In StarCraft II, we’re taking a lot of the same ideas from our previous games and pushing these gameplay ideas but really expanding on them and making them as deep as we possibly can. Between our story mode spaces, we can see a lot more of the story than we could in any of our previous games. StarCraft II has more story, deeper characters, more choices, and unique missions. Each mission has its own meta-game that forces you to stretch your abilities as a commander.

Mining Your Own Business:

This is a mission where Tosh calls up Raynor and he says, “I have a contract but it’s really hard to do and there’s Zerg. I need your help.” Each game is unique. The goal is to harvest 5,000 minerals. You are faced with decision of building SCVs, defending, and leaving to high-ground. You have to play chicken in the environment.

There are two distinct types of Redstone cliffs: man-made and natural. This is not something that the graphics artists made for us. The new water tools are no longer locked to the cliff level. This is what we did for the “Mining Your Own Business” mission. You can just open up a map and start spraying random stuff. New lighting editor sets apart the look. You can create custom light, it’s not determined by the artists. You can create any crazy custom worlds you want.

Evacuation of Agria:

There is a character named Dr. Hanson and she is calling Raynor for help. You choose how to win. You could build up a squad to defend against the Zerg. We show you map of where truck is going to go; you can plan tactics before you go on mission.

Alpha texture blending is in the editor. In old games everything, is all tile based. But with what we have now, you can blend textures together and no two parts of the map will look the same. The way you want to paint the map and how it will look is the way you want. You can create roads in the editor. It’s not an art asset: you can do it on the fly. You can change how dense or sparse grass can be.

Mods

StarCraft II has a more powerful editor than we’ve ever seen before. DoTA and Tower Defesne, for example, were made by our fans and they are played by hundreds of thousands of players. Studios are trying to figure out how to take advantage of this game type. All kinds of games are based on genres created by our fans.

Hard-working folks can receive money from players. The quality of the games we will be playing in the upcoming years will be insane. Mod-makers have gotten jobs all around the industry from our editors.

Here’s a few examples created by our devs without too much time:

Uberlisk: a custom unit that has spine crawlers on his back and can destroy ground itself. It creates a huge explosion.

FPS game: Nova is running around and you can control a keyboard. You can go inside a building, do whatever. You can go underground in SC2.

Lost Viking Game: A Viking plays a Gradius/Demonstar style game.

There is not a lot of limits to what players will be able to do with this engine. Who can say what will happen when Battle.net 2.0 and the editor gets into the hands of you, the users.

Q&A

Q: Any plans for group collaboration on maps?

A: Yes, there are plans to give modders and artists products and share it with other people. You can import triggers so a person can work on a different part of a map.

Q: Any plans to stop map stealing?

A: We haven’t locked down on what our exact plans are. But we are going to make it very difficult, if not impossible, for it to steal from you, the mod maker.

Q: To what extent can the UI be customized?

A: We asked for lots of extra things. We’ve tried to give you as many UI customization tools as you can. One of the things we’ve added is an item system, which we don’t need, but it’s useful for modders so we’ve added it anyway.

Q: How will hero system be more flexible?

A: You can do same things as in WarCraft III? The data editor is extremely powerful.

Q: Will it be possible to adjust armor?

A: Yes, we’ve made it possible to be able to reproduce armor systems of past games.

Q: Has StarCraft 2 has been pushed back because of battle.net?

A: Well, it wasn’t just battle.net. We knew we wanted to work on the game longer. As developers we want you guys to play this game ASAP, but we saw a bunch of things in the campaign that we wanted to make better. So really, the delay started with battle.net, but we saw lots of things we could do better to make this game meet your expectations. The delay has been a blessing for us.

Q: Will there be a way to save your characters?

A: We do have support for what we’re calling banks. Basically you can store info on your local system, any kind of info you want to store.

Q: Any possibility to record shoutcasting in replays?

A: Not in shipped version of the game, but it’s a great idea for e-sports. There’s alot of technical details to be discussing and we might implement it in patches.

