Who will survive the Tomb of Immortal Darkness? It’s a new five-man dungeon coming to World of Warcraft that’s “deep beneath the crumbling tombstones of Duskwood’s Raven Hill Cemetery.” (Incidentally, Duskwood is my favorite old world area. Oh, the memories.) The dungeon uses Deep Dark technology to give players the ultimate challenge: navigating an instance in total darkness. Is your toon gear’d enough to take on Omgsogoth, the Dark Lord of Twilight?

Clearly this is a silly April Fools gag (I hope that doesn’t spoil anything for you), and it’s just one of a few Blizzard has going on. Another worth mentioning here: Kinect functionality in StarCraft 2!

/dance

This just in: this year’s Blizzcon will be on October 21 and 22 in Anaheim. “Blizzcon? What’s that?” That’s what Blizzard calls its annual “celebration of the global player communities surrounding Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo universes.” Two days of fun, in other words.

Blizzard hasn’t announced any details regarding the show, such as whether or not the great Jay Mohr will return as MC of the cosplay contest, or whether or not there will be a musical guest, how much much tickets will cost.

Presumably one of the stars of the show this year will be Diablo III, which should be approaching release around that time. I’d actually be shocked if the release date isn’t announced by then.

And now for some World of Warcraft news. Blizzard says that they’ve sold some 4.7 million copies of Cataclysm since its release one month ago. Most of the sales came on the very first day of release, with 3.3 million copies moving on day one. Mighty impressive.

Note that these numbers are worldwide, as the game was simultaneously released across the globe, coming out in the U.S. and a bunch of other places on December, and spreading elsewhere, including Korea, by December 9.

Also mentioned in the very fancy press release is that Blizzard is hiring (presumably to get work started on all those games they’re said to be working on). Maybe you have the skills to design the next “go kill 6 murlocs and bring me their eyeballs” quest?

Following up that inane Net Neutrality babble with a fun video. Here was have a man playing World of Warcraft using nothing more than a Kinect. Well done, chap.

In other hilarious Kinect news, some company called ThriXXX (/me rolls eyes) has developed some silly Kinect game where players “move their hands virtually over the body of a virtual woman.” I’m only mentioning this because a local Fox TV station quotes a grandfather in saying, in reference to the game: “If you notice it’s only one hand so I figure the other one is busy.”

Good ol, Grandpa, always with the jokes.

SteelSeries’ second go at creating such a mouse, the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm MMO Gaming Mouse (yes, it’s a mouthful) could make a fine gift this holiday season for the WoW player in your life. It certainly helps if said WoW player has hands the size of Andre the Giant’s.

Features:

• 14 programmable buttons
• On-board memory to store multiple profiles
• PC and Mac compatible software
• Nifty built-in flashing LED
• Blizzard’s blessing as it’s a fully licensed WoW product

Pro:

• Plenty of buttons that you can configure however you see fit
• Driver software works for Mac on Day One this time around
• SteelSeries’ typical solid build quality

Con:

• It’s gigantic (or maybe I just have small hands?)
• Pretty much a one-game (or one genre) mouse—it’s probably overkill and/or inappropriate for browsing the Web or playing the latest FPS
• Inner thumb buttons a little difficult to reach (but again, maybe I have Princess Zelda hands)

Raise Curtain

SteelSeries’ World of Warcraft Cataclysm MMO Gaming Mouse should probably come with a sticker on it that says the mouse equivalent of “must be this tall to ride the ride.” It’s a very big mouse, but that ensures your hands aren’t too squished together when trying to access all 14 buttons. It works as advertised, which is really all you can ask, but it will definitely take some getting used to, particularly if you, like me, have Princess Zelda hands.

The first thing you notice about the mouse is, “Hey, that actually looks pretty great.” It looks like a WoW mouse. I’m confident you could show it to a non-WoW person and they’d remarks, “Do you use that to play that online game you play all the time?”

Why yes, yes I do.

Beyond the aesthetics—note that there’s an LED in there that flashes and pulses to your specification. It’s merely eye candy but it’s not like there’s something inherently wrong with eye candy, per se—the mouse works about as well as any other high-end gaming mouse. Nothing feels cheap here.

Why have so many buttons on a mouse? MMO players know that to effectively control your toon you need to be cognizant of approximately 900 keyboard and mouse combination, with shift- and alt- modifiers further complicating matters. Anyone who’s sunk any amount of time into games like WoW will no doubt have gotten the hang of it, but it’s nothing something you can pick up in an afternoon. (Blizzard said in a recent interview with Edge magazine that a full 50 percent of people who play the free 10-day WoW trial don’t make it past level 10. These games take time and dedication to play, let alone play well.) If you can offload some of the less cerebral commands from the keyboard to the mouse you’ll have made the game slightly less confusing to play.

