FPSLabs : BlizzCon 2008 Wrap Up

BlizzCon 2008 Wrap Up

Posted by Thomas Gribble in October 12th, 2008

Living in Southern California has its benefits. You have the beach, the mountains, and the desert all within driving distance. The bountiful supply of fairly attractive young women is also worth mentioning. Of course, there are some sacrifices as well. Smog, constant droughts, outrageous cost of living, and the ever-present threat of earthquakes are among the rigors associated with living here. It’s also nice that quite a large portion of the video game industry is based in the greater Los Angeles area. Developers probably consider it beneficial to be a stone’s throw away from Hollywood in the event one of their titles gets the attention of studio execs. One such company is Blizzard Entertainment, who has become well known not only for the games they have produced, but for their uncanny ability to tell a story in cinematic fashion.

In 2005 Blizzard thought it might be a good idea to hold a convention at which the then-outrageous number of Blizzard fans could get together to see the latest projects and play the latest demos. Though in 2005 you might have been able to get away with saying that StarCraft was Blizzard’s biggest achievement, in 2008 you would probably be considered an idiot and possibly lynched by a mob of angry World of Warcraft players for suggesting that their game was anything less than the top dog. And really, who can argue? This year saw the completed beta version of StarCraft 2; an attraction that boasted 2-hour long lines around the clock. It was also the first time that Blizzard showed off the graphical splendor of Diablo 3 in playable form. This attraction had the attention of at least 2000 people at all times as well. But to say that World of Warcraft wasn’t the main attraction at this event would be downright blasphemous. Sure, Blizzard had the entire Hall C of the Anaheim Convention Center devoted entirely to Diablo 3. Sure the StarCraft final had a full hall of nostalgic fans witnessing what was probably the last great StarCraft match on American soil. But, as was the case last year, World of Warcraft, and particularly the “Wrath of Lich King” expansion for the game was what really drew untold thousands of members of the horde and alliance to Anaheim this year. Not StarCraft 2, not Diablo 3, World of Warcraft.

Now frankly, we couldn’t possibly care less about World of Warcraft. To my knowledge, nobody at FPSLabs has ever even touched the game. World of Warcraft is not particularly demanding on computer hardware; a requisite to any game that hopes to attract a fan base of more than 10 million. For that reason, we tend to avoid it like the plague when it comes to selecting candidates for our benchmarking suite. Yeah, we probably should include it, since it would be a safe bet to assume a good portion of our readers play the game religiously, but we don’t, so let’s just leave it at that.

Last year at BlizzCon we were presently surprised to see a fair number of gaming hardware manufacturers in attendance. Logitech debuted their G9 laser mouse at the show, along with the revised G15 keyboard. Bigfoot Networks (KillerNIC) made a hard push into the gaming market by going after those to which ping is not just a number, but a pillar of life. NVIDIA was there too, milking the last moments of their dominance of the graphics card market for all it was worth.

Since we had played StarCraft 2 last year, it was the hope that the few hardware manufacturers in attendance at BlizzCon 08 might be showing off something interesting that drew us to Anaheim. Although we were not expecting much, we were still left a bit disappointed. One new product was on display. SteelSeries was showing their World of Warcraft mouse. The mouse, which looks distinctly unlike what we have come to expect from the company, boasts 15 programmable buttons, flashy lights, and a very characteristic “WoW” look. Sure to be a hit with World of Warcraft players who demand super ner… err.. high-quality gaming peripherals ;(.

Besides StarCraft 2, the demo of which has now been blessed with a playable Zerg race and several more stunning cinematics, the best thing at the show this year was something called the Froglin demo at the ATI booth. Two ATI reps from Markham were showing off a technology demo on two Radeon HD4870X2 cards (over 5 TFLOPs of compute power) that involved thousands of tiny Froglins (Frogs + Goblins) gathering gold and going about their lives completely independently (with their own AI, all NPCs), and smart tessellation, all rendered in the impressive fidelity of DirectX 10.1. We snapped a few pictures of the demo in progress, but they really don’t tell the whole story. We are currently working on getting our hands on a copy of the demo or at least some more information regarding it.

Although this year’s BlizzCon wasn’t particularly huge in terms of new hardware, the event itself was a huge success. What facilitated this success? Attendance. I am confident that in just 2 days, BlizzCon absolutely shattered the attendance numbers that E For All garnered in 3 days over the previous weekend. Why did more people come? Because BlizzCon had things that people actually wanted to see. There is a lure about the event that entices even those who are not completely die-hard Blizzard fanatics to attend. And attend they did. Unfortunately, that includes a large number of fairly overweight individuals who don’t particularly care for personal hygiene in any capacity whatsoever. Even still, E For All could stand to take notes; If you build it, they will come. Perhaps unshaven and disheveled, but they will come.