Project Lore

WoW players now can change the race of their level 10 and higher characters - if they don't mind dishing out $25. Blizzard unveiled its new paid race change service today, about a month after adding the service as "coming soon" on the official website. All you have to do to start the process os logon to the Account Management page, click on the Race Change option (which is being promoted pretty heavily ono the page at the moment), and follow the instructions. Here's a few items of note to take in mind when considering a race change. For full details, check out the FAQ on Blizzard Support.

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Can't I Be A Snappy AND Functional Dresser? If there is one buzzword I noticed at this year's E3 it was "style."  Motion controllers aside, I heard everyone from EA to Disney Interactive Studios drop the word as a descriptor for at least one of the company's titles.  Style is nice and all, but I never thought it would become the word of E3.  The idea of digital fashion was littered throughout the trio of "new" racing games, Blur, Need for Speed: Shift and Split/Second, but it came up in unsuspecting places like Muramasa, The Invincible Tiger, Sin + Punishment 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum and even My Baby 2 (seriously! I think Southpeak caught onto the word's new-found popularity and just tossed it in there).  The five letter word was spoken in every fashion possible, adjective, noun, verb.  You name it, it was applied, by someone, somewhere, at the show. Although the PR people lead us to believe the term was coined this year, style has been around far longer than any of us.  Believe it or not, it has even been applied to games before aught-9!  Case in point, our favorite MMORPG World of Warcraft.  With each new tier or raid dungeon release the issue rears its ugly head again and with good reason.  Once you begin collecting items from a particular dungeon, that being Ulduar in the present day, the gear differences become incredibly small.  Sure, the min-maxers out there have a point, the percentage increases do matter, but I follow my old rogue officers opinion on that matter; "Whatever looks the coolest is the best." I'm not one to fret over my outfit too much, but I am a bit dumbfounded at our lack of a customizing (dieing, painting, etc) system in World of Warcraft.  I entirely support the artist's overall design of gear, except the druid shoulders, with each class having its own distinct style, but why can't we make small modifications to color schemes?  Heck, I am not hard to please in this respect.  Give me the ability to change the color accents of non-Tiered gear to match our in-the-works sets and I'd be happy as a disease-free non-Egyptian pig in slop. If E3 taught me anything this year, it is that all we gamers care about is style, whether it be our own, the game we are playing or some combination thereof. I can't possibly be the only one who despises running around with three shades of red, a mix of blue and some colors I can't distinguish.  Doing so in a single-player RPG is one thing, but when I am spending 10+ hours a week on a single character for years, I expect some ongoing customization outside of simply obtaining new threads.  The change can easily be placed inside the various armor crafting professions, or added as some sort of secondary profession.  Perhaps one with repairing abilities?! How much does a piece's look matter to you?  Will you take it over something with more functionality due to its visual prowess, or are stats the numbers the main one aspect for your decision?  It's no secret that I am a big critic of daggers in WoW, but to date, I have never raided with anything but them.  I've also never broken a set bonus purely for the looks of a non-set piece, but I have used non-set items between the reward zones for that reason. Everyone loves a spoonful of QQ to start off the week, right?

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I'd totally just stunlock him first.

Gamers have been customizing their avatars for years, decades even.  The first customization was very, very basic, picking a name.  Over time developers have added all sorts of customizable options, down to Star Trek Online's promise of allowing us to create our own alien species.  As if that universe doesn't have enough aliens in it already.  Blizzard's character customization allows us to pick faces, hairstyles, skin tones and all that hubbub, but it never struck me as an incredibly deep system.  Numerous RPGs and other MMOGs have offered a more granular approach, straight down to the color set of your gear and a wide variety of (useless) accessories.  Yet, something has always been missing recently. As far as the industry has come, I can't recall a single title by name that allows me to be left or right-handed.  I know I have played a game that let me do this, perhaps one in the Quake series, but I can't remember specifically.  My collection of gamer friends struggled to come up with anything other than vague memories (SiN, some older RPGs).  It seems clear to me that a handful of older FPS and RPG titles allowed this, although many likely glossed over the option, or I simply did not care at the time.  But, I care now. FPS are fleeting titles, nothing sticks to the characters.  In multiplayer you die constantly, and while series like Call of Duty and Battlefield allow you to rank-up and such, you aren't attached to your toon.  In an RPG, one is more attached to the avatar.  With a third-person RPG, one is constantly viewing the toon, seeing everything he/she does.  You become attached, possibly even obsessed over the looks.  Entire mods have been created to allow gamers to tweak appearances.  This obsession is only multiplied in MMOGs, and for obvious reasons. As deep and lengthy as an RPG can be, no title can stand up to the amount of time that we invest in our MMO characters.  Along with the dedication, comes the intense social aspect that makes MMOGs so attractive.  If I am going to be sinking days of time into my creation, shouldn't I be able to swing it like a southpaw? I know this is an incredibly minute aspect of WoW, but a guy can dream, right?  A fleeting aspiration at best.  I don't even expect Blizzard to implement this aesthetic pleasure so late in the game, but they have done other things I did not foresee, such as the Paid Character Re-Customization service.  Has anyone else ever wondered about this?  Heck, can you name some other titles that have this choice?  There has to be some relatively new titles that allows us to do this. As for the other MMOG developers out there, you have yet another feature request.

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