Author: Heather Newman
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The state of WoW going into 2024: Blizzard had to deliver the best year ever for World of Warcraft, and it did
World of Warcraft soars triumphantly into its 20th anniversary year in 2024, but just two years ago, that milestone was hardly guaranteed. Blizzard’s modern MMO was on life support toward the end of the Shadowlands expansion. Players had dropped away in droves as complicated power systems, endless grinds for “fun” rewards, content droughts and unevenly…
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The GTA 6 trailer is packed with little details: here are some of the most promising
Grand Theft Auto 6’s first trailer this week is just 90 seconds long, but analyzing its hidden details and Easter eggs already seems to be a full-time job for some fans. The trailer has racked up over 142 million views in just a week, and already thousands of posts are dissecting it for brief glimpses…
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Warcraft’s game director explains why Blizzard debuted three expansions at once: ‘Speaking it out loud makes it real’
Most Warcraft fans expected an expansion announcement for the massively multiplayer RPG at last weekend’s BlizzCon 2023. But to hear Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas tell it, Blizzard Entertainment’s bold decision to debut the next three expansions at once made even its own leaders nervous. “There were definitely a few like, wait, we’re really showing…
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The WoW Classic team is expanding so they can experiment more: ‘We are slowly crafting things that are effectively Classic Plus’
The World of Warcraft: Classic team is expanding, developers told us at BlizzCon last weekend, and although the team didn’t announce the much-requested “WoW Classic Plus”—an idea for expanding WoW Classic with new material rather than just advancing it through historical WoW updates—it will be producing more brand-new stuff for the throwback version of WoW.…
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World of Warcraft director says players who pay for early access to the next expansion won’t have a ‘long-term advantage’
World of Warcraft: The War Within is the first WoW expansion where purchasing a more-expensive edition gets you into the new content more quickly. The announcement caused an immediate controversy, but the game’s director claims it will not ultimately affect players’ progression relative to each other. A standard version of the pack, coming out next…
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WoW director says its most controversial new class specialization is OP because it had to be: ‘The community is naturally skeptical of things they don’t understand’
Blizzard knew that its controversial new augmentation evokers—the first support class ever in World of Warcraft—were going to be overpowered. That choice was “deliberate,” the game’s director told us in a BlizzCon interview, although he added that “obviously they came out the gates too strong.” Augmentation evokers dropped like a bomb into WoW last summer,…
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World of Warcraft: Classic was supposed to recreate the past, but now it feels like WoW’s creative future
After playing both World of Warcraft’s new 10.2 patch and World of Warcraft: Classic’s new Season of Discovery at BlizzCon 2023 over the weekend, I was shocked to discover that there were as many creative twists in the “old,” re-released game as there were in present-day WoW. Season of Discovery is a limited-time version of…
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Why Diablo 4’s loot filter isn’t ready yet: ‘Every perceivably simple decision has some kind of crazy cause and effect’
Diablo 4 has a big, small problem: inventory space. There’s just not enough of it. Among all the other cool things coming next year in Vessel of Hatred, Diablo 4’s first expansion, are a number of fixes designed to help players with the endless bag-space management task that is, perhaps, inevitable in Blizzard’s loot-explosion action…