BlizzCon 2011 - Kung Fu Panda: The Game?!

So it seems like the much anticipated children's movie is coming to life in a video game much like Hello Kitty Online has spawned from the depths of Hell onto the internet and somehow became a fully playable world in the video game sense. Yesterday afternoon Blizzard had announced that they would be adding the much anticipated (?) Pandarian race to World of Warcraft in an upcoming expansion. And in my my fits of laughter and tears (yes I really was laughing that hard), I found out they really were serious!

In my previous write up about BlizzCon I had spoke of how I thought Blizzard would step forth into the world with some news of "great things", but really- walking, talking Pandas? Is that what you spend your multi-million dollar budget on? How hard was it to get an old model of a character and put a panda skin overlay on top of it? Oh yeah and put a voice .mp3 file in there too! Great job concept team - that must have taken you about 30 minutes to come up with and another hour to put the skin on top with how hard it is to figure out what colors BLACK and WHITE are in your code base.

I'm glad you guys have a bunch of nerf guns and XBox 360's on Campus because you all must have spent a great deal of time celebrating your new expansion and successful creation of a new player race by playing Forza 4 and doing some Multi-Player in Halo afterwards. I call this one a great success for you and the team - as well as the droves of your targeted market 9 -15. Well done, lets give you all a pat on the back once again, just like we did with Cataclysm!

And now with the annual subscription model World of Warcraft is surely looking to try and "fatten up" its figures in how many active subscriptions they have when they sucker people into they game and then when the players decide the game is crap - they still get to record those numbers for a whole year (i.e. the annual marketing report). This is undoubtedly a way to make the numbers of players look and seem like there are way more in game then there actually are. I mean - 12 million subscribers looks really darn nice when you see it on a sticker when you buy a game, it really lures you in and makes you think that there are tons of knowledgeable people playing the game right?

WRONG!

Most of these people are in fact dumb as nails or are the most obnoxious elitist trolls in any game around. And when you tell me that there are youngin's in my guild and in voice chat with me (around 10 or so) and you are in fact their PARENT and are being an obnoxious elitist tard, that some how does not instill the confidence I have in the marketing potential of said game - or even its community.

So I will let Blizzard have their Kung Fu Panda Expansion. I just hope next year that they don't come out with a Finding Nemo one.