The mouse’s default driver settings map the buttons thus:

Being a tinker, I wiped those setting as soon as I launched the game.

I had the mouse’s buttons programmed like this for the past few days:

As a new priest, I had already settled on a pretty good casting sequence. I have no idea if the sequence is Elitist Jerks-approved, but the order made sense to me. Plus, in the early levels of WoW all you’re really doing is killing mobs one at a time—nothing too strenuous or chaotic. As the picture shows, I had mapped the button underneath the scroll wheel to my main casting macro. The slender button to the immediate left of the scroll wheel was set to “nearest target” (causing you to target the nearest enemy), and the slender button to the immediate right was set to open all of my bags. Why move my left hand all the way from its WASD home when I can merely use my right ring finger to bring up the bags?

I left the other buttons unmapped because it wasn’t necessary to map ‘em so early in the game. If you’re a level 80+ and you’re raiding or PVP-ing and you have three of four action bars worth of talents you need at the ready, then yeah: map away. The extra buttons certainly come in handy.

http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=BzYTR3MTpAoxTGsQeGxE2AX8HQqRLNyf&version=2

As this embedded video shows, the mouse certainly makes it easier to kill mobs. (The video is a parody if all those “epic” videos that many guilds upload to YouTube that are accompanied, for seemingly no reason, by irrelevant trance music.) My left hand never once leaves WASD (with my thumb on the space bar to jump for fun), leaving my right hand—my mouse hand—free to kill those jerk trolls.

In short, the mouse worked.

I’ve two concerns with the mouse.

One, again, it’s a little on the big side. Razer’s MMO mouse has a whole bunch of buttons without being the size of a Cadillac. Maybe I have small hands, I don’t know. But keep that in mind before you buy.

Two, it’s definitely overkill for daily mousing. (This is unlike SteelSeries’ highest end mouse, the Xai, which is great for first-person shooting and everyday mousing.) This ties into its size, but you might have to be prepared to dual mouse: use this mouse when you’re battling those Horde/Alliance fiends, but then switch over to your regular mouse when it’s time to hop on the forums to learn how to best min-max your toon.

In short, she’s a fine mouse that works as advertised, and that’s great, but it will definitely take getting used to. You’ll need to teach yourself how to split your workload between the keyboard and mouse, and you’ll have to get used to the size. She’s a big one.

Blizzard has confirmed its next-generation MMO. It’s currently called, or at least referred to as, Titan, and it was first noticed in the leaked roadmap that surfaced a few days ago. The company isn’t too happy that the project’s existence leaked (a Blizzard China manager resigned in wake of the leak), and that it’s currently working on recruiting “the best talent in the industry” to help work on it. Hmm…

The MMO isn’t expected to draw upon previous Blizzard lore (or “IP,” in the cold language of the new video game industry), so this is a brand new adventure.

It’s also probably the most important video game in the history of the world. Well, provided you’re an Activision Blizzard stockholder. What happens to the current World of Warcraft fanbase when Titan comes out? Will we be expected to subscribe to two MMOs? Who even has that kind of time? Will WoW die a death in the face of the shiny new toy? Will Blizzard split the WoW fanbase, with a number of WoW players leaving Azeroth for good for Titan Land? And what if Titan stinks on ice? You’ll have run off your existing fanbase for no particular reason.

But these are questions that will be addressed in the coming years. The game isn’t “scheduled” for release until 2013, and who’s to say how many times until then the project will be re-shaped, torn down then built up again, delayed, and so on?

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has become the fastest selling PC game of all time. Blizzard sold 3.3 million copies in a mere 24 hours. Assuming everyone paid $40 for the game, that works out to $132 million in first-day sales alone. Not too shabby!

For comparison’s sake, the previous expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, sold 2.8 million copies in its first day of availability.

Also for comparison’s sake, Call of Duty: Black Ops is estimated to have done some $360 million in first-day sales, which works out to 5.6 million copies sold.

Not that sales are indicative of a game’s quality, but it must be nice to be an Activison stockholder these days. If you can’t turn a healthy profit with those kinds of numbers you’re probably doing something wrong.

This is a quick one. We already have a level 85 player, a Human Paladin, in World of Warcraft. The best part is that she dinged 85 a good three hours before the game was even live in the US of A.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm is now live all around the world! And of course, it wouldn’t be a Blizzard launch without an equal amount of bugs and QQ. So join me as we scour the Internet looking for reaction to Blizzard’s latest!

