This year was my first Blizzcon. I had no expectations going in outside of what I saw the previous year through the Virtual Ticket. Last year’s Virtual Ticket did teach me one thing: I had to go. I had to attend so that I could become part of this community that I’ve always been a part of at home but never fully experiencing. So this blog post will entail my personal journey.
I suppose the thing to start off with is that I originally had purchased both a normal ticket and the Charity Event dinner ticket. My feeling was that I really wanted to take my experience up a notch because I had been missing numerous opportunities in partaking in the action. The Charity Event dinner motivated me because of the potential for some awesome networking while supporting a good cause.
Earlier, I had some issues I needed to take care of which drained me quite a bit. Once I managed to get to the convention center I had some time to kill.The first thing I had to handle was picking up the badge. The instructions for the Charity Event were a little different compared to the normal ticket but I ended up hitting the usual registration area to pick my badge up. I had some trouble because of the way the ticketing had been setup through Eventbright that caused a few problems. Eventually, I managed to pick up my badge as well as the swag bag.
Thereafter, I hung around the 1st floor lobby at the Hilton then moved to the 2nd floor just before the Ballroom where they held the event. I saw numerous streamers that I recognized which felt odd since in person people sometimes aren’t as you might expect them to be (some might appear taller while others far shorter). I didn’t bother to hang out at that point in time due to the Charity Event and mostly I used my time to get some writing done.
Once the Charity Event started, they had us enter a fairly sizable spot with a great spread. There crab claws, fresh shrimp cocktail, cheese platter, turkey, roast beef and drinks. Unfortunately, I didn’t have as much of an appetite because I had a late lunch. In retrospect, I wish I could’ve had more food and possibly some alcohol. Nonetheless, I didn’t want to drink that night and realized in the end that carrying around my heavy laptop was probably a very poor idea.
There wasn’t any structure to the dinner and you pretty much could go up to anyone from Blizzard and start a conversation. Since my current game for Blizzard is Diablo 3, I decided to hang out with the Diablo 3 team. I have to say the people on the team were really awesome! Everyone was exceptionally friendly and eager to hear about my experiences with the game. Wyatt Cheng in particular went far and beyond to hear from me as well as making me feel welcome. He introduced me to numerous people from the team, all of who are really nice. We chatted quite a bit about my approach to playing the game, the various classes I play, providing a few tips here and there and talking about some of the philosophies behind the design. It was a really cool opportunity to get a wonderful snapshot into how the game is produced and really changed my perspective about the game in different ways. Travis Day was another guy who was wonderful to meet. He talked a bit about his recent honeymoon vacation in Japan and he showed me a few shots of the temple they visited out there. Since I was living in Tokyo, I thought that was really cool of him and provided a nice little connection.
Another person, I had the chance to meet was Chris Metzen. This guy is really a bro. Great vibes, immensely positive, tons of energy and interested in what you’re doing. He definitely has that larger-than-life type of personality (not to mention that I’m just such a tiny guy). He had to take off for a bit since they had some planning to do. For that I wish I could’ve had a little more time to speak with him, especially considering how he’s more on the storyline side of things (which lines up with my situation as a writer).
Some other people I had the chance to speak with were some of the execs like Frank Pearce, Paul Sams, etc. I had the chance to reminisce a bit since I applied years ago to them back when there were in their old offices. It was great just hearing these stories.
After finishing up, I hung out at the Hilton a bit. The bar area was pretty filled and getting rowdy. I ended becoming pretty tired so I took off for the night. My legs and feet were pretty sore from walking around and standing up most of the time. Not to mention my back was badly aching (I probably overdressed a bit for the occasion).
In retrospect, I wish I had reserved the hotel starting on Thursday rather than Friday. Many people had trickled in on Thursday, which allowed for one more night of partying. That would’ve made arriving the following day far easier as well as providing more opportunities to hang out with people just before the place became overly crowded.
Following day, my friend dropped on by and we hit up the convention once again. Picking up his badge went a lot smoother but we were cutting it close to the opening ceremony. We had to stand in the back because we were a little late but still managed to see it from the start. Obviously, the anticipation was high and Towelliee noted via Twitter how an unmarked area had been setup. Mike Morhaime took the stage and gave a pretty emotional speech with the huge issues of harassment in gaming that had been sprouting out more and more. Next, came the gaming line up with the expansion for Hearthstone, Goblins vs Gnomes. That was a pretty good segue to provide a brighter tone.
Of course, the big star of the show was Blizzard’s new IP Overwatch. The moment the video started playing you could feel the hair rise on everyone’s body as we eagerly awaited what this game would be. The start of the video seemed to hint at a super hero-like movie (somewhat reminiscent of Captain America in the comic book hero post-WW2 style art and narration). Instead, it turns out the narrative was simply a tale of yesteryear as two children, one presumably a disenfranchised teenager, had been watching a video of a disbanded group of super heroes. Just as things looked to be turning into your average, boring day, a giant gorilla (Winston) is dropped right into the museum and business picks up.