Q: Can you load multiple maps at once?

A: We supported it in WarCraft III as “campaigns” and we are looking to support it for StarCraft II. Don’t know if it will be in ship.

Q: Will you be contacting your map makers because you track their quality?

A: Yes. Battle.net will show us who made the maps and who authored it. We’ll have access to the map-maker’s account. And yes, we’ve been doing this for years.

Q: Will we see this third-person perspective in any of the actual single player missions? Will editor be in beta?

A: I don’t know if we will include the third person thing in the game. It requires lots of teaching. We are trying to get people used to RTS gameplay in the single player, let alone third-person gameplay. We are planning to ship the beta in the editor. It probably won’t be in day one, but it will be there.

Q: Is there going to be any content filtering for uploading maps? Or is it wide open for everything?

A: Not sure yet, but our plan is to have a rating system where players flag the map and our staff comes by to confirm and the person will be warned/banned.

Q: Can you play a map as a beta or demo map?

A: We are still discussing this.

- Discuss at StarCraft: Legacy
- Discuss at StarCraft.org

Welcome to the Lore Panel. This year we want to try something different. We have our scripts ready, and cast the game. So we figured we’d bring the cast of StarCraft 2 out to BlizzCon so you guys can see who they are and hear what they brought to the role. We’ll have a Q&A at the end.

The first character we want to bring out, the one honest man in the universe, the hard-hitting, hard-living, old-school Jim Raynor, Robert Clotworthy:

For our next character, we’d like to introduce, this is a wild one, the gentleman who played this character is no longer with us, but we have found another character who has the same gravitas, power, Zeratul, Fred Tatashur:

Guys for the third character, one of my personal favorites, a new character who has quickly taken over and just rocks, and the sound of his voice just lights us up. You’ll recognize this character from the intro of the game, Tychus Findlay, Mr. Neil Kaplan.

For the fourth person we’re introducing, this person is not actually playing a character, but this lady has become one of my favorite people on Earth, one of the best voice casters in Hollywood, Andrea Romano:

Our next character is a new character that we’ve woven into our existing lore, Gabriel Tosh, Mr. Dave Finnoy:

This is another old school character, you kind of love to hate, Arcturus Mengsk, Mr. James Harper:

And our last character, you might notice someone is conspicuously missing from the panel, Kerrigan, we’ve hooked up with an actress which is so amazing and brought out nuances we could only hope for, you might recognize her from Battlestar Galactica, Ms. Trisha Halper.

Metzen: What’s it been like to play Jim Raynor?
Clotworthy: I am thrilled to see so many people here? As a voice over person we usually stay in the background so I am just thrilled to be back. I am telling you, this game rocks.

Metzen: it’s funny, though by anecdote, in the midst of races clashing for supremacy, you’ve got this one honest man. THe theme is that one man can make a difference amidst this clash of titans. There was just this thing about Robert’s voice – he just owned it and we’re so happy to have him back. Andrea, let me ask you. You kind of had a chance to direct/meet Raynor how do you feel about his role?

Andrea: You can never anticipate what voice is going to come out of an actor. You can look at how he looks and assume how he is going to sound like, but you can never predict what he will sound like. Me and Robert worked together many times. One of the joys of voice acting is to hear new things come out of voice actors that you’ve never seen before.

Clotworthy: he is the reluctant hero. he is a great role model, lots of us wish we were him. there is great responsiblity in playing this role. And Andrea, though you may have six emmys, I have a n00b.

Metzen: We were in the need of a new Zeratul. Jack Ritschel was a really cool guy who passed away, played Duke and Zeratul. We found Fred, the man of a thousand voices. And Fred also does Rory Swann, just a terrific character. So Fred what was your opinion of doing Zeratul?

Fred: He captured the spirit of this 1000 year old knight Templar. So I was trying to voice print of what he brought, without giving in too much.