The game only went live in North America a few hours ago, at midnight PT, but people in Europe had been able to play the game for several hours before the North American servers went live. Apparently somewhere along the line American schools forgot to teach students about time zones! Blizzard said the game would launch (servers permitting—see Oceania, which plays on North American-based servers) at midnight. Folks, when it’s midnight in Paris it’s 6pm in New York and 3pm in California. It’s really not that hard to understand.

But no, message boards were filled with plenty of QQ along the lines of, “THIS IS SO UNFAIR, WHY DO EU PLAYERS GET IT FIRST ARRRGH.”

EU gets Cata 9 hours earlier than US?! I mean seriously WTF?!? If anything they should get it 9 hours later!

This is what Blizzard is dealing with on a daily basis. It’s crazy-talk, pure and simple.

But hold on there, partner, EU gamers didn’t exactly have a smooth launch. Within minutes of the servers going live, message boards filled with EU players complaining about server queues and full servers, random disconnects, lag, and other game-breaking aggravation.

This is partially why I didn’t bother staying up all night waiting for the servers to go live: these launches are always cataclysmic.

I just logged into my server (Aggramar, though I will be started a new life on a new server later today… still deciding what to roll) and everything seemed okay to me. No queues or anything. Then again, it’s 11am, 10am server-time. Some of the game’s textures took a second to appear but that’s to be expected with so many people bum-rushing the servers.

Said one upset Orc Hunter:

Blizz i just wanna say thanks for all the bugs, and not letting me actually do anything with the content since questing is the main thing, and i can’t get my bar back, simply amazing sitting here in icecrown just waiting, after 2 hours of servers being live, and i still can’t quest. I kinda bought the digital so I could do these things, but nope.

I do love the idea that people think Blizzard has purposely gone out of its way to ruin people’s game-play experience.

Chill, folks.

You could always use these first few glitchy hours to read the novel The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm so you know how and why Azeroth exploded.

5. World of Warcraft Cataclysm Dragon Art print poster. The artists at Blizzard have been working on new exclusive art as part of the Cataclysm expansion. As a result of that they have been auctioning off signed copies of the main image, as well as non-autographed versions of the main poster. Either way, the poster is an amazing image and would look great in any man-cave (or woman-cave). You can pick one up on ebay for about $10.

4. The Cataclysm Deathwing tshirt. Don’t be afraid to let your freak flag fly, there’s how many millions of people playing WoW now? They may not admit it, but odds are that Brenda in accounting? Yeah, she’s actually a blood elf warrior. So while you might might feel a little bit silly wearing a Deathwing tshirt, it might help you meet Brenda.

3. Eat Sleep WoW Vinyl sticker. Need something for the back window of your truck? Well here you go. Again, this is one of those “don’t be shy” about your Warcraft addiction things, but it’ll fit nicely in the back window of your car. The sticker runs about $4.00 plus shipping, and if you prefer, you can get get Horde or Alliance instead of the logo. Either way, great stocking stuffer.

3. World Of Warcraft 2011 Wall Calendar. Looking for a 16 month calendar with some custom graphics from Blizzard? Well, you can pick one up for the your favorite WoW addict for a mere $13.49 (on sale right now). Definitely worth your gold.

2. SteelSeries Warcraft:Cataclysm Mouse. Steelseries is famous for making custom mice and keyboards for World of Warcraft, and Cataclysm is no exception. The Cataclysm MMO mouse has customizable buttons, works with both the Mac and PC, and has custom paint job. The mouse is scheduled to be released today, with an MSRP of $99.99.

1. Without fail, Bradygames releases a guide with each expansion set. Once again, there’s a strategy guide coming out and it retails for $16.49.

At midnight tonight (Pacific Standard Time, leaving those of us on the east coast looking like fools) Blizzard flips the switch on the World of Warcraft: Catalysmservers. It’s a pretty huge deal, and not just because it’s the latest expansion (leaks reports indicate at least two more expansions within the next three years) to the game that recently turned six years old. Consider this a sort of What To Expect™ post.

First: The actual game launch. Blizzard’s official launch event happens tonight at 9pm PT at the Fry’s Electronics in Southern California. There will be “the powerful music of The Artists Formerly Known as Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain, an epic /dance competition, autographs from the development team, and more.” And, of course, you’ll walk out of there with a shiny copy of Cataclysm.

Other stores, including Best Buy and GameStop, have launch festivities planned, so be sure to check your local haunt to see if anything’s Going Down™. (I shall be sound asleep when all of this is going on.)