The mini movie does a great job showing the basic idea behind Overwatch, which turns out to be Blizzard’s first FPS. They then went into a game play demo that whet our appetite for the machines waiting outside. My friend immediately commented that the game resembled Team Fortress 2 with Blizzard’s twist. Since I never played TF2 I had very little to go off of. But I did manage to give the demo a try (which I’ll later expound upon). Either way, the crowd was instantly awed by the graphics and detail of the game. And of course, once the opening ceremony finished, everyone pretty much jammed the demo line.
Starcraft 2 (as I expected) made its return with the announcement of a new standalone featuring that conclusion of this current episode. This time the game will finish up with the Protoss. As always, the intro movie was epic and seems to allude to all three races working together to defeat a common enemy.
After finishing up with the opening ceremony, we wandered around a bit to give the convention center a bit of a spin. I have to say that the place is just immense. One thing I really appreciated was checking out the various statues of Blizzard characters. The amount of detail on each character was amazing. My absolute favorite was the Queen of Blades. I went back later that night and managed to get some decent up close photos.
One of the first talks I went to check out was the Diablo 3 upcoming stuff talk. Probably, more than anything I was looking forward to this part the most (next to the opening ceremony). For the most part, I’m going to have a separate write up for that part. Main thing for me is that I’m pretty excited. I did manage to check out the demo later that night and had the chance to play all 6 classes and get a feel for how the upcoming patch will be like. The long and short of it is that there’s just more to look forward to.
Caught a bit of the World of Warcraft arena tournament. I was rooting for the Three Amigos and it seemed like they had a strong start. Later things became a little more difficult. Not sure if it’s because Venruki ended up going monk but definitely there were points where it felt they were stronger with him as a frost mage.
Did the little chat with the D3 guys again where we did a little “rifting” (sp?) on item design. That part was fun because it provided me with insight on their process. Some key points were the idea of “the fantasy,” focusing on visuals in game vs buff/debuff visuals, fixing big picture problems, avoiding mass nerfs, etc. The main idea here is iteration factor, a very popular concept in development. Essentially, refining things until you get to a point of satisfaction. My idea was a Clan-only sets that worked together in creating a new power. Essentially, it’s the Voltron/Devastator from Transformers type of set item. Yang, one of the developers, did admit he didn’t want to deal with the number of combinations in testing them, but it was interesting hearing how they would go through taking an idea like that and seeing the feasibility of it.
Also, got to check out the World of Warcraft item design/class updates that are coming to Warlords of Draenor. Mostly, that panel was about the decision making process behind how many classes had removed various abilities to make them more comprehensible as well as simplifying certain item mechanics. That gist behind the changes was to streamline things, getting rid of ability bloat and going over use cases in the reality of how they wanted the new loot to be instantly useful.
Outside of giving the D3 demo a shot, I didn’t do much else on Friday at the convention. After dinner, I hung out in the Hilton lobby and managed to finally meet a bunch of streamers such as DizzyKitten, Mike Preach, Koali, Hirona, Trekkie, some of the Midwinter members, Katelyst, Celeste, Swifty and Hotted. I tried to really get a chance to talk with each person and relate some experience of how I managed to find their channel and something about them that I appreciated. Everyone was really wonderful to meet in person finally and some were far more friendly than I expected. I did see other popular streamers such as Towelliee, Sonya, SeriousGaming (Vicky/Alan), Reckful, Lea, etc. but things were really chaotic in the bar area. I did manage to get a shot with Mike Morhaime as well.
One really cool thing is that Wyatt Cheng and I caught up in the hotel and he took me to the side and we had a really nice, lengthy chat about D3 and my experiences with the game. Some key points here were hearing about how moving the demon hunter back into shooting once again (although M6 won’t change), bringing back the Whirlwind Barbarian, the new Wizard set that allows you to utilize Slow Time as an offensive capability and some other things I noticed in the demo.
Saturday started off with a massive, hungry crowd. The opener was the Method vs Midwinter live raid that showed the upcoming raid for Warlords of Draenor. Midwinter started pretty strong but I heard that an accidental trash pull probably cost them the game. There were some nailbiting moments whenever a tank went down. In Method’s case, both tanks went down at one point and some people assumed that it could’ve been a wipe. However, they managed to recover. One of the key things here was seeing how the new battle resurrection system would be handled since it’s timed based. In the end, Method still broke ahead but the race felt closer this time around.
Since Blizzard didn’t want to unveil their new IP ahead of time, the Overwatch panels had been hidden from the schedule. However, I did manage to catch one where they talked about the development of the game. Most of it was how the game came to life from an art point of view. Some people mentioned that the game was the remnants of the original Titan MMORPG that was rumored to be in progress. The game possibly was the arena aspect from Titan. It’s anyone’s guess why the MMORPG aspect never came to be but I fathom that they would’ve wanted something to break how the MMORPG genre, which means building an improved WoW.
