28 minutes later
Image by
Katie McKiernan

The travel brochure says “Don’t eat the food” and it’s not kidding. Crates of infected grain have been delivered to all the major cities in World of Warcraft, spreading the same scourge that created the undead and ultimately the forsaken faction. Taking a cue from Resident Evil Outbreak, players infected by the scourge become zombies and can then attack and infect other players. Of course, other players and guards can reciprocate the aggression, though they run a risk of infection if they do. There’s a brief incubation period where the players can be cured, but clusters of bodies near the healers indicate that things could be going better.

The last time a plague ran rampant through Azeroth, it was a little less scripted. The introduction of the Blood God Hakkar propagated a disease called corrupted blood that killed any characters who had not yet reached endgame instantly. Epidemiologists tracked the spread of the disease through the game’s transit networks and used it to develop disease transmission models that may one day be useful for real world outbreaks of fatal contagions.

While the current oubreak is a bit more controlled, it does have one distinguishing feature that makes it different than the corrupted blood epidemic. The world narrative calls for increasing urgency in the outbreak, a fact that Blizzard has chosen to simulate by gradually decreasing the duration of the infection debuff.

Put another way, you used to have 10 minutes to find a healer. Now you have two.

The combination of Warcraft’s dense server populations and the gradually decreasing incubation period make the scourge an interesting source of modeling data. Shorter incubation means less chance to travel, but also means more rapid spreading in denser populations. Whether epidemiologists take notice or not, players can hope to see resolution of the disease plot line in the upcoming expansion: Wrath of the Lich King.

If you thought you were ripping Blizzard off at $15/month, worry not! The developer has worked out a way you can give something back. Bloggers at WarCry are reporting a button in the assets of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion beta labeled “Paid Character Customization.”

Though reluctant to comment on it at Blizzcon, WoW production director J. Allen Brak eventually conceded that the button was real and would be implemented in the future. Just when you thought you were safe from micropayments.

Anybody out there willing to pay cold hard cash to change your character’s hair color? Equipment? What would it take to make you part with an additional $2 for your favorite MMORPG?

WoW widows should get ready to become real widows, because Bejeweled is coming to the World of Warcraft and your raid-obsessed sweetheart will never have a reason to stand up from the computer again.

The breakout casual game from PopCap will be arriving in the form of a mod–user-installable code that adds layers to the Warcraft core. Bejewelled will be a more professional version of the Besharded mod, a clone created by Michael Fromwiller. In a pleasant deviation from cease-and-desist as usual, PopCap actually hired Fromwiller to further polish his mod and add PopCap branding after noticing that it existed.

With Namco jealously guarding the patent on minigames during load screens, it’s nice to see that developers are making headway where they can to fight sandwich gaming.

Coming hot on the heels of an update that reduced the levelling time between levels 30-60, warcraft has made a play to further compress the grind. By signing up a friend, you can reap 90 days of: tripled experience gain, an hourly ability to summon your friend to you, a free level for every two levels your friend gains, and a shiny new Zhevra mount. All that comes on top of the free month you used to get for doing Blizzard’s marketing for them. While this will no doubt engender fanboy rage at being cheated out of a portion of their lives, it should help ease the pain of helping a new friend to the level cap.

Some 20000 gamers have negatively responded to the art direction in the upcoming Diablo III. More than the typical message board complaining, the movement founders have created a series of image mock-ups to communicate what they’d like to see.

While gamers disagreeing with developer design decisions is nothing new (please see the rest of this site –ed), the mock-ups demonstrate that media manipulation tools are common enough in gaming culture to be useful communication tools.

After Blizzard’s earlier announcement of Diablo III, Diablo II and its expansion Lord of Destruction jumped into Amazon.com’s top ten sales rankings.

Blizzard’s games are unique for exceeding the typical three month shelf-life of retail video games by about ten years. Evidently, the mere mention of their franchises (regardless of release dates or specs) is enough to generate consumer frenzy. Though, perhaps gamers are just looking for a little cooperative gaming love to while away the time until the next game comes out.

Good hunting, all.

If you haven’t heard, it’s probably because you’ve been asleep. In a cave. On the moon. For a week. Just in case, though: Blizzard announced Diablo III, latest in the long-running series of action-based dungeon crawlers. Diablo is notable as father of instanced content and the [Item type] of the [animal type] + color approach to generating random loot and addicting players to the ensuing random reinforcement schedules.

Diablo has always been a sort of deeper successor to Gauntlet, and its roots show in the gameplay video. From the exaggerated 3d character models to the management of enemy swarms, it all feels very familiar.

Nevertheless, we’re still a long way off from seeing the game (there isn’t even a release year posted yet). So sit back, the marketing campaign is sure to be a bumpy ride.

As of patch 2.3, Burning Crusade has thrown enough paint on the World of Warcraft gameplay to make it look new again. However, no amount of superficial tweaks to the same underlying gameplay can change the fact that this game is best recommended to disinterested casual players and deeply invested hardcore. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; how wrong can nine million people be?