sort of a let down, but I was too sore to care. Some of the nerds /rage‘d pretty hard with about 3 mosh pits going on… simultaneously at one point.

Day 2 was a whole lot of fun. I will be posting my thoughts on the entire experience pretty soon.