August 22, 2008

WotLK beta changes: mounts get the OK in Booty Bay

Here's a short report for you regarding the Wrath of the Lich King beta. Word has come from the Livejournal community for the game that you can now ride mounts in Booty Bay.

As we said, it 's nothing special in itself, but combined with other bits of information, it paints a pretty interesting picture.

For one thing, given that people can now ride mounts at level 30, and that Booty Bay is essentially a mid 30- early 40 zone, it makes levelling just a tad bit faster, since you don't have to run around the entirety of Stranglethorn Vale anymore.

Furthermore, this bit of news sort of signals a change that may grow to be important for the basic infrastructure of WoW. Specifically, we're talking about what constitutes indoors and outdoors in the game and, thus, what areas you can use fast transport in. We're hoping the system caters more to hub towns being mountable areas, but that's just our personal preference.

What do you think? Do Mounts in other hub cities sound good to you?

Mounts to be available at Level 30 (via 2.4.3 patch notes)

Source: wow.qj.net

Eve of the Leipzig Games Convention: setting up the booths
Leipzig is looking pretty spiffy this year, and I'm really looking forward to it, considering how much of a downer E3 turned out to be. Anyway, the good folks at 1UP have posted a new bunch of photos from the site of the Leipzig event as the booths are being set up for the big shebang tomorrow.

My personal favorite are the promotional figures for Lego Batman made up entirely of Lego blocks. Several major booths worth of noting is the not-little-but-big LittleBigPlanet booth, Blizzard's World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Tomb Raider: Underworld, and Mirror's Edge. You can see who else is coming to the show by clicking on the pics below.

For more pics from the site, follow the source link below. As expected, there's no sign of Nintendo, who has decided to go on a roadshow rather than join the rest of the group.