To close out this storyline, the Video Game Preservation Museum announces its “closure”:
The VGPM was not a museum, but it did claim to be thinking about starting a museum. You’ve heard about it because the guy running it, a video game collector and reseller, claimed that SEGA had wielded the fascist power of the police state to destroy videogame prototypes. The significantly more likely scenario is that they were stolen, everyone involved knew they were stolen, and the collector thought he was in the clear because he was buying it (with fundraised money) from a fence.
Watching a blizzcon panel on WoW Forever and it’s nice to see basically a whole 20 minute section about fog. I can’t in good conscience pay money to blizzard because they are owned by MS. But it sends a great surge of confidence my way to see these devs understand how important fog is to the mystique, scale, and intimacy of that world.
I am not interested in shelling out one-thousand fifty-nine dollars and 00/100 cents on a Steam Frame with Apple amounts of storage or the current state of VR, which has seemingly landed at a bunch of neat little things circling a moat of dead studios surrounding Castle VRChat, but I’m truly happy for anyone who wants that thing and I hope it sells well (it’ll sell well between VR proponents who want to get away from Meta and Valve cultists) because I want Gaben to keep shoveling money into the translation and emulation layer furnace
New zones, quests, class and social mechanics confined to the world as it existed before any of the expansions, and all without raising the level cap. There are new raids and dungeons to experience at end-game or during leveling, with some of these set in areas of the map that have always been out of bounds and the subject of a lot of player intrigue. Basically, it’s all confirmation what everyone has always thought: somewhere down the line of expansions and patches, WoW lost its soul and became some kind of brainless anti-social weekly to do. WoW Forever is a response to all the criticism of retail WoW, and a commitment to try to return to a certain philosophy of socialization and progression from the past and to make new things with it.
That sounds cool. I haven’t played WoW since BfA and the announcement did trigger some sort of sleeper agent part of my brain. I used to play with my older brother and we might play again as over the years he had kids and we had different schedules and systems and drifted apart in terms of games played. This might be a nice opportunity to reconnect and play with him again with a fresh start.
I both agree with this and also think it is like the rosiest possible way to put it. I would say that forever will not change anyone’s opinion on any flavor of world of warcraft. If you are in the very specific position of:
-played and enjoyed vanilla (as it was originally released in 2004) and/or classic (the 2020 updated rerelease of vanilla)
-do not enjoy retail (what “normal” wow currently is after all its expansions)
-are bored of classic, don’t want to replay all the same quests and all the same raids in all the same zones and all the same dungeons
Forever is for you. I don’t think it’s for anyone else.
I’m just looking at this and nodding, then nodding some more, then shaking my head, then pondering what I’ve done with my life, then nodding once more.
(The Steam new release list is the worst it has ever been by a comfortable margin, there were days in the before time where it was tricky to limit things down to a manageable amount of screenshots/blurbs for the random game topic and now if I can find three usable bits in a day I’m tickled)