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Before World of Warcraft there was plain Warcraft, the award-winning, genre-defining real-time strategy trilogy. Many players of the MMO have never experienced those classic stories. The next World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor, is going to fix that.
“What if those dark days could come again?” asked Blizzard’s Chris Metzen on stage at BlizzCon 2013’s opening ceremonies. “To forge a brighter future, sometimes you must confront the ghosts of the past” he continued, whipping the crowd into a frenzy before announcing the next expansion set for World of Warcraft, Warlords of Draenor.
We’re going time-traveling, folks. Old heroes, old villains, and settings familiar to the players of the original Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and the two games and expansion that followed.
The new expansion feature a new world in Draenor, upgradeable player garrisons, new character models, a level cap increased to 100 and much more. Also worth noting from the trailer, the ability to boost to level 90 and play from there.
The Story
At the end of the current World of Warcraft storyline, former Horde Warchief Garrosh Hellscream is taken away in chains, to be put on trial. That trick never works. He escapes trial and meets up with a new friend with the ability to bend time.
Garrosh travels back to when the world made sense of him, his intent is to redeem the Orcish ideal. He wants the Orcs to be proud conquerors again. His most critical mission is to stop the moment when the Orcs of old drank demon blood and fall under the sway of The Burning Legion. He will build an Iron Horde with the Chieftans of Old, empowered with the tech of the present. He will lead his Iron Horde through a time-spanning Dark Portal to conquer the present day.
Orc Clans
Old Draenor was a much more savage place than the Outlands World of Warcraft players are familiar with.
The only real civilization is a number of famous Orc clans.
Frostwolf Clan of Frostfire Ridge — Chieftain is Durotan, the Father of Thrall. Thrall gets to see where he came from, hang with his family. Will Durotan join the Iron Horde?
Entering Old Draenor
Players are sent on a suicide mission through the Dark Portal to stop the Iron Horde invasion. They’re dropped right into the action, much like Mists of Panderia.
The Horde start in Frostfire Ridge, a frozen area with towering volcanoes. They’ll get wrapped up in a conflict between two competing Orc clans, the Frostwolf and Thunderlord. They’ll also battle Ogres to claim the Bladespire Fortress as the Horde’s expansion base.
The Alliance begin in Shadowmoon Valley, changed (or unchanged) drastically from the way it looked in the Burning Crusade expansion. It’s an area always bathed in darkness, filled with rolling, moonlit hills. It’s the home of Karabor (eventually the Black Temple), the holy temple of the Draenei. The Alliance battle the Iron Horde to free the city to use as their base.
The Plot Thickens, Spills Over
From these first steps into old Draenor, players will embark on a quest that culminate in a battle with a big bad. During the panel Chris Metzen stressed that that big bad wasn’t Garrosh. “He’s the guy behind the guy.” That battle will spill over into the next, unannounced expansion, the first of many Blizzard has lined up as World of Warcraft encroaches on ten years of operation.
Where to start? That must be the big question facing DICE right now as they try and wrangle Battlefield 4 into a stable state. Players have been reporting disconnection errors, freezes, crashes and a smattering of bugs. DICE have tabled a list of fixes they’re working on on the Battlefield 4 forums, which includes a bug that stops server queues from working and various client instability problems.
Players have also been finding some odd errors, YouTubers TeamTooHeavy have posted a video that apparently shows the silencer on the QBU88 muting sound on a server. More worryingly, many players have been reporting netcode issues, which cause a discrepancy between the game logic that denotes where shots are going and when they hit, and what you’re actually seeing on-screen. If netcode’s laggy the game might tell you that you’ve just git a soldier seven times in the chest and been suddenly killed, while from your killer’s perspective he’s rounded the corner and shot you fair and square. Redditor Hickery123 has rounded up some pretty blatant video examples of this happening here.
DICE are patching speedily, thankfully, which marks a change from Battlefield 3 when every patch had to go through Microsoft and Sony bureaucracy. A lot of Battlefield 4’s multiplayer component operates server-side, so they no longer have to deploy updates and downloads to every player’s PC to deal with issues. Battlefield 3 also had some major problems on release, and ended up okay, but it’s a particularly frustrating situation when a big open beta event happened just weeks ago.
The connection issues seem to be affecting 64 player servers more frequently, so you might want to steer clear of those for a while. If the server runs into an error, all of the levelling progress you made during the match will be lost, but reportedly this will suck up XP boost time regardless, so it’s best to save those until the server issues are fixed.
Activision has officially confirmed ‘Extinction’ mode for Call of Duty: Ghosts following leaks which revealed the mode over the weekend.
The publisher has released an official trailer showing the new four-player co-op mode in action
According to the brief official blurb, Extinction is “an all-new 1-4 player cooperative game mode featuring a unique blend of fast-paced survival action, FPS base defence, scavenging and class levelling”.
The game’s official Facebook page calls it “co-op survival madness, with aliens”.
The video appears to show players using drill-like devices to destroy alien hives. Players work together to protect the drilling devices from incoming hordes of four-legged aliens.
Extinction mode was first outed when screenshots and teaser footage was leaked over the weekend.
The Call of Duty: Ghosts release date is set for November 5 on Xbox 360, PS3, Wii U and PC. It will also arrive alongside the PS4 and Xbox One on their respective launches in November.
Square Enix’s revamped massively multiplayer online game, Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn, has reached more than 1.5 million registered users worldwide, Siliconera reports via Famitsu.
A Realm Reborn relaunched in August after Square Enix addressed a mountain of issues plaguing the title since its 2010 release. According to Siliconera, it’s unclear how many of those 1.5 million users are actively playing the game, as opposed to those who registered in its previous life.
Following its re-release, A Realm Reborn faced a rocky start due to clogged servers. Speaking with Polygon during PAX Prime 2013, director Naoki Yoshida said regaining player trust was the team’s greatest challenge.
