WWI - Arrival & Opening Ceremony
The World Wide Invitational began at 9am on the Saturday, and I (rather naively) turned up at 8:30. The queue was rather… infinite. I must’ve walked for about 10 minutes before reaching the end. Waiting in line, I saw all sorts pass me by. People of all shapes and sizes, most wearing some piece of Blizzard clothing. Naturally, most of the conversation I could understand revolved around WoW. However, it quickly moved once the gates opened, and I was soon inside the building (after a slight delay getting my pass, due to an iffy printout of my email.). I made my way to main stage, and got a reasonable seat.
Details of the opening ceremony and the surprise announcement after the cut.
I then proceeded to wait. And then wait some more. The opening ceremony finally started at about 11:45, after over two hours of sitting about doing nowt (I kept myself entertained reading This Gaming Life). The two MCs made their way on stage, and before they’d even opened their mouths I couldn’t stand them; their false enthusiasm was just a little too grating. “Give it up for the Vice President of Global Finance”. Yeah, right. People did, of course. And the Vice Presidents of Public Relations/Human Resources too. I can understand Rob Pardo, Tom Chilton, Samwsie et al getting applause, but these suits? Not so much.
Once all the members of Blizzard present had been introduced, the various ‘pro-gamers’ were marched on stage. This really is something I don’t quite buy into. I like the idea in theory, just not so much in practice. But regardless, they too got riotous applause. By this point, however, I was starting to question my 2 or so hours spent sat around. But then, Mike Morhaime appeared on stage, and present a ‘Best Of’ clip of the WWI held in Seoul, North Korea in 2007. After the video, Mike gave a run down of the weekends events, before explaining that “there’s still one more thing that we need to do”. A man appeared on stage carrying a guitar, and began to play the haunting Tristram theme from Diablo. This didn’t come as a surprise to anyone (in fact, someone commented as such during the closing ceremony), but that didn’t make it any less impressive. The trailer that followed had everyone in awe until Diablo himself appeared, at which point the crowd went wild. The atmosphere in the room at this point was nothing short of electric, and it really was something to behold.
Details of the gameplay demo that followed this announcement can be found here.
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