Friday August 21st

Housekeeping again swings by early as a wakeup call which sets us all into motion. It’s way too early though and the doors don’t open until 10 or something, maybe 9. So instead of waiting in the mass of humanity, we casually chill out in our hotel room watching the throngs of people move towards the convention center. I’m up in the room browsing through Reader hoping to catch wind of any new news that may slip out since the doors opened, but amazingly, there wasn’t any. Unlike years past where once the doors are flung open people’s vision is set upon the new area of greatness, they very carefully hid what was to be unveiled. The program as well wasn’t being handed out until after the opening ceremony. It was incredible that after 4 years they got it right!

So in this downtime, I took up the guy’s offer from last night and we headed towards The Guild’s booth. No one was around and the line was very brief. They had DVDs and posters on sale for the cast to sign and everyone got their picture with Felicia Day at the end of the line. Once that wrapped up the ceremony was starting and we found some seats in hall C, which was vacant, and watched the show.

Opening ceremony sort of dragged on with a recap of last year’s show and just a general thanks-for-coming-and-being-one-of-our-greatest-fans-of-all-time kind of thing. The meat of the matter was showing off the monk for the first time, which reminded me heavily of the assassin from Diablo 2 sans traps, and confirming the leaked Cataclysm rumors. I can’t say the monk is a particularly attractive class for me to play, maybe I am pigeonholed now as a sort of magic user, but in general playing Diablo seems to stress safety in range and powering up the greatest AoE spell. The Cataclysm stuff seems much more interesting than I imagined it would be. I’m not one to reroll so I don’t care too much about goblins and worgen, but the system changes like flying in Azeroth, talent revamps, Path of Titans, Deadmines, and archaeology sound neat. After the ceremony the Cataclysm area was opened and the Diablo 3 build added in monks as playable classes. Very sneaky. We quickly went off to a booth where you can have custom pictures taken with a WoW themed backdrop. I got a picture with Varian Wrynn that I haven’t uploaded yet. I’ll have to scan it or something.

I’m going to split up my separate impressions of Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 into different posts. I broke away to the community tournament area where they had a ton of Alienware laptops setup to play Starcraft 2, DotA, or Warsong Gulch. Why you’d play the last 2 is beyond me. Those people are completely retarded, sorry. You can play that crap when you go home. The laptops would switch to whatever was needed so it was somewhat dynamic and VERY ANNOYING when people would want to play non-Starcraft 2 stuff which necessitated the switching. Again, it’s beyond me that you would go to Blizzcon to do stuff that you can do already. Anyway, I played a few games and like I said I’ll talk about it in other posts, but my overall impression is that Starcraft 2 is very very very good.

After this we hit up some of the booths and wandered around. In the bag this year was a few items of note that would give some incentive to hit up particular merchant booths. One was a fishing quest that started at the Brady Games booth. One was a key at the Steel Series booth that could unlock and open a chest. Another was a raffle thing from Razer to play shuffleboard. Someone was yelling around us to get a temporary tattoo to enter into an HDTV drawing, so we ran over there and I got the Starcraft 2 logo on my arm. We were supposed to go back and get caricatures but we forgot!

So the day is drawing on and it’s dinner time. Last year on the first day we had arranged for all our guildies attending that we’d eat dinner together, but it was a fiasco and this time didn’t plan on anything like that. Certainly if other people wanted to do something like that, they could have, and a lot of people were sad when they asked if we were going to do anything like that and I said no. There are places to eat inside of Blizzcon and all day the smell of pizza wafted by my nose. Driving in I saw a California Pizza Kitchen and decided to head there for dinner. It was totally great I must say. They split our check with no problem and the pizza was totally delicious.

We get back and the costume contest had already started and I got separated from everyone. So I checked out the very end. I got in another few rounds of Starcraft 2 to finish up the night. I found out Ashley had managed to win a GeForce 275 video card by playing at the Cataclysm area and looting a legendary item which is totally crazy. A $250 video card! I’m not jealous or anything.

Around this time our friend from way up north was coming in from after work and we met up and he was feeling hungry. I had already eaten but he insisted on going to Morton’s. We always walk by and never go because it’s very pricey and I heard there’s a dress code. However we went in and it was filled with a lot of Blizzcon goers wearing whatever and we figured you probably aren’t going to turn down paying customers. I didn’t want him to eat alone so I tagged along.

Afterwards we headed back to the Hilton bar to meet up with a group of people. They said they got a room so we asked which one and the reply was 212. We’re like, ok… So we go to the second floor and look around and find nothing. I had to go to the bathroom so I headed up to the 12th floor while my friend is confused and asks the front desk if there’s a 212 to which they reply “Yeah we have lots of 212s.” I had to ask again and they said “Oh yeah 7th floor.” Very helpful info! My roommates were dead tired and crashed for the night but I had to do some meet and greets so I headed out and stayed for a bit and eventually called it a night.