Metzen: One of the funniest things with Fred, was we were talking about lyp-syncing with Zeratul where he was like “what the hell are you talking about”. So we talked alot about Tychus, and how he was meant to be. Once that voice came out of your body, as in how are you making that sound, we found the perfect foil for Raynor.

Neil: I guess I should say the line people are most familiar with “Hell, it’s about damn time”. This is the coolest character I have ever played, plain and simple. I’ve played characters made famous by other voice actors, and it was lots of fun, but this was my chance to do my own thing. The greatest thing about being Tychus is that you can drink up scotch till 5 in the morning and not worry about how you sound. We actually did one session where we had really bad food poisoning. I spent half an hour in my car trying to get in, but the voice worked perfectly!

Metzen: Dave i was going to ask you about Tosh, sometimes the artists will just conjure a character and the visual design is so engaging that we writers have to go with that. I can’t tell you, but there is really good stuff with Tosh guys. Tosh actually started as a mercenary, we sought out the voice actors and we’ve tried out a number of actors. What was your impression of this guy?

Dave: Tosh fits in with the game so well because he is a product of the environment he fits in. Somewhere deep deep inside, he has something good in him, but he knows if he has to survive than he has to be #1.

Metzen: The thing about Tosh, when we included, he counters a character named Matt Horner, who was out of town & couldn’t be with us. We wanted to have characters that kind of contrasted. In alot of ways the Matt Horner character represents Jim Raynor’s idealism, but Tosh is the “do as thou will” and the product of a very hard universe. As he graduated from his army experience, he is a very nihilistic man. We wove Tosh in such a way that he is tied in to Nova. Nova will make a little cameo in the game (it’s very cool). So Arcturus, what was it like when you were trying to overthrow the government.

Arcturus: It was roough. It was really really rough. How did we come upon this voice anyway? I absolutely do not remember. I haven’t had as much fun doing something in probably 20-30 years. This has been a phenomenal experience. This took 3.5 hours in a couple of days to do this. I don’t remember a whole bunch about the 12 years ago. I remember I had drove down to Irvine, I had an unopened, unplayed SC which was for windows. IMDB.com can be wrong much of the time, and IMDB has me as Zeratul. So all these years I’ve been thinking “I did Zeratul”. So an agency is looking for a character named Zeratul. They’re not even calling me to see if I’m available? I thought he was really good? My agent told me to recreate my character of Arcturus Mengsk. I’m really happy to be back doing this again, because it’s so much fun.

Metzen: So Trisha, you’ve been very patient by the way. I have to wonder, do we have any Galactica fans in the room? You know, it’s funny, the character of Kerrigan is so principal, she is the heart of all that is StarCraft. So how was it, stepping into this role? What do you make of this character?

Trisha: First off, I have to say it’s intimidating to come in to a game and do a job you don’t have a histroy of. I’m going to admit that I’m a video game virgin. Frogger was the last game I’ve ever played. Personally I’m not very technologically savvy. But it was kind of intimidating and not knowing the backstory and history and everything. It’s an honor to be up here with you guys. WHile I do go up to do my thing I don’t have multiple voices. I think the first time I came in all I had to go on was a picture of Kerrigan and the Queen of Blades. For the Queen of Blades, they stem from the same person. You don’t get to work with each other with the other actors. Thank god for these guys to be in the room and tell me what is happening. At the time I didn’t know what Zerg or everything was. It’s fun to try & find the small differences. How do you bring in Sarah Kerrigan into Queen of Blades without changing it? Queen of Blades is just fun to play. I’m a pretty good person but I do think I do a good job of bringing out the evil. It’s very therapeutic. In the first installment I’m pretty light, but cut to next year here and I’ll have alot more to tell you about the character.

Metzen: In wings of liberty, obviously Kerrigan is the Queen of Blades, but there are certain sequences where we flash back to SC1. I think it was Mr. Harper’s clip where you see how Kerrigan gets left behind. It’s one of Raynor’s great nightmares. Andrea, what have your impressions been of the arc of this thing? What has your experience been coralling all of these characters?

