#Budrickton
Manchu WoW: Pandaria, 5.0, and Where World of Warcraft is Now
Did you look as confused as I and my friend Kiki here did when Blizzard unveiled World of Warcraft‘s fourth expansion at Blizzcon last month?
Blizzard’s golden child is going into its eighth year, and Mists of Pandaria is the game’s early, bi-curious, bipolar adolescence, rife with identity crises and plenty of confusion about its future and its present.
Pandaria and the future of WoW, however, have real, hidden meat (#unnecessary) that the average or even relatively-savvy player can’t see unless they frequent Blizzard news posts or community chat.
Unless you’re an insane WoW addict like me or my kind, you don’t do that and can’t be expected to; your barometer on the wildly successful MMO is whatever Blizzard’s handsome devil of a mouthpiece (and resident head of creative, Chris Metzen) dishes out every year on stage to a convention hall packed with nerds, later carved into bite-size youtube clips.
So what’d we get this year?
Bamboo-stic, panda-rife, Asian-stir-fried nonsense in place of a genuine, thrilling tease for a new expansion, one that’s been conceptualized and billed as a return to almighty WAR in a game that’s largely been lacking it for years.
The reveal smacked of something less timely than Blizzard’s usual spectacles. It almost seemed like the company — which, let’s get real, has just about the greatest track record in game development, ever? — was unaware that its greatest threat is coming on December 20th of this very year.
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Nirvana for Nerds – Con 101
[Caffeine Note: Friend of the Brothers Omega Budrickton is a scholar, gentleman, and frequenter of conventions. He wanted a venue to share his thoughts and but of course we obliged. Hug him and give him a mug of your freshest mead.]
The young nerd’s life is often an unforgiving enterprise. Their trading-card-trading, Pokémon-playing, perpetually chunky and uncoordinated elementary years are just the beginning of a number of roads, many of which run off the edge of a cliff, socially speaking.
These rocky starts for my brethren are usually followed up with a high school life of true class; basement-dwelling, Han-shot-first, ‘virgin-forever’ years function as a training ground for learning how to work an innate and exuberant nerdiness into daily life, and possibly, actually interact with ordinary people!
There’s hope in these years; nerds either abandon their ways in pursuit of socializing, underage drinking, and the holy grail: losing your virginity before age 18. Or, they go full throttle, and become what they were always destined to be at the place where all nerds unite:
The Con.
