Blizzcon Recap
Blizzcon was a great experience! Here's a quick recap of the whole event.
On Thursday night, the eve of the event, I met with a bunch of the machinima people attending, as well as a few of Blizzard staffers and had dinner near the convention center. I don't remember everyone who was there but some of the machinimators included Terran and Ezra of Rufus Cubed, Tristan Pope, Jun Falkenstein, and the members of Dead Workers Party.
Ricky and I headed off to the Anaheim Convention Center on Friday and arrived just in time for our time slot in the machinima booth. We carried with us a big box full of Edge of Remorse DVDs. Before the event I ordered 100 retail packaged DVDs, with cases and artwork professionally printed.
We laid them on our table and gave it all away to the people passing by, giving them a quick 10 second low-down on what machinima is. OK it was a little hectic and we probably did a terrible job doing so! But our film was playing on the TV behind us so hopefully people understood.
The DVDs were gone in 20 minutes. I wish I had made more to give out but just the 100 was expensive enough. I even got to autograph a couple! Me being the fool that I usually am, I forgot my fully charged camera at home... hopefully if someone else took pictures I can steal them and post it later. At one point Henry Lowood (from Stanford and archive.org) came by to say hello.
After the booth I played some StarCraft II - more on that later.
We met up with the Xfire staff, and had a live chat along with the other machinimators - John and Ryan from Red Sky Foundry, Ian Beckham, Stone Falcon Productions, Slashdance, and some others I might be forgetting. We didn't have a table so we were actually sprawled on the floor of the convention center lobby typing away on laptops. Here's a picture one of the Xfire guys took (me on the left):
After this we went to dinner with everyone and had a great meal. Ricky had to leave early after this so we called it a night.
On Saturday I went back and allowed my soul to be devoured by StarCraft. I watched the semi-final and finals of the StarCraft tournament. Watching the pro Koreans play was so amazing, it was ridiculous. So ridiculous that I couldn't help but laugh when I first saw the speed of their mouse clicks - some of the TVs showed a direct feed of the player's monitor, so every mouse movement was visible.
After that me and my friend went straight to the StarCraft II area and played it over, and over, and over again until the day was done!
Even though it was still obviously early in the development, it was extremely polished and very, very playable. And I might even say that it's already the best RTS game I've ever played. I'm having withdrawals right now. I missed the presentation on the single-player but from what I see online it looks to be amazing too.
I see and hear a lot of people complaining about how it looks like an expansion pack or doesn't live up to the hype... well, they couldn't be more wrong. Watching it from a distance and playing and being in the game is so different. It feels like StarCraft which is a very good thing, yet feels newer, more advanced, and overall superior to the old game. Overall everything just felt incredibly smooth. The way the animation plays out and the already polished interface gives everything a very "glidey" feel that's really addicting. Of course balance issues are impossible to judge at this point so who knows if it will live up to the "masterpiece" title that the original owns. Regardless, this game is going to kick some serious ass when it comes out... I'm going to buy like 13 copies just because. =P
I did not get a chance to ask any questions about machinima possibilities. Again I missed the single player presentation so I did not get a chance to see any of the cinematic capabilities either. But one of the trailers playing at the event showed the new Thor unit closeup, with the backdrop out of focus. That gives me hope that Blizzard might be considering machinima possibilities in the new toolset. Regardless I will definitely be doing something with it when it's released. =)
Anyway... that was my experience of Blizzcon in a nutshell. I had a great time, but missed out on a lot of things as well. Next time I'll have to schedule out things a little better.