Andrea: I came into this game about a year ago. I had to learn alot about the history of what happened in the past and where we were going in the future. I asked Chris if he knew where the arc was going to end when he started on it. It’s important to know what we need to foreshadow. I’m lucky I have Chris sitting next to me, he is very articulate, he understands what he needs very well and I can communicate that to the actors in specific acting terms. I like to record in what’s called ensemble records. I like to rehearse them together. It gives us the opportunity to act, and react which is very important. It’s key we remember what the character before did, so that we can have continuity. We have a very long production period. We have the chance to record it once, play it back, and go “you know what, we can improve that”. We can have that make more sense by playing it back for the actor. There’s alot of tweaks we can do, and it’s a luxury to be able to go back & fix things afterwards. Early in my career, i started doing video games but I stopped because they ended up being slugfests. But these games created by Blizzard are so stimulating it is like directing a movie. They are stunning! We brought our A-game. What we have here is a really interesting beginnign. We have years to go before we’re done. I hope you guys enjoy playing it, watching it, as we do making it. The recording sessions are intense and extremely fun.

Q&A:
For Andrea, you guys have an amazing cast for SC2. Quick question is are you also doing stuff for D3? And for people who want to get into voice acting, what do you reccomend? What do you look for in these characters?

The key #1 most important thing to do is take acting classes if you’re not an instinctual actor from birth. If you only have one voice you should just know how to do it better than anyone else. To actually get employed you should send large expensive gifts to my office (kidding). If you persevere and follow your dream there is room for you in this industry.

Do you have your own version of the character?

Tychus: I kind of put myself in that place. Every little piece of information such as posters & pictures helps.
Trish: I have to visualize the character more so than in front of the camera. It’s easier to become the character when you’re acting as the character. When you’re sitting in front of a mic you can’t do much or make any kind of sound.

At the end of Brood War, during the Dark Origins mission. Will that have any impact on Wings of Liberty?

It heralds everything. We see Zeratul creeping around, trying to get to the bottom of this matter. If the heart of StarCraft 2 is the Jim Raynor/Kerrigan story, then the hybrids mythology is the spine.

Is the core cast signed for all three chapters?

We’ll try to make sure that continuity is contained.

Metzen: I’m the battlecruiser commander, the terran marine, the terran ghost. In WoW, I am Thrall, Logash. All sorts of stuff i.e. Ragnaros. I hesistate to use the word actor.

Do voice actors do any kind of visualisation? And does the magistrate still exist? Or will he be pushed aside?

As an actor, you are always talking to someone. We use substitution, or at least I do. I use somebody from my real life to talk to so that my acting is honest & real instead of talking to an imaginary character. As far as the Magistrate goes, he is the contrivant to help tell the story, he is not intended to be a character, but it does feel that way. It does pose an interesting question. Is the character still out there? Perhaps.

- Discuss at StarCraft: Legacy
- Discuss at StarCraft.org

Battle.net hasn’t been talked about lately because World of Warcraft is our most popular game. The goal is to improve the service so it will be a premier matchmaking service. Launched in 1996 for Diablo, it was updated in 2003. There have been more players on it in total than World of Warcraft. The prospect of StarCraft II and Diablo III will take this further. As always everything in this panel may or may not change.

In Warcraft III, automated matchmaking was introduced. This made it easy to play with friends and we felt this was really important to the game. Warcraft III ended up being extremely popular because of, in part, the effective matchmaking system and ladder. Randomly-selected teams were put in and are by far the most popular way to play the game. If you’re going to lose, it might as be with teammate you can blame. The icon system, a “poor man’s” version of an achievement system, was introduced. It’s your 2D avatar on the service. There is a large modification and custom map making community (e.g. Defense of the Ancients [DotA]) that we learned alot from.

