Project Lore

Update: The beta client is now downloadable for people selected via Beta Opt-In. Keys will be sent out via e-mail.

Come for the World of Warcraft, and stay for the Starcraft 2 discussion! Those of you out there who love Blizzard products are probably already getting excited, and for the portion of readers who cut their teeth on the company's MMO first, there's no better time to start.

We announced not too long ago that Blizzard was looking to unleash the beta for the sequel to their genre-defining strategy game this month. Realize that this is an event roughly twelve years in the making. That's half my life-span!

People who played Starcraft as a kid have grown up, gone to college, gotten married, maybe had kids. And those who start their RTS journey by playing Starcraft 2 may not have even been born at the time of the first game's release!

And, to that end, think of all the unborn babies that will be spilled across keyboards and computer screens across the world once people have the beta in their grubby little hands.

Some are saying that very moment may occur later today, predicated primarily upon the launch of the Official Starcraft 2 Beta Forums.

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Blue Stew is a new daily column bringing you a delicious concoction of developer news, thoughts, and opinions straight from the boiling pot that is the official World of Warcraft forums. The highlights of each day include additional commentary by Project Lore staff. Welcome to the first edition of Blue Stew! We know that trying to find anything useful on the official forums can be a lot like tip-toe-ing through a minefield, but if you look a little harder, you can find some surprisingly useful information from the development team and various Community Managers (collectively known as "Blues," due to their specially-colored text). The goal of this column is to provide you with the highlights each day, as well as our own brand of commentary on the subjects at hand where appropriate. Considering the nature of the beast, there might not always be a lot worth talking about. But since this is our virgin voyage, why don't we go ahead, crack the bottle on the bow of the ship, and get this thing sailing?

• First up is an inquiry from transmogrification fetishist and part-time Druid, Saberclaw, who idly wonders why Goblins don't get to transform in the same way that Worgen do? Maybe it has something to do with our fuzzy, were-wolf bretheren being the only race with a reason to change the way they look? He quickly recoils from his stupidly outlandish thread title, stating that he was really just trying to ask whether or not we'd get to pick from various goblin types at the outset. Wryxian was kind enough to step up to the plate, stating that while the playable Goblins aren't as vastly different from their current in-game counterparts (as opposed to the Draenei, when they were introduced), you can expect them to be more than just another "standard green short guy." And I have to agree. Just looking at the picture to the right, you can tell that this particular set of Goblins has been bred and prepared for combat. There's something leaner and meaner about them. Something that says they'd rather drain your blood than your bank account. I don't know if it calls for drastic changes to the race, but I bet they'll be a lot more expressive and interesting than your average, "time is money, friend" NPC.
• Axelhander, when he's not busy squishing grapes between his toes, spends his spare time correcting the development team on their flawed game design.  Today, he called out Kalgan (a.k.a. Lead Game Designer, Tom Chilton) on some comments he'd made in a locked thread about the nature of Rated Battlegrounds. His major beef? Why, as a primarily solo player, is he being locked out of the best gear able to be obtained through the new rating system? Kalgan already addressed this issue in the previous thread, stating that the reason they didn't want to allow single players to queue and participate in the rated Battlegrounds was because it would be too easy and convenient for them to game the system by afk-ing. The natural assumption would be that, as a part of a group, any individual player would have more incentive to perform at their best. After all, think of it like an Arena group: a member that just sits there while his comrades do all the work (or, more likely, get slaughtered) isn't going to be on the team much longer. Kalgan adds that the current design philosophy for end-game PvE content is to reward organization, and that they'd they like to do the same with PvP: "I understand that you're expressing a philosophical disagreement as to whether rewarding for organizational effort and coordination is the right approach for the game, but I'm not sure why the expectation would be that we'd do that in battlegrounds when we don't do that in pve. You certainly can't 'get gear on par with the game's best' by doing solo daily quests either." Hey, I like to solo as much as the next guy. When I level a new alt, I almost never team up with anybody until I hit the level cap, but what's the use in rewarding someone the finest gear in the game if they don't care to engage in the level of content that requires it?
• Zomber had to put on his "smart" glasses for this one. He asks: What's going to happen to the Argent Tournament when Cataclysm hits? Will it simply become another Quel'Danas, a once-major hub of end-game activity reduced to obsolescence by new content? Or will the event end once the crusade against the Lich King does? Zomber then expanded his query to incorporate other pockets of "dead" content in the game. The inimitable Bornakk answered the call, stating that since not everyone will own Cataclym right away, it makes sense to keep the Tournament, and areas like it, in the game. He also emphasized that it may stay in play longer than Quel'Danas did because it's currently one of the easiest and most convenient ways for a player to raise their reputation with their faction's major cities. Bornakk acknowledges how tricky managing this sort of ephemeral content is: "Generally speaking - spending a lot of time on new content and then making it end and disappear is not something we like to do and have to be very careful on when and how often we do it. We are changing some of the classic continents because they have been there for 5 years so we feel it's okay to change it around after all this time."

So that's it for the first edition of Blue Stew, which we will pick up starting again on Monday. I hope you were entertained, enlightened, or both. But it's clear that there are many ways in which we could improve this column. So, please, in addition to adding your thoughts on the content above, let us know how we might make it better! What sorts of issues should we focus on? How can we make it more interesting to read? The floor is yours, readers.

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