“BlizzCon is operated at a substantial loss for the company,” he said. “It’s a huge marketing opportunity, so that’s the benefit we get out of that. But in terms of any kind of financial gain, it actually is a loss for us.”

To give you an idea, then, of how much holding the show costs, consider that 20,000 people bought tickets this year. At $US125 a ticket, that’s $US2.5 million. So for the company to make a “substantial loss” on the show, it must cost a lot.

Then again, when you’re Blizzard and you get all that WoW subscription money, you can afford to throw lavish parties for your fans every year.

Blizzard incurs ’substantial loss’ from BlizzCon [GameSpot]

I briefly got my hands on both the Goblins and the Worgen during BlizzCon 2009, and while I wasn’t able to experience either area from start to finish, I played enough to realise that these two races are getting far better treatment than ten previous could ever dream of, all thanks to the bar set by Wrath of the Lich King’s Death Knight starting area.

The Death Knight starting experience was unlike anything seen before in World of Warcraft. It introduced new gameplay elements such a zone phasing, which allowed for the area the player was playing in to change drastically during the course of their adventure, while adding in various mini-games to help the player feel that they were playing a larger role in the story. Blizzard takes these elements and applies them to the starting areas for the Goblins and the Worgen, The Lost Isles and Gilneas.

The demos for both races started off at level six. During my interview with lead developer Tom Chilton, he explained that this was simply because the 1-5 areas weren’t quite finished, and they felt the 6 and up areas offered a more complete grasp of what they were trying to do.

Both races reach level 6 under dire circumstances. Your Goblin character winds up dead on the docks following a shipwreck, with an NPC desperately trying to revive him using everyone’s favourite Goblin engineering item, the Goblin Jumper Cables. Once you’ve come to life, you set off on a series of quest to help your fellow greenskins recover from the traumatic wreck. The very first quest requires you blast open escape pods, with each freed NPC referring to you by name, hinting at a much more intimate story leading up to the beginning of the demo.

The Lost Isle takes a cue from Northrend in terms of design, presenting a much more vertical experience than standard World of Warcraft zones have in the past. You’ll find yourself looking down on areas you’ve visited previously, in between run-ins with explosive-throwing monkeys, Alliance sailors, and the shadowy rogues of the SI:7.

Aiding in my explorations were the Goblin’s two active racial abilities, Rocket Barrage and Rocket Jump. Barrage fires a barrage of missiles at a foe, while Rock Jump launches the Goblin forward for a tiny speed boost, perfect for escaping unsavory situations. The latter should make Goblin rogues absolutely insufferable.

While my time as a Goblin rogue was brief, I did come away with a strong feeling that Blizzard is intending on making Goblins serious Horde business, while maintaining the same lighthearted tone they have with Gnome society these past five years.

On the Alliance side of things, your Worgen wakes up in stocks, with NPCs arguing over whether or not you deserve to live or die. Can you control your curse, or will it consume you? Right from the start it is obvious that Blizzard is taking the werewolves quite seriously. Soon you find yourself freed, tasked with finding ingredients for a potion to help curb your more feral tendencies and helping defend the city from an undead invasion.

Where The Lost Isles are sunny and cheerful, Gilneas is dark and bleak. There’s still the same sort of verticality to the playfield, with hills rolling a bit more than hills had rolled previously, but all in all it’s a very familiar looking place. Think Darkshire and you’re heading in the right direction.

Perhaps if I had tried the Worgen first I would have been a bit more impressed, but after the bright, humorous Goblin experience, the Worgen just felt like a bit of a letdown. It felt less like an exciting new race, and more like humans in furry outfits. In fact, one of their racial abilities lets you shift back and forth between human and Worgen, which means you essentially are a human in a furry outfit, albeit one that can run very fast for 10 seconds at a time on a 3-minute cooldown timer. Another new race that should give rogues even more ways to run away. It could just be that the excitement from levels 1-5 was more necessary to the Worgen experience than Blizzard expected. I suppose we will find out sometime next year.

Still, I can see the direction Blizzard is going in, making the starting areas for these two new races the same kind of epic experience as the Death Knight. My only worry is that rolling a Dwarf, Troll, or Gnome is going to be a great deal less appealing once Cataclysm comes out, unless Blizzard plans to share the innovation with every race.

The subject of StarCraft: Ghost came up during my interview with StarCraft II art director Didier as a joke at first. I asked him when StarCraft: Ghost was coming out, and he replied, “Didn’t you get it? It was out at GC in Germany, running on the PS Slim or whatever they’re calling it,” he teased. I mentioned reading the StarCraft: Ghost novel, and how it really made me want to play the game that didn’t exist. “Oh it exists,” he replied.

