The Asian Power Hour

Fans will remember the Starcraft II mock-up and teaser that Blizzard had released at the very end of Warcraft III, using the in-game engine. I'm sure that caused more than a few sleepless nights for Starcraft junkies.

There had been rumors floating around earlier about how Blizzard would close down the Battle.net service for the original Starcraft soon, and it looks like that might be the case, as it looks like SCII will be sucking up all that sweet juicy bandwidth soon. It makes sense though, as keeping the original servers up would take away from sales of the new product in the long run, as players may prefer the original and go back to that instead of sticking with the new product.

In other news, speculation, but in a fairly cold hard fact kind of way, a few years back, I remember seeing a post on Blizzard's hiring website that advertised:

"to work with members of the Diablo and Diablo II team"

I had thought to myself, huh, well here come Diablo III. And while I kept waiting for the ball to drop, it never came. But at seeing how polished Starcraft II was when they annouced it, I'm fairly certain that within the next year or so, Diablo III in all it's 3-D multi-gajillion polygonal glory will drop out and ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands of students across the world.

More speculation comes as a fairly renewed hardcore fan of World of Warcraft. Looking at the trends that Blizzard has pushed so far with WoW, it seems that Blizzard is using WoW as a surrogate in terms of advancing the Mythos of the Warcraft World in place of the RTS games. The latest patch, 2.10, introduces Illidan, one of the main characters of the Warcraft saga, as a fightable boss NPC. Other notable characters players can interact ie beat the snap out of and vice versa, include Lady Vash'j of the Naga and Kael'thas of the Blood Elves, all major plot-advancing characters from Warcraft III and the expansion, Frozen Throne.

Looking at the Warcraft Mythos and this trend, one can only assume that the next expansion will deal with the strongest and most important, storyline wise, of the characters from the mythos not in the game. This would have to be Arthas, and the frozen wastes of Northrend in which he currently resides. If there was another World of Warcraft expansion in the works, this would be it, and I am pretty freaking sure Blizzard is hard at work on it, as Rob Pardo is probably currently at home sleeping in his bed stuffed with hundred dollar bills, wondering why his house isn't built out of solid gold yet.

However, with this trend comes something a bit more interesting. If Blizzard is advancing the storyline of the Warcraft world so far beyond what the original games had laid in place, then, does this mean that they hope to conclude the Warcraft saga with the online game? By introducing every single one of the major characters into the online game as bosses, they are in effect cancelling them out from the series, as players have the distinct, nay, only option of killing them.

The Blizzard people definetely are serious sticklers for world mythos, although they keep changing fuzzy areas to accommodate World of Warcraft. Putting something like a character as important to the story as Illidan definetely throws a wrench in this, as they have effectively stated that this character has been defeated at the hands of not any famous hero, but collectively at the hands of adventurers from across the world. Huh, that sounded pretty cheesy right? But it also sounds damn epic.

Is World of Warcraft going to be the capstone of the Warcraft series? I hope not, since my somewhat rabid fanboy devotion won't let me accept that without a fight. However, it certainly looks that way at the rate Blizzard is going. This also leads me to believe that perhaps, just perhaps, there is a brand spanking new IP in the works at Blizzard to replace the fantasy niche that Warcraft held. Just speculation mind you, but I've thought about it many a sleepless night in my Tauren underoos.

The last two points of speculation come straight from the Blizzard job opportunities website, where two areas seem to be hotly contested right now for new talent:

-Mobile
-Next-Gen MMO

While many people have thought that the Next-Gen MMO would have been Starcraft Online, and there's still a possiblity it might be, there would be no way that Blizzard would release a game internally that would take away from sales of any of it's other flagship products. Seeing the trend with WoW, and the lengthy development cycle that Blizzard takes, there's a pretty big possiblity that this may be the product to replace WoW in about 3-4 years, which seems like what the active lifespan for WoW has left after all these crazy patches and storyline updates.

On the other hand, I'm fairly excited about prospects in the mobile field. I've been fairly intrigued to see when Blizzard would pull some sort of mobile app out of their ass and force feed it to Asia, all the while reaping humdillions of dollars. Over the last year, I've written pretty extensively on what this app could be, and what it could do, and I'm sticking to my thoughts that it would follow in the steps of Ragnarok Online's mobile mage, and have some sort of link up capability with the online product. IE, some sort of World of Warcraft utility tool/game that would be able to link up to your account.

Speculations aside, it looks like a busy busy year for these here folks, and now...links!

Starcraft II Official Site
World of Warcraft Patch 2.10, The Black Temple aka Let's kill Illidan
Blizzard Job Postings aka What to expect in the future
Ragnarok Mobile Mage