Second: Rather than adding zones as they did with the previous two expansions, Blizzard has decided to alter some of the existing zones courtesy of a giant cataclysm. It doesn’t just mean physical differences in the landscape, but also that quests for levels 1-60 have been fleshed out. I think we can all agree that that was long overdue. That said, it will be sad to see some of the lands that some of us spent quite a lot of time in (I’m almost certain I spent more of 2007 walking around Azeroth than I did walking around Planet Earth) go away forever.

(And yes, I know the patch that introduced the altered Azeroth has been live for several weeks now, but it doesn’t really “count,” in my opinion, until tonight. You know what I mean.)

Third: There’s two new playable races introduced in Cataclysm: Worgen and Goblins. It’s pretty clear that Worgen are the “cool” race this time around (like Blood Elfs were back in Burning Crusade), so I fully expect their starting areas to be absolutely swamped for the first few days after Cataclysm’s release.

Fourth: There’s some sort of guild leveling system, but I’ve never been a very good guildie, so I can’t comment too much there.

I think those are the big bullet points this time around, a new Azeroth and the two new races.

The question now becomes what to roll tomorrow?

We are three weeks away from the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and Blizzard has let it be known that there will be several worldwide launch events that may be worth investigating. For those of you in the US, get thee to the Fry’s Electronics in Fountain Valley, Calif. where you can partake in the launch festivities. There’s going to be a dance contest! If East Side Dave McDonald attends, he’ll win that contest, guaranteed. Simple as.

The Fry’s shindig begins at 9pm PST. Both the standard and collector’s edition of the game will be available right there.

And since this is a truly worldwide game, there will be events all over the place, from Russia to Sweden, from Spain to the UK. Even Canada gets in on the action!

Blizzard has the details of all the worldwide events.

My plans for launch? Meh, I’ll probably be asleep. I can wait a few hours till I wake up to log in and zoom around Azeroth for the zillionth time.

We’re, what, three weeks away from the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm? Yes… I have noticed the sun shining brighter, the air tasting sweeter of late. Right on cue, then, is the new the new MMO keyset for SteelSeires’ Shift keyboard.

As you might expect, the point is to make it a little bit easier to play MMOs without having to buy a full-on, dedicated MMO keyboard, (All you’d need is the Shift, then this keyset.) There’s dedicated buttons for common tasks (trade, duel, and the like) and emotes (yell, etc.).

And obviously it plays nice with your many macros you have set up.

Probably more important than the keyset itself is the fact that SteelSeries has shown the Shift keyboard so much love. Like, SteelSeries didn’t just release he keyboard, create one generic FPS keyset, then leave the keyboard dormant.

And yes, I know there’s already a Cataclysm-specific Shift keyset, but perhaps you don’t Deathwing, cool as he is, all over your keyboard?

Like the other keysets, it’s $24.99. You’ll need the Shift keyboard, too, which is $89.99.

Who can forget the Red Shirt Guy? He’s the young man who, at Blizzcon last week, told Blizzard something about Falstad Wildhammer being on the Council of Three Hammers. I don’t know, I’m not as familiar with the World of Warcraft lore as I’d like to be. Which is not to say I’m above killing hours on WoWWiki looking up this or that faction, but clearly I’m not in the same league as Red Shirt Guy. Moving on. Blizzard was so impressed with the young man’s knowledge that they’ve actually put him in the game.

His name in the game is the Wildhammer Fact Checker, and he’s wearing a red shirt. Pretty, pretty awesome.

“FAKE!”

Um, no. A blue post on the WoW forum confirms its authenticity.

You can now pre-order the digital download edition of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm from Blizzard. Buying this particular edition ensures that you’ll be able to play the game the minute Blizzard turns on the Cataclysm servers, which, incidentally, happens at 12:01am PST on December 7.

What’ll happen is, you buy the game today (or whenever), then your credit card gets charged. The next time you load the game and there’s Cataclysm available to download you’ll start downloading the game automatically, just like any other patch.

Of course, by buying the digital download edition you miss out on some of the goodies that Blizzard has lined up in the boxed editions, but then you’ll only get to play the game when the UPS person knocks on your door.

This digital download edition is $39.99.

Blizzcon begins tomorrow. Unfortunately, I cannot attend, which means I’ll probably be watching Blizzard’s online stream. This is relevant because SteelSeries will debut its full range of Cataclysm-themed accessories at the show. I’ve already mentioned the new World of Warcraft: Cataclysm MMO Gaming Mouse, but there will be others on display.

Much like what SteelSeries did with the launch of Medal of Honor, it’s releasing many of its accessories with Cataclysm branding, as well as specific functionality.

