Hasta La Gadget!

Back in August shortly after the Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls expansion was announced, it was revealed that a beta of the game was expected to kick off by the end of the year, and sure enough it has as Blizzard has announced that the Friends and Family Beta has begun. The beta, according to Blizzard, used to be limited to just Friends and Family and Blizzard employees, but the company has announced that this year they will be extending the invite to “valued media contacts and key members of the Blizzard community” as well, along with 3,000 of Blizzard’s most active Diablo 3 players who have opted in for the beta testing as well.

Thankfully the beta is not under an NDA meaning that if you wanted to learn more about the upcoming expansion, you should start to find YouTube videos and blog posts about the expansion popping up on the internet soon. Of course given that the game is currently in beta, what you see now is subject to change and could be vastly different from the final release. The closed beta is expected to kick off soon as well, so if you want to get in on that beta testing action, you can do so by opting in for the beta via your Battle.net profile page, although this is not a guarantee that you will get it. So, who has managed to get their hands on the beta, and what do you guys make of the expansion so far?

Diablo 3: Reaper Of Souls Beta Launches For Friends And Family original content from Ubergizmo.

The other day Blizzard officially announced that the World of Warcraft game would be getting an expansion in the form of Warlords of Draenor, something of a hark back to the good old days of Warcraft where players would get to meet the Draenei and Iron Orcs. The expansion would introduce players to the world of Draenor and will see the level cap raised from 90 to 100. While the expansion looks to be pretty fun, here’s some bad news: there will not be flying allowed in the new expansion and new zones until the next major patch, patch 6.1, has been released. (more…)

World Of Warcraft: Warlords Of Draenor Will Not Allow Flying Initially original content from Ubergizmo.

When Diablo 3 was announced for consoles, many weren’t too surprised especially after seeing the user interface where the action bar for the player’s character had been mapped out to a controller’s buttons. In a way this made a lot of sense and it felt right, leading PC gamers to wonder if they were ever going to see gamepad support for Diablo 3 on the PC in the future. Unfortunately this will not be happening anytime soon, if at all. This was confirmed by Matthew Berger, the senior level designer of the console version who stated that due to the different nature of the game for either platform, it does not make much sense.

“The rhythm on PC is tactactactactactac – you’re clicking the mouse, you’re telling your character where to go,” Berger said. “On console, the rhythm is very different. It flows more, because you’re constantly repositioning your character with the thumbstick; you’re really never stationary on console, whereas on PC you’re a lot more stationary… When you’re playing on the PC, you’re not really looking at your character as much, you’re kind of focusing on the cursor. Whereas on console it’s the exact opposite, you’re drawn in.” While Berger’s statements do make sense, shouldn’t the player decide if they would rather use a gamepad or the keyboard/mouse combo? What do you guys think?

Gamepad Support For Diablo 3 On PC Will Not Be Happening original content from Ubergizmo.

How many of you guys have actually thought that it might be cool to play Blizzard’s World of Warcraft on your mobile device, like a tablet, for example? While there are app developers who have attempted to create MMORPGs for mobile devices, they can hardly be compared to the same level of quality and depth of playing an MMO on the computer or the console, although it seems that Blizzard did experiment with the concept at least once in the past.

This was revealed by Blizzard during the company’s annual gaming event, BlizzCon 2013, where producer director J. Allen Brack admitted that the company did experiment with bringing World of Warcraft onto mobile devices. “Mobile is something I think we’re all excited about. We all have mobile devices. We all have tablets. It’s a pretty ubiquitous experience at this point […] We’ve experimented with differents things [for World of Warcraft] with tablet; we don’t really have ‘this is the thing that we think is the right thing for tablet.’ We kind of keep our eyes open for what the right experience is,” although Brack does admit that the experience, such as the interface itself, posed a significant challenge.

While we doubt World of Warcraft will make its way onto mobile devices in the future, gamers will just have to contend with Blizzard’s digital collectible card game, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft which will be arriving on iPhones and Android devices.

Blizzard Experimented With World Of Warcraft On Mobile Devices In The Past original content from Ubergizmo.

Most Blizzard gamers are probably well-aware that World of Warcraft the movie is in the works, but as to what exactly does the movie entail, its plot, its characters, and its cast all remains unknown. While a good portion of the movie is still being kept a mystery for now, during BlizzCon 2013, additional light was shed on the movie that is currently scheduled to begin shooting in January 2014, with the movie seeing a release on the 18^th of December 2015. (more…)

Additional World Of Warcraft Movie Details Revealed During BlizzCon 2013 original content from Ubergizmo.