The Location

The Stockholm press event was held in the Royal Armoury of Stockholm Castle. I got there almost an hour before the time stated in the invitation, but wanted to make sure I wasn’t late and I wanted to get a chance to meet some of the others invited before going on with the show.

Once the clock struck 4pm, the VU Games event manager herded us together and directed us towards the first room, after we’ve all received a goody bag which contained the press kit, a sweatshirt with the WoW logo on it and a Vivendi product catalogue.

The room was filled with what looked like a small banquet containing a round table filled with snacks and wine. It appeared first to be absolutely unrelated to the press event, and more than one of us looked around, wondering if we had entered the wrong room. We hadn’t. All the wine and food was meant for us! So we dug in. Swedes don’t say nay to food and booze. Especially when it’s free. I didn’t have any alcohol myself, as I believed it was all a ploy made by VUG/Blizzard to drunken us and then skip the entire showing ;)

Free Alchohol... I love Blizzard.

After an hour of mingling with the other media people; there were folks from several Swedish/Nordic sites, magazines and even a newspaper or two, and having devoured the snack and booze filled tables, we were taken to the show room.

This is where the choice for the Royal Armoury really played out. The entire way to the show room at the end of the hall had medieval armours and weapons, all in glass monitors. It really set the mood for the show, with the dark, slightly red lit cavern being our final destination.

The room had a handful of computers set up behind the scene and audience area, with a huge projector screen covering the scene wall.

The Show

After a short introduction by the Swedish PR contact Tom Lindgren, where he introduced the following people:

Chris Sigaty, Senior Producer
George Wang, Blizzard PR
Julia Gastaldi, VUG European PR

Kheldon (left) and Chris (right)	Kheldon (left) and George (right)

And soon thereafter the show got started. Chris spent the first 20 or so minutes going through the basics of the game, putting the emphasis on the games ease of use philosophy. Quickly he went through a few low, mid and high level characters to show off character creation, mounts and professions, as well as some quick overview of the different areas and how the instances work. He went through the basics of the quest system and the combat system, explaining how they work in general.

That part of the show was directed mainly for the mainstream media, and I was just sighing and waiting for them to get to the good part, the Q&A session.
The Q&A started up right after the demonstrations and everybody had their questions. The answers from those are listed below in short:

• You can stay in instances as long as you want, there is no time limit. You can also log out of instances and when you log back in you’ll be in the same instance. Monsters also don’t respawn in instances.
  
• You can’t invite friends/group members into the instance unless they were with you when you entered the instance for the first time.
  
• The monthly fee has not been determined but local payment methods and currencies are being discussed.
  
• The game will be played on the same version; patches should be put up at the same time or within 24 hours of each other.
  
• You’ll have 10 characters per account which you can set out over the available servers as you wish. But, you can only have one faction on each server.
  85% of the world will be PvP on the PvP servers. Battlefields will be put into the next push, at the same time as the European beta starts (which will have the same features as the US closed beta).
  
• There are PvP titles to gain from killing opposite faction members. You gain points which gets you access to titles and equipment. Your points gathered goes to the overall faction points gathered by your faction. And you can also get negative points by killing enemies of considerably lower level than yourself, which then affects the total faction score and gives you bad titles, eventually making you KOS everywhere, even among your own faction.
  
• Features to be added after release are Hero status, which will be added as soon as possible, for free. Housing will be part of an expansion most likely though they haven’t outlined any expansions quite yet. Their answers on Life Quests were vague except that it won’t make it to launch but should be worked out soon thereafter as it’s considered to be a content that starts up at mid levels.
  
• As far as Chris knew, there would be no family discounts for purchasing the game/fees, the collectors edition would have two versions of the game though, one CD and the other DVD, which one of them having an introduction trial on it.

The demonstration and the Q&A ended there. And people were left to play the game on the computers while Chris went into another room to do interviews.

Eventually it was my turn, along with people some a couple of other media reps, and the transcript of that, I’ll try to being you as soon as possible. I have to decipher the ramblings of my tape recorder. Enjoy these peaces and the pictures for now.

A wicked awesome Podium	Chris pretending to be God.	Some Orcs came to the event, but were quickly kicked out because of their smell.

written by: Kheldon