There were some features of the latest Battle.net that Blizzard didn’t like, such as: feeling the chat system was too disorganized, gameplay being disconnected from single player, as well as new players being thrown into the thick of ladder and custom map play (read: pwned). They felt that the ladder system only served best players. In community of ten thousand players, the amount of people that cared about ladder only was one hundred. It wasn’t as successful as it could have been.

How games were displayed and supported was a problem. For example, if you wanted to play something besides DotA or Footmen Frenzy, too bad.

Always-Connected Experience

The goal for StarCraft II’s Battle.net is to provide much closer integration than in previous games. It can do a better job. They want to make sure you’re connected to news, content, news, and friends. Blizzard gamers need to know what’s going on in the community. Blizzard has learned from WoW and the support of the WoW community.

Battle.net accounts will be updated and connected to your emails. For example, in Diablo II, you only got to keep characters for three months. This won’t happen again.

In the login screen you enter your Battle.net account from the very beginning. It’s the first screen you see, with access to single player, multiplayer, widgets, and news. This will happen before you play your first game, so that you’re connected to a larger community. You’ll be able to play as a guest in offline mode if you select Single Player.

Challenges Are Fun

Single Player maps will attempt to teach more advanced multiplayer mechanics (current gaming example: Guild Wars attempted this through the Zaishen Challenges). You will be able to try as many times as you like to improve your time and score as well as compare with your friends.  You’ll be able to access freinds list even when you’re playing single player. compare this to battle.net where you have to log out, log into b.net, etc.

One of the features of the Replay Screen is the ability to rewind. They said it couldnt’ be done but we found a way.

Profile: people will be able to browse you, see matches you’ve played, compare achievements, etc.

Achievements

WoW’s system is great, but they will try to improve SC2’s achievement system further. Achievement awards are the avatars. Your achievements will unlock a variety of avatars that you display. Decals show up on units themselves based on achievements. There will be many things you can unlock and display to your friends. The pool of unlockables will be added to over time.

As soon as you’re logged in we can check for patches, make sure you’re up to date.

Cloud storage

If you play the game from work you can actually play a couple missions of the campaign.  So when you go home you can leave from where you left off without saving and don’t have to bring a flash drive.

Competitive Arena for Everyone

Another feature is improved automated matchmaking. We want to offer play options for everyone to enjoy; we need to make sure its easy for you to find your friends in organized games.

Ladder play doesn’t have to be for hardcore gamers. We can improve upon that. We all have experience playing competitively in our daily lives i.e. basketball league at gym instead of playing against Michael Jordan. You can have a fun experience without being the best.

Leagues & Divisions

You can get put into these leagues: Practice league, Copper league, Bronze league, Silver league, Gold league, Platinum league and Pro league.

For example , you’ll be known as bronze player, etc. You’ll be in a division. We make sure that you can actually win against each person in your division and that it’s realistic. So everyone has a chance to win in your division.  At the end of your division you can go to end of season tournaments and prove who’s going to win the league.

Here are the casual play options: practice league, co-op skirmish, random teams, challenges, custom games. In casual play we slow down game speed, have anti-rush maps and an all-around friendly experience so you don’t have to get 4-pooled rushed on your first game.

Party System

This is something that’s been around most notably in WoW. We didn’t feel any reason why we couldn’t bring over to StarCraft II. You can invite someone to a party & you can see party members, etc. Whoever the party leader is you can select which game you go into. All of you go into the game together. You can play as a persistent party as many games as you want.

Custom Games

You’d see only DOTA games in the game list.If you wanted to play something else you couldn’t play it. All different DOTA games would be consolidated into one line. All games are consolidated into one line. There is a “filter by genre” so you can subdivide & filter even more. For example, the player can select co-op skirmish, and DOTA will go away.

One of the things we added that’s very cool is you can have game lobby be private, invite your friends, and  hit “open to public”. So you don’t have to do the whole trying to sneak your friends in and coordinating when they will join.

B.net account system helps to ensure fair games. Smurfing is over. You can only use one Battle.net account to play StarCraft II.

