Project Lore

Tomorrow, Alex Albrecht (Bowbins, Deadbins, etc) will be a guest on WoWInsider's podcast and you can catch it live at 12:30pm PST! He'll be joining Turpster, Mike Schramm, Patrick Beja, and Michael Sacco to discuss the latest WoW news like why fewer players are participating in arenas, new changes to professions, and Blizzard's new addon policies. Check back here, WoWInsider, or UStream on Saturday for the stream!

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The Guild is a very popular web series, if you still haven't seen it, I would suggest taking a gander over at The Guild's website at watchtheguild.com. The series follows a fictional guild called The Knights of Good playing a unidentified MMORPG. Most people take World of Warcraft as the MMO in question but they still haven't specified what game it really is. The show mostly zooms in on the character of Codex who is played by actor Felicia Day who also happens to be the main writer on the show, and yes she does play World of Warcraft in her free time. The series follows Codex and how her guildies have plagued her love life and her normal day to day living. The Guild is just finished it's second season, but don't be afraid this would be a great time to get your feet wet and get caught up with the series. During the  agonizing wait between season two and season three you can also find the newly created guild podcast "Knights of the Guild". The podcast is run by two members of the crew. Jenny, the lead production assistant, and Kenny, behind the scenes editor, tag team the podcast. The first episode had some interesting interviews, information about the show, and it really is just another way to get some behind the scenes action out to the fans. The podcast will come out monthly, so during the wait for the next season we can still get our fix of The Guild. You can find The Guild on Xbox live, Zune marketplace, and you can also stream it through MSN video. Don't forget to follow The Guild on youtube, twitter, facebook, myspace, and flickr. As you can tell there are a lot of ways to support our favorite web series. What would you guys think of making The Guild into a 30 minute TV show? Could this show work on prime time TV? With shows like The Big Bang Theory riding high on geek fandom and shows like The Office using a mockumentary style it wouldn't be a hard stretch to see a web series like this hit the small screen.

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Initially, I was going to discuss the purported patch notes for Wrath of the Lich King's first content patch.  As it turns out, the "leaked" Patch 3.1 notes that began floating around this weekend are fakes according to most sources.  How fake?  That remains to be seen, but it is likely that the creator - Aurelius of Forlorn Legacy on Windrunner-US according to WoWInsider - got some changes close to correct. Thankfully there was another interesting topic to crop up late last week, BlizzCast Edition Seven.  The latest podcast of all things Blizzard focused on one universe for the first time since the developer began the series, Rock N' Roll Racing World of Warcraft.  The episode was designed as a wrap-up to Wrath's release with J. Allen Brack, Jeff Kaplan and lore master Chris Metzen, all stopping by to give their thoughts. The first part of the cast featured JAB and Kaplan discussing Northrend's creative process, things learned from the previous expansion, the hard choices and how they turned out.

• Northrend was one of the first lands to be prototyped for the MMORPG, during the development of The Frozen Throne.
• Northrend & Outland were both in the running for the first expansion.
• A group of five people, lead by Metzen took care of the awesome quests.
• Implement multiple starting zones for expansions.
• Throw the antagonist in everyone's face at all times, in as diverse a fashion as possible.
• Moving to 10- and 25-man raiding was validated as a solid decision in the first month.

Perhaps one of the most interesting things to be revealed in this section of the BlizzCast was the amount of Hero classes that were in the works.  Blizzard narrowed down the choices to 29 separate classes before beating that number down to just three.  None of which were the long-rumored Arch Druid.

• Rune Master - Melee archetype like a rogue or monk (Pandaren ftw!).
• Necromancer - Ranged caster with "a lot of corpse explode."  Many ideas incorporated into the Death Knight.
• Death Knight - Umm, well, I hope you know what this class does by now...

The second half of the Q&A has Cygil questioning Blizzard's Senior Vice President of Creative Development, Chris Metzen.  Being the creative mind that he is, Metzen's answers are incredibly long and descriptive.  Cygil leads the discussion in all sorts of directions and storylines, covering Illidan's demise, the distracted Dragonflights, Medivh and even the newly introduced Order of the Ebon Blade.  For the lore lovers out there, the second half of the podcast is incredibly interesting with future plot points being danced around by Metzen. If you haven't checked it out already, Episode 7 can be read, downloaded or streamed at the official BlizzCast site.  The total runtime is just under 40 minutes.

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