Hello and welcome to the 15^th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this week’s column, we’re going to talk about something that was talked about during the Dragon Con panel earlier this month. Quite a few extra details got mentioned that are worth note: the removal of Multistrike, Demon Hunters starting at 98, professions moving away from the cooldown-gated Warlords of Draenor model, etc. The part we’ll be focusing on however is something the developers teased during the panel: Adventure Mode. Sadly no additional details were given about what the developers meant by Adventure Mode – it was simply mentioned as something to talk about at BlizzCon. That leaves us with a couple months to ponder about what Adventure Mode means for us.

In 1895, one of the very first cinematic shorts was being shown to a small audience. Train Pulling into a Station was the name of the short movie (at least the translated version), and the nature of the technology at the time struck fear into the audience. It's fabled that some individuals had run to the back of the theater to avoid the "oncoming" train. Such is an example in history where technology surpassed what people accepted as the truth; it was given that people cannot view an oncoming train inside of a theater house, and yet with the developing nature of cinematic theory the world was proven wrong. Henceforth, a new form of entertainment was introduced to the world and we were infants to understanding its reach.

This summer's Virtual Reality Los Angeles (VRLA for short) was a foray into a similar technological experience. The con was small, but the implications were far from what the show floor could virtually hold. Every booth was showing off some different form of entertainment, whether it was a 360-degree video, an Oculus-driven video game, an interactive hand-gesture demonstration, or even a full solipsistic immersion into self-propelled flight. Music videos, 3D-animation flourishes, interesting narrative panels, and other similar expos were about the floor. One such booth that had a lot of attraction was Reload Studios featuring their game World War Toons.

The Scrying Pool is a Guild Wars 2 column where I simply ask what if? Nothing is off the table as I dive into possible features and future content, looking at what currently exists in Guild Wars 2 before I answer my own what if question with how I think the feature and content could be implemented.

Next weekend is PAX Prime. ArenaNet has announced they will be on the show floor during the weekend as well as host a panel on Saturday morning focused on challenging group content and the Future of GW2. In the last couple of weeks I have talked about the road to the panel as well as what the Future of GW2 portion could be, so this week I’ll dive into the challenging group content side.

Hello and welcome to the 13th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. Last time we threw out a few predictions for what the new expansion would bring. We were right about the Burning Legion focus, but that one was a freebie given the end of Warlords of Draenor’s story. I was more surprised that my wishlist comments for a melee Hunter spec and a demon form tank ended up being true, though not quite in the way I’d envisioned. There’s plenty of features we didn’t call though, so we’ve got lots to talk about. For this week’s column, rather than doing a synopsis of Legion’s feature list (Wowhead’s already done that work for me), let’s start focusing on specific major features. In particular, this week we’ll be talking about Artifact weapons.

The Scrying Pool is a Guild Wars 2 column where I simply ask what if? Nothing is off the table as I dive into possible features and future content, looking at what currently exists in Guild Wars 2 before I answer my own what if question with how I think the feature and content could be implemented.

In last week’s Scrying Pool I talked about the road to Heart of Thorns. In the column, I discussed how I thought that ArenaNet would have a panel at PAX Prime that would announce details of what Challenging Group Content will be as well as a release date for the expansion. Since then, the panel schedule for PAX Prime has been released and includes the following panel for the Saturday morning of PAX:

The Scrying Pool is a Guild Wars 2 column where I simply ask what if? Nothing is off the table as I dive into possible features and future content, looking at what currently exists in Guild Wars 2 before I answer my own what if question with how I think the feature and content could be implemented.

This week I’m going to talk about Heart of Thorn’s launch, specifically the time leading up to it. I feel like we are entering the polish phase. We have seen that the World vs World Desert Borderlands map and the PvP Stronghold map are basically done with just some minor touches needed to make them truly great. This weekend we are getting our hands on the full core Revenant and the first four revealed Elite Specializations. I think that each of these are in their final iteration, with only minor changes coming based on player feedback.

Hello and welcome to the 12th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this week’s column, we’re going to do some speculating. On Thursday, August 6^th at gamescom, Blizzard will unveil the newest expansion for WoW. If you’re like me and there’s 15+ hours of flight between you and gamescom, they’ll be livestreaming it on their dedicated gamescom page. Now the question is: where will this new expansion take us and what changes will it bring to the game? Quick spoiler alert for those who haven’t fought Archimonde at the end of Hellfire Citadel and seen the cinematic afterwards – we’ll be talking about that right after the jump.

The Scrying Pool is a Guild Wars 2 column where I simply ask what if? Nothing is off the table as I dive into possible features and future content, looking at what currently exists in Guild Wars 2 before I answer my own what if question with how I think the feature and content could be implemented.

Normally that intro holds true, but with the Elementalist’s elite speculation reveal I will be flipping the tables. Instead of looking forward, the Scrying Pool will be looking back as we pick the Specialization series back up. The specialization series focuses on my impressions of each of the Elite Specializations after they get revealed while throwing in some of my previous articles and speculation for flavor.

The Scrying Pool is a Guild Wars 2 column where I simply ask what if? Nothing is off the table as I dive into possible features and future content, looking at what currently exists in Guild Wars 2 before I answer my own what if question with how I think the feature and content could be implemented.

Food in any MMO has an odd place, typically requiring time and resources to level up a cooking profession. The road of this progression is always filled with the leftover remains of lower level foods that remain unused in favor of higher stated nourishment. Guild Wars 2 also falls into this trap, but what could be done to fix the warehouses full of unwanted, non-perishable foods?

Hello and welcome to the 11th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this week’s column, I’m going to be taking another look at one of patch 6.2’s features, Timewalker Dungeons. I finally had the chance to try my hand at a few of them with this past weekend’s Wrath of the Lich King Timewalker bonus event, so I got to have that blast of nostalgia while getting a little gear for one of my tank alts. I’ll also be taking a look at how the other game I’ve been playing lately, Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, has a similar system and talk about the benefits and drawbacks of both.