Free Candy For Everyone

There’s a post over at Gaming Steve about the news from Blizzcon, and an interesting bit about the possibility of the Alliance race being Pandaren.

Why not the Pandaren? Why are so many other sites reporting the Pandaren as the new Alliance race?

When the editors of the gaming magazines were brought to Blizzard’s offices to view The Burning Crusade for the first time, there were dozens of posters and artwork depicting the Pandaren as the new Alliance race. At the time Blizzard was 80% certain that the Pandaren were going to be the new Alliance race and it was presented as such. However, due to various complex reasons, there is now a zero percent chance of this happening. At best you might be seeing non-killable Pandaren NPCs in the game.

Could this change at all? Could the Alliance get the Pandaren?

Well, anything is possible, and Blizzard is famous for changing their mind about … well, everything! But considering the charged political reasons surrounding this issue I do not believe that Blizzard will change their mind on this decision.

Key bits being “charged political reasons” and “you might be seeing non-killable Pandaren NPCs”. I’m guessing someone got up-in-arms about the killing of Pandas. Wow. That’s a political situation? It’s too bad. I would have liked to play as a panda. Of course, as one of the commenters on the Gaming Steve post pointed out, it would make the Alliance/Horde player imbalance even worse. Though the suggestion that the Alliance should therefore get an “ugly” race is just silly. Why add a race if no one is going to want to play it? They should add a race people want, otherwise just stay home.

I’ve been playing lots of Civ4, but I still don’t quite feel ready to review it. I’ve played a game probably 85% through at the 2nd lowest difficulty level. But until I actually am challenged and have to make decisions (instead of just being able to pick every option because it’s so easy) I can’t really speak for how the game is. If you’d like to see a bunch of screenshots of the game, check out Eric’s BinaryWorld blog here. And I’ll have a review up possibly later this week.

As promised, my thoughts on the expansion pack - “Yay, more World of Warcraft!” Ok, see you later. Haha, just kidding. I’ve been a little distracted playing too much Civilization IV, so have been a bit less focused on WoW then in previous days. Just as well, as there is a preponderance of Burning Crusade information out there already. But if you don’t want to actually read any of these multi-page blah-blah fan boy previews I’ll give a summation. But first, links to those previews.

• Blizzard - The official press release
• Official Site - The official expansion web site
• Gamespot - Hands on with the new Horde Race, Blood Elves
• Gamespy - Expansion overview and some Patch 1.9 notes as well
• IGN - Also an expansion overview with a side of Patch 1.9 info
• 1up - Hands on with Blood Elves
• Gaming Steve - He’s got some links to scans of the CGW article about the expansion and the patch (a bit hard to read, since they’re scans, and all the info is now available from other sources, so unless you’re obsessive about every detail skip it)

Ok, yes, I read all those sources so you don’t have to. Basically the bits I cared about were that the new Horde race is the Blood Elves and their starting location is Sunstrider Isle in Quel’Thalas, north of the existing Eastern Plaguelands area. Well, no one has actually posted a map yet that I’ve seen, so I used my (very poor) Photoshop skills to point out the area in question. There are two areas on the Eastern Kingdoms map that give no information when moused over. Look, I put in arrows!

On the other continent, Kalimdor, there is another such unused area. Possibly the new Alliance race starting location…

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My Civ 4 review is still forthcoming. I got to spend about three hours playing the game yesterday and got some decent first impressions, but as with Age III, I don’t want to pass judgement without some more time figuring out the nuances. A real brief summation of my first impression (completely subject to change) - it’s a lot like Civ 3. Go figure! The general feel of the game is quite similar. The techs are different, the city improvements have gone through some changes, but the idea is the same. (Thank goodness, or we’d all be up in arms, wouldn’t we?) I did feel like there was a more drastic change between Civ 2 and Civ 3 (which I know not everyone liked, but it is nice to see change and experimentation). But like I said, I haven’t spent enough time to really get into the fine details.

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Yes it is. Tomorrow is Blizzcon and they’re supposed to be making some public announcements at 10 am. Of course, that’s probably 10 am Pacific time, so I’ll have to wait until the afternoon to hear what’s going on! They had best be making some real big expansion announcements tomorrow or the bubbling mess of excitement that comprises the web community might just explode. So no news here, just like the big guys, this is my announcement that there will be an announcement tomorrow and I’ll copy the info here and give my take on it. Because my take is of the utmost importance to everyone. That’s EVERYONE. Haha.