Posts with tag Conspiracy

In among all of the "omg fake pets for real money" drama from this week's announcement, we may have missed something big: the Pandaren are now live in the World of Warcraft. The Pandaren are my favorite Azerothian race, even though they're essentially a joke -- Samwise Didier just loves pandas, and he made art for an April Fool's joke that Chris Metzen loved so much they decided to include the bears as real characters in Warcraft III. Since then, they've become fan favorites (not least of all, especially for me, because alcohol and ale are a big part of their culture), but we've only seen hints of them in World of Warcraft. There was a rumor going around a while back that they would never appear in the game because China didn't allow depictions of violence against the bears, but that was just a rumor. Still, the Pandaren have existed in WoW only as a Blizzard in-joke. We assume they're out there somewhere, but until now, no one has ever seen one.

Of course we say "until now" because there are now little Pandaren monk noncombat pets running around, bowing, and doing magical kung-fu. Does this mean that the future Emerald Dream expansion will have us all playing as Brewmasters? While yes that would be awesome, not so fast again: Diablo and the Zergling from Starcraft are both in the game as noncombat pets, and they don't mean anything at all (although they were both included in the game before the announcements of Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 -- maybe Blizzard is working on a Pandaren-based puzzle game? Conspiracy theorists, assemble!). And just because we all have Grunty doesn't mean murlocs are suddenly going to take to spaceships with battle rifles in the official lore. But it's cool to see Pandaren actually in the game, even in pet form, and who knows, maybe we will one day find the legendary realm of Pandaria in our own version of Azeroth.

In what may be an attempt to throw everyone off the recent speculation that Goblins and Worgen just might be the next playable races in the World of Warcraft, new Halloween masks with both male and female versions were found in the latest PTR build. The discovery sent players into a frenzy, and got everyone speculating about the next expansion and what it holds. During last weekend's WoW.com radio show, Turpster said he wished that the whole Halloween mask thing were planted by Blizzard to confuse the player base, and it turns out that they just might be... except that it might be the other way around and the devs are trying to cover up the Goblins and Worgen discovery.

MMO Champion, the data-mining heaven, has the full image of all the "new" Halloween masks, which include Murlocs, Vrykul, Naga, and Ogres, including a never-before-seen-in-game female ogre! However, astute readers point out that the female ogre is actually a "direct copy-paste of an old drawing from one of the RPG books." Closer inspection of the female ogre mask will reveal some rendering inconsistencies compared to the other skins, which were lifted from in-game models. Clever Blizzard - could these new masks be a red herring? Or could the red herring actually be the Goblin and Worgen masks, and this is just one elaborate ploy to obscure the big announcement at BlizzCon? Let the mayhem commence!

Oops, forgot this earlier... thanks to Malfural of But Wait, There's Lore for the tip! EDIT: Whoops again! Malfural has nothing to do with BWTL, but says he's a great fan. Thanks for the tip, anyway, BWTL reader!