Connecting The Blizzard Community

Why not celebrate all of our games & bring all our games under one roof? The idea here is that if you’re a StarCraft II player but also have WoW accounts, you’ll still be able to be informed about what’s going on in WoW.

We’ve decided to switch chat over to instant messenger style chat.  It’s easier to chat with one person or multiple people.

People often play with real-life friends. The other thing we’ve noticed is, especially with WoW growth, real-life friends are created from in-game friendships. When new games comes out, you want to play with your group of friends. It’s hard for WoW players, even if you’re in same guild, to coordinate this.

Realms keep your friends apart and you’ve got the concept of trying to keep track of character names, etc. We kind of looked at xbox live. We added each other to our friends list. All my friends are popping online and I couldn’t remember who each person was. Then we looked at myspace: the only challenge they had was to find new friends. They could name themselves something goofy or use their real name. Even if you used the search function you still might not find all of them. In google talk, once I’ve added you I could just assign an alias to you.

So, we’ve decided to introduce the concept of battle.net RealID. In real life we know each other by real names, so why don’t we introduce that to the service itself? If you are friends with someone it doesn’t matter what game or realm they are on in battle.net, you can communicate with all of them.

RealID

Once you have battle.net RealID, you don’t have the pressure of staying on the same character because you’ve already done these achievements.

Imagine you might play StarCraft II for 6 months & play other games. What’s going to happen is you’re going to know which ones are playing D3 & you will have a friends network right at beginning of the game. You don’t have to start it from scratch.

With RealID you have additional functionality in addition to friends. We can be in StarCraft II but you can be talking about something in WoW.

We also have the concept of a broadcast. The way it works is if someone is playing WoW, War3, SC2 you can tell your friends what you might want to play later. We will also be making these changes in WoW to reflect real-life friends.

Real-life friends are mutual. Privacy options & parental controls will be there. Something we are definitely adding to the service. There are lots of knobs & dials. We want you to choose what info you share with friends.

Custom Map Community

Something we haven’t always talked about. Two years after WarCraft III was out, the popularity of games actually shifted to playing custom games. 99% of people played Reign of Chaos when it was released. The modding community eventually shifted this towards custom games.

The StarCraft II editor will be more powerful than WarCraft 3’s. These editors are the tools we use to build the campaign. Everything we can do you should be able to do, plus there is more, i.e. functionality we don’t need, such as items.

We have the concept of map publishing. Once you actually make a map you can publish it up to the service. You can make it so that everyone can get a hold of it. You can download maps without joining a game. When you pull up a list of maps, you can browse all the maps on the service. You can see all maps on battle.net – everything that’s been published.

The big things to discuss in the future i.e. not at launch of StarCraft II.

StarCraft II Marketplace

You can see all the different maps and it is easy to browse. We have the concept of ratings, and  people can comment on maps. You’ll be able to browse,  search for maps & they’ll be rated by stars. There will be free & premium maps. A portion of the revenue will go to map creator.

This is all aimed at making this awesome, awesome, map community. What happens when people have a budget? Take a look at all the sorts of things people can create i.e. Counterstrike & Day of Defeat. Imagine if you could hire a small dev team and create a game using StarCraft II as your engine. This creates a much larger selection of content for players.

We want to see what new genres people can come up with. Tower defense came from WarCraft III; now it’s in other games.

Defense of the Ancients and other maps will be a free map. We totally intend for there to be lots of free content i.e. the iPhone apps store. We are trying to add a layer of super professional content on top of that. We can look at maps that rise to the top & can create matchmaking for these maps.

All this adds greatly to the longevity of the game. Get prepared to start making awesome maps! We want you to have a head-start – it takes a long time to make an awesome game.

Q&A:

Q: Any plans for add-ons for forums, fansites, social networks?

A: Yes we have some aggressive plans for this area after the game launch.

Q: For achievements, what about offline play – for people who can’t connect two weeks? Does that get factored into battle.net?

No. If we allow people to bring offline games into achievements, it allows people to hack the system.