Probably the most compelling release would be the SteelSeries Shift Cataclysm Edition. It’s the Shift keyboard, but with a Cataclysm-specific keyset. You can, of course, grab the keyset separately if you already have the standard-issue Shift keyboard.

Other goodies includes a Deathwing, Goblin, and Worgen (~!) edition of the QcK moused.

We knew that Blizzard wasn’t too keen on the various StarCraft II hacks and cheats that are out there, but I, for one, did not expect courtroom drama. But here we are! Yup, word on the street is that Blizzard is suing the developers of at least three StarCraft II hacks for—wait for it—“destroying” the game. Goodness gracious~!

GameSpot has the scoop, but Rock, Paper, Shotgun has chosen to focus on one particular aspect of these legal shenanigans. That is, Blizzard’s claim that copying portions of the StarCraft II code into memory (your RAM) is a violation of the game’s end-user license agreement and terms of use.

Says Blizzard:

When users of the Hacks download, install, and use the Hacks, they copy StarCraft II copyrighted content into their computer’s RAM in excess of the scope of their limited license, as set forth in the EULA and ToU, and create derivative works of StarCraft II

“In excess of the scope of their limited license,” you say? Look, I’m not one to cheat while playing games online (permaban, I say), but that particular phrase sounds like it came straight out of a William Gibson novel.

The suit guess on:

The harm to Blizzard from Defendants’ conduct is immediate, massive and irreparable. By distributing the Hacks to the public, Defendants cause serious harm to the value of StarCraft II. Among other things, Defendants irreparably harm the ability of Blizzard’s legitimate customers (i.e. those who purchase and use unmodified games) to enjoy and participate in the competitive online experience. That, in turn, causes users to grow dissatisfied with the game, lose interest in the game, and communicate that dissatisfaction, thereby resulting in lost sales of the game or ‘add-on’ packs and expansions thereto.

It’s hard to disagree with most of that. If you’re in an online game against a cheater, what are the odds that you’ll ever play again? Or what are the odds that you’ll post a nasty message on a forum somewhere, or that you’ll tell your friends, “StarCraft II stinks, there’s too many cheaters”?

There’s a lesson to be learned: don’t cheat while playing games online.

In other Blizzard news, here’s World of Warcraft: Cataclysm‘s opening cinematic:

Thoughts? A longtime player of the game, who shall remain nameless, told me that Deathwing’s voice actor is suffering from “Dark Knight syndrome.” You know, putting on a voice to sound throaty and gruff.

DX11 support is much appreciated, however (now that I know to disable CrossFire in order to get it to work properly!).

I’ve just received word that the very first cinematic footage of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will pop up during Sunday’s Cowboys-Vikings game on Fox. The game starts at 4:15pm ET. So, set your DVR or wait till someone puts it on YouTube (which I will subsequently post here). That’s it.

SteelSeries has developed another World of Warcraft mouse. Hopefully they’ve learned a few lessons from their previous mouse, which was OK but sorta flawed at the same time. It’s called the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm MMO Gaming mouse, and it was co-developed with Blizzard. And given my various conversations with the folks at SteelSeries over the past months, I know that Blizzard doesn’t lend its name to just any peripheral, much less take the time to co-develop one.

As you can see with your eyes, the color scheme sorta goes along with Cataclysm, the newest expansion pack that’s set for release on December 7.

So what does the mouse do?

First off, it works with both Mac and PC. Setup is handled in-game.

There’s 14 buttons that you can program some 130 preset commands. Presumably things like “cast spell 3,” etc. Or, you can map any number of your custom macros that you’ve spent months (years?) perfecting. The mouse itself can store one profile, while the software can store an additional 10 profiles.

SteelSeries says they’ve taken all the feedback generated with their first WoW mouse, and along with Blizzard, have created something that delivers “ a more comfortable, intuitive, and ultimately better experience.”

I guess users will be the judge of that!

The mouse will be on display at Blizzcon, which takes place next week in California, so if you’re in attendance you can check it out first-hand. I, unfortunately, will be at home watching the online feed like a dork.

The mouse will be released on December 7—the same day as Cataclysm—for $99.99.

Pretty weird feeling to be excited about the prospects of a mouse, but here we are.

World of Warcraft, still going strong. Just a few weeks before the release of the newest expansion, Cataclysm, Blizzard has announced that the MMO has just crossed the 12 million subscriber line. Maybe Blizzard should have used some of that money to buy Liverpool FC?

The game’s previous expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, recently came out in China, pushing Blizzard just past the 12 million subscriber mark.

Pretty amazing considering the game is nearly six years old. Think of it like this: what other entertainment product (or gadget, even!) were you using back in 2004 that you still use today? Maybe you have an old iPod that still does the job?