“We actually looked at a lot of the art assets so we could include them in specific missions in the game, or if there was a specific installation in Ghost that we wanted to include in StarCraft II. We look at all our assets.”

He likens it to the situation with the cancelled Warcraft: Lord of the Clans adventure game. “Originally Lord of the Clans was like that. We cancelled Lord of the Clans for a lot of similar reasons, but Thrall ended up as the biggest character in the Horde. I’m not saying that’s Nova, but we’re definitely not throwing away the lore.”

It’s good to know that all of that StarCraft: Ghost development didn’t go to waste. If you’re interested in of the lore behind Ghost and its lovely protagonist Nova, be sure to check out the StarCraft: Ghost Nova novel, recently featured in our 2009 Summer Reading List.

It’s nearly a year later, and Diablo III game director Jay Wilson is now sporting a rather fetching bit of beardage, but the legendary shirt is nowhere to be seen. The outpouring of demand was readily evident, and third-party companies have made a tidy sum producing knock-offs of the design. Where’s the real deal?

“The shirt wasn’t produced through normal Blizzard channels,” Jay explains. “It was something the team had made on their own.” Therefore the shirts never underwent any sort of official approvals process, which explains why Blizzard didn’t immediately put them up for sale. There’s still hope though.

“It’s our intent eventually to make them. Whether we make them for public consumption I’m not sure – I don’t see why not. I’ve got other fish to fry.” I think we can all agree that working on getting the game finished is slightly more important than releasing a silly t-shirt. Slightly.

As for third-party bootlegs, Blizzard is aware, and will frown in a legal fashion at any company that seeks to make their own unauthorised versions.

The art director for StarCraft II when he isn’t belting out vocals for Blizzard’s house band, The Artists Formerly known as Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain, was quite vocal about keeping things fresh across the Terran, Protoss, and Zerg campaigns during our interview at BlizzCon 09. “We definitely have ideas that we haven’t include in this one to keep the next games unique. We always joke around that every expansion has to have the snow tileset, so there we go, we’ve got the snow tileset. We do that just for a goof. “Hey, there’s the snow tileset!”"

All joking aside, Sam explains that certain ideas have been held back for the two single player expansions, in order to ensure that each has its own unique flair.

“There’s a lot of really cool unit ideas that we have that we probably could have squeezed onto one of these, but instead we wanna let them shine more in the next one – let them be a little more unique. This is an expansion, but it’s the Zerg campaign or the Protoss campaign. It’s not like a one-off sort of thing. It’s gonna have all its unique sets.

“We’re going to go back to the same planets. My hope is that we can affect those planets somehow, so if you’re on Korhol in Wings of Liberty, when you return in the Zerg campaign or the Protoss, I want something radical to have happened to it or changed, whether a change in leadership or some “Cataclysmic” event,” he jokes, referring to the newly announced World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion.

“That’s the sort of thing that I really dig. I love it in movies when you see a character from the original one except now he has a cool hatchet wound on his face – what happened to him? So basically we’ll put hatchet wounds on the planet. The +2 hatchet of doom!”

Did I mention I love this man? He’s like me, only with a fully-working face and hair. He’s even at my same skill level in StarCraft. “Everybody is better than me. I get beat by the UI. Not the AI, the UI. Waitaminit, what do I have to build here? What, I have to build a – ah damn.”

Check out this tour of the zones of World of Warcraft: Catacylsm, for a look at Gilneas, The Lost Isles and how Deathwing’s reappearance will forever change the face of Azeroth.

New lands are all well and good, but seeing places where I’ve spent countless hours over the past five years completely changed is simply spectacular. Changing the existing world so drastically is an amazingly elegant way of adding new content without slapping another undiscovered landmass or alternate dimension to the game.

Some of our readers were a bit put off by the suggestion that the single player portion of StarCraft II would require logging into Battle.net, as evidenced by some of the comments in the post following the Battle.net panel at BlizzCon this weekend. The next day we followed up on the issue with Blizzard vice president of game design Rob Pardo, who clarified the single player situation for us.

“You don’t technically have to (login), but you’ll want to. You can play in offline mode if you want – I just don’t think you’re going to want to. You’ll be giving up lots and lots of features, and why would you want to be giving up features?”

We covered the features exhaustively in the original post, but perhaps we didn’t draw your attention to the button on the above screenshot labelled “Play As Guest.” That button kicks off the game without connecting, so those of you without internet who couldn’t possibly be reading this post should be happy, unless they try to set up a LAN.

To give you folks a little background information, the BlizzCon press room is a place of joy and wonder. They line two walls with kiosks playing the games available on the show floor, so the press can play without having to be complete jerks, butting into the front of hundreds of patiently waiting fans. They also have excellent Italian dinners, which I stopped eating the moment a Diablo III kiosk went free, leaping over rows of furiously-typing journalists for my chance to play the Monk.

