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Nioh: Complete Edition / 仁王 Complete Edition is Now Available on Steam!

Ready to die? Experience the newest brutal action game from Team NINJA and Koei Tecmo Games. In the age of samurai, a lone traveler lands on the shores of Japan. He must fight his way through the vicious warriors and supernatural Yokai that infest the land in order to find that which he seeks.

Alongside the announcement of a new World of Warcraft expansion at Blizzcon today, Blizzard Entertainment revealed that it will be launching its own classic World of Warcraft server at some point in the future.

A ‘vanilla’ version of World of Warcraft is something that longtime players of the game have been requesting for years. A classic server would offer those players a way to experience the game as it was in 2004, before expansions and updates permanently altered both the landscape and content of the game itself.

There have been numerous fan attempts to create such a server in the past, many of which have been met with threats of legal action from Blizzard since such running such a project requires, among other things, unauthorized use of Blizzard’s IP and reverse-engineered source code.

One of the more infamous attempts at doing so was the private vanilla server Nostalrius, which shut down in 2016 after Blizzard threatened to take them to court over copyright infringement. At the time, Nostalrius representatives said that over 150,000 actively played on the unofficial classic server.

The latest effort to do so was the fan-project Elysium (which was born out of that shuttered Nostalrius fan server), but that project itself shut down in mid-October following its own internal management complications.

Other online games like RuneScape have already taken to maintaining an official classic server for nostalgic fans. In that case, RuneScape developer Jagex says that maintaining both classic and modern versions of the game is something that helps it meet the desires of its community.

Blizzard has not announced when the server will go live, saying only that it is currently in development.

Here’s a fun challenge: How do you convey unique character traits and quirks in a game primarily played from a first-person perspective?

That’s exactly what Blizzard had to figure out while designing its character-packed multiplayer shooter Overwatch. At GDC 2017’s Animation Bootcamp, Blizzard’s own Matthew Boehm took the stage to explain how the Overwatch team ulled it off — and what other devs can learn from the experience.

It was a fun talk that dug into the artistic and technical challenges of expressing personality in first-person animation while staying true to the designer’s intent for gameplay. How would a gunslinger like Overwatch‘s McCree reload a revolver, for example — and how can you do it in 45 frames?

Boehm’s talk was interesting to developers of all stripes, and if you missed it the first time around you can now watch entirely for free over on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its new YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC Next already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

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