Q: Will you be discouraging cheating by banning IDs? Will it affect other games?

A: In WarCraft III we could ban your account, but accounts were free. Now we can do any of these things. The question is what the person did.

Q: With battle.net, should we expect significant reduction in latency?

A: We are looking at various solutions to decrease latency especially for other countries.

Q: Are you guys doing anything to make people liable for leaving games?

A: It’s really hard for us to enforce something like a custom map like that from a Blizzard point of view. Our solution in WarCraft III was that we had a concept of shared control. If your partner drops you can control all his units. We’re looking for solutions but there are things that will be tough to enforce. People might have a legitimate reason to leave, so it’s really hard for us to be the bad guys to enforce this.

Q: Do you have any plans for realtime spectators & pro-league replays?

A: Yes, we’ll have realtime spectators for ship & pro-league replays on ship.

Q: Matchmaking system – how does that mix in 2v2 if your friend is different rank?

A: We track your ranking as a team.

Q: Will we be experiencing new battle.net changes for legacy games?

A: No, not for now.

Q: You guys have plans for allowing people to incorporate their own models, etc?

A: Definitely. But I’m not sure of the extent of that.

- Discuss at StarCraft: Legacy
- Discuss at StarCraft.org

Welcome to the ORG network’s coverage of BlizzCon 2009! Blizzcon has expanded to 4 halls this year, and it is packed. The opening ceremony is over and the fansite staff are set up to meet the development team. Inside the BlizzCon goodie bag are: a Jim Raynor figure, hand sanitizer, a key to “epic loot” (somehow associated with SteelSeries), Blizzcon map, Blizzcon schedule, a Blizzard Authenticator, a press badge, and a card for Grunty

A leak of a new Diablo III class, the monk, was leaked from the Korean Diablo 3 website:

The monk is on the far right:

Official announcement:

Gameplay:

The next World of WarCraft expansion, Cataclysm, has been announced:

Remember to check out our Flickr photo stream. Also, be sure to follow the StarCraft.org and the StarCraft: Legacy twitter accounts for complete event coverage!

- Discuss at StarCraft: Legacy
- Discuss at StarCraft.org

Our current plans are for Twitter to be our main method of communication during the day, while on the floor of the convention, and then we’ll also be providing round-up article coverage and news updates as more information is shared and available for you all. There will additionally be large amounts of photos uploaded throughout each day, so keep an eye on the photo feed on the right as well.

While we’d like to be able to get it up faster, our Video feed will be updated each night with the appropriate official Blizzard cinematics/gameplay videos, as well as our own personal video coverage from the floor and nightly wrap-up video.

More immediately, there will be a 1st Day Live Q&A with our representatives at the convention, hosted live on this page at 6 PM (Pacific). Make sure and have your questions saved up and we’ll answer them as well as we can. And don’t be afraid to invite your friends, we’ll answer their questions too.

We’re looking forward to today’s events, we hope you are too!

Staff members from all three sites will be working together to produce and distribute the best quality content. BlizzCon coverage from our contributing member sites will be exclusively available on BlizzLive. We’ll be covering all of the major news, panels, and events. As a part of our coverage we’re planning the following:

• Coverage of All Breaking News
• Photos
• Video Coverage (talk show style from the floor)
• Live Blogging
• Panel Articles and Videos
• Exclusive Interviews
• Podcasts
• StarCraft II Gameplay Impressions
• Diablo III Gameplay Impressions

Starting Thursday, August 20th, BlizzLive will go live and the staff will be hosting a live chat to introduce ourselves, gather your last minute questions and speculate on what secrets BlizzCon ‘09 has to offer. And then on Friday, August 21st, BlizzLive will begin our coverage of BlizzCon 2009. Be sure to bookmark the new site and continually check for updates as we deliver the best of BlizzCon directly to you.

Don’t forget to use the reminder below and visit our site Thursday, August 20th at 6 P.M. (PST) for the live Pre-BlizzCon Q&A with our staff on the ground in Anaheim.