I moved on over to the Diablo 3 retrospect. That talk mostly was about seeing the history of Vanilla D3 until present day and how the team evolved, the learning process, etc. Probably, the big thing was the talk about items, the longtail goal of minimal content patches with items having poor stats and how the game play initially was all about the auction house as opposed to the game itself. I can understand the auction house aspect as a secondary market since Ticketmaster was building a similar system with their TicketExchange platform. Unfortunately, the reality didn’t end up matching the vision and removing it had been one of the best decisions to allow them to go forward with the new itemization.
I ended up skipping the next two World of Warcraft panels in favor of checking out the Overwatch demo. Since I never played Team Fortress 2, I had nothing to compare to with outside of old FPS games I played ages ago. FPS really isn’t my style neither as most of the game play is PVP oriented. Unfortunately, for my team, Sodah was in our group but on the opposite team. So we pretty much got slaughtered badly. I did manage to try the Asian….I mean Hanzo, Reaper and Pharah. Unfortunately, I discovered the F1 key (which shows you all the character’s abilities) too late after getting nuked over and over again. So the only one I started to really figure out was Pharah.
At least for me, the game seems more like a 1st person MOBA game as opposed to just an FPS. I didn’t see anything like upgrades or items outside of healing packs and there is nothing to really enhance your abilities. Instead, you play a certain role along the path of offense, support and defense. You can switch between heroes and it doesn’t seem to discriminate which “side” you choose in terms of the hero. I’m not sure if that aspect will change. The game play was really smooth, the graphics great but it did feel like there would be some learning curve. I don’t think the learning curve will be that high but Blizzard’s admitted philosophy on games is “easy to learn, difficult to master.”
After giving the demo a shot, my friend and I went to check out the cinematic stage they setup on the 3rd floor. It seemed more like an audio sell for theaters. But the main feature was a sneak peak of the World of Warcraft movie. I have to say it looks fantastic! They offered one “secret” shot to demonstrate the realism and soulfulness given the orcs in showing a clip of Thrall crying. All I can say is that I can’t wait to check it out once it premiers!
At that point, my friend had to leave so I pretty much went solo the rest of my time there. I caught the LFG documentary, which mostly was about the impact World of Warcraft has had upon the lives of Blizzard employees and its fans. It was really well done and I think for myself one of the major aspects was getting a glimpse into their data center and monitoring system. There was one part where the head of operations took out a blade server, which ended up being Tichondrius. Many jokes about explaining how and why Tichondrius went down a few weeks back were floated around. Also, seeing how certain streamers were shown in the monitoring part was interesting and creepy too. In some ways, it almost verifies the alleged “streamer buffs” that can happen (like Diablo 3 in which Datmodz often jokes about).
Next was the closing ceremony followed up by L90ETC and Metallica. I never really followed the L90ETC and so I was surprised in seeing the band members (especially Mike Morhaime). I have to admit that these guys weren’t bad. Some people thought that Metallica would have a hard time following up. But I will say Metallica is definitely one of the best metal shows around. I managed to see them back for the Big 4 and realized quite quickly that their live performances are pretty special. This was no exception. They did quite a few old school songs and kept the crowd alive with their energy. I was very pleased in their song choices and the amount of time given. I thought that perhaps they would do just three songs. But they played almost all of my favorites (Enter Sandman got a huge cheer).
Maybe my only mistake was leaving the concert area to pick up some swag. I did that around L90ETC’s performance, not realizing that they had setup gate guards to prevent people from re-entering. So I mostly hung out near the huge monitors in checking out the performance. To be honest, I didn’t mind because I was just too far back. Also, I didn’t want to deal with the stampede later on. Unfortunately, when it came to the swag, some stuff had sold out pretty fast like the new wolf pup. I did pick up a Reaper shirt and a Sylvanus doll among other things.
Either way, I was pretty sore and decided to head back. I think there was a twitch party only for partners. I felt that might’ve hurt the Hilton lobby slightly since I didn’t see that many people I could recognize. Probably, they should’ve held that party either on Thursday night or maybe earlier (or cut it earlier) but I didn’t feel that the lobby had the same level of energy as the previous night.
All in all, was BlizzCon worth it? Was the dinner party worth it? I definitely think if you haven’t attended a BlizzCon, you should go at least once in your life. For me the real highlight was being able to connect with so many people from streamers to Blizzard employees. My goal always was to make new friends/acquaintances and figure out where I belong in this ecosystem. I definitely think that I will try to make another attempt next year. Hotel-wise I don’t know if I’ll stay two nights. It felt that the better option would’ve been to do Thursday and Friday rather than Friday and Saturday. Also, I’ll probably go with the Marriott next time as I felt the Hilton did not provide the level of satisfaction for the price (there were some major issues there for me).
If anything, I think getting back into the gaming scene was good for me. I haven’t attended a gaming convention for years and seeing this level of geekdom was refreshing in some ways. I think if I was a more social person, I would tried connecting more with people. One thing I hope that could be added in the future are more icebreaker type of events to get more people to connect in a variety of ways.
In the end, it was sad seeing that the convention had come to a close. You never want the party to finish and it’s likely that I’ll never see most of the people ever again in person. But you do have a life to live and gaming is just one aspect.