The Monk demo started out in the Sundered Pass, an area of shifting desert sands. An NPC sporting the signature yellow exclamation point quest marker tasked me with travelling out into the wastes to find something or some such. Honestly? I wasn’t paying all that much attention to what she was saying. I wanted to get out into the sands and kick some arse, Street Fighter style.

Yes, the Monk has been designed with Street Fighter in mind. As lead designer Jay Wilson told me during our interview, there are a lot of fighting game fans on the Diablo III team, and they wanted a character that added a bit of that feel to the game. Have they succeeded?

It was hard to tell at first. The initial enemies you encounter are wasps, which pretty much go down in one or two hits, so the massive destructive power isn’t nearly as evident. If I was lucky I’d pull off the full Exploding Palm, a combo move that leaves the enemy with a damage-dealing dot, making them explode in an extremely satisfying manner if it drains their heath completely.

As mentioned previously, many of the Monk’s moves are combination moves—moves with multiple stages. The Exploding Palm, for instance, delivers a couple of weak hits before the third step, which applies the explosive damage effect.

As I progressed through the desert, strong enemies began to appear, including members of the demonic Fallen, who took more than a few mouse clicks to dispatch. The Monk’s damage was fine against these larger creatures, but the differences between the Monk and the more powerful Barbarian became readily apparent the first time I took a heavy hit. The Monk isn’t all that good at going toe-to-toe with enemies. The best tactic seemed to be to jump in, hit the enemy with a quick barrage of strikes, and then move before you get hit.

This became even more clear once I started running into large groups of enemies. Running in, feet and staff swinging wildly, did not work. I was quaffing healing potions like they were going out of style, and I actually managed to die. The key to large groups is the Monk’s Seven-Sided Strike ability. A semi-ranged attack, the Seven-Sided Strike has you tearing through groups of enemies in a flashing display of holy power, leaving song dead, and some weakened. Combine it with the explosive effect of the Palm, and you’ve got a very effective way of taking out large groups without dying in the process.

The key to playing the Monk would seem to be in combining his combination powers to create your own play style. I didn’t get to explore this much, with the limited skills at my disposal and the limited time I had to play, but one can easily see how a skilled player can turn the Monk into a devastating engine of destruction. It’s a character class that will take a little work to master, but the results should be quite satisfying.

Ozzy is not exactly known for his clarity, so you’ll have to forgive us if we cannot tell you exactly which game he was talking about being addicted to during Saturday night’s interview. I’ll go ahead and give you what he said, as best as I can make it out. Then you folks can help us fill in the blanks.

“The only one I ever played is that f–king (unintelligible) I got addicted to that instantly years ago was that f–king video game where the f–king guy jumps off the f–king cliff. Sort of this old (well, or whale?). I was playing all f–king night.”

You can see where we might be confused. So far we’ve come up with several good suggestions. Owen suggested Jungle Hunt. Luke thought it might be World Games, with the cliff diving. Some of the members of the press I talked to after the interview thought it might be Super Mario Bros. or maybe even Lemmings.

I would have asked for clarification, but he then launched into a story about Sharon playing Tetris.

“Tetris – my wife got addicted to it. I remember lying in bed and saying, ‘Shit. Are you playing that f–king game?’ And she’d say, ‘No.’ And then I’d hear ‘Bastard! F–king asshole!’ And then the exploded one (exploding sound effect) in her f–king hands!”

That didn’t help anything, did it? I sure hope her hands were okay.

So what are your thoughts? What cliff jumping video game was powerful enough to fell the prince of darkness? The f–king comments section is yours.

At a panel that took place while I was knee-deep in interviews, Blizzard introduced the new Sarah Kerrigan to the world, smashing previous rumours that voice actress Karen Strassman was taking over the role. Helfer is no stranger to video game work, having appeared in voice form in Spider-Man: Web of Shadows and Halo 3: ODST, as well as a live action appearance in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Is Helfer up on her StarCraft lore?

“It’s intimidating to come into a game and do a job that you don’t really know the history of it, I’m kind of a video game virgin in terms of playing. Personally I’m not technologically savvy,” Helfer said at the outset of her introduction to the crowd. “At the time, I didn’t know what Zerg and all these things were. It was fun to find out all these little differences.”

Along with Helfer, the panel also revealed that original cast members Robert Clotworthy and James Harper would be returning as Jim Raynor and Arcturus Mengsk respectively, putting to rest earlier reports that Clotworthy wasn’t deemed worthy to fill Raynor’s space boots.

BlizzCon 09: Kerrigan Gets Cylon’d [IGN UK]