The Onion reports on a new expansion pack that simulates playing World of Warcraft.
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Onion News Network. Jean Anne Whorton: Video game players celebrated this week as a highly anticipated sequel to the popular online video game World of Warcraft hit the shelves. Onion News Network Tech Trends has the story. Jeff Tate: World of Warcraft, it has 9 million players worldwide, many who say they spend hundreds of hours playing the game every week. Here at the Blizzard Entertainment offices, creators say they couldn't be more excited about the new expansion pack, World of World of Warcraft. Jonathan Parrish is the vice president of Blizzard Entertainment. Jonathan Parrish: World of World of Warcraft allows Warcraft gamers to do what they like to do more than anything else in life, which is play World of Warcraft. Jeff Tate: Blizzard programmer, Chris Boldman, demonstrated how the game works. Tom Bolgman: So here, I'm playing as a character named Greg, who's playing World of Warcraft as a level 3 gnome rogue. So, uh, I'm going to press my up arrow key, and that's going to make him press his up arrow key, which is going to make the character on his screen kind of move forward across the screen. Jonathan Parrish: What this game is going to do is put you in the shoes of someone imagining they're in the shoes of an elf, a dwarf, a mage, a troll. Jeff Tate: A fan response has been great. The game sold over 100,000 copies its first day of release. Kyle Dierkes: My avatar is the biggest World of Warcraft fan in the whole World of World of Warcraft world. Jeff Tate: The game promises to bring a level of realism to video gaming never before seen. Tom Bolgman: Here, I'm going to press Alt-Shift-7, and that's going to make, uh, my character, uh, start scrolling through the terms of use agreement and the end user license agreement, and it's fun to just play a character who's getting lost in this whole other sort of fantasy world. Kyle Dierkes: The graphics are amazing, uh, they're revolutionary. I mean, when you, when you're staring at the computer screen, you actually believe that you're in a dimly lit basement staring at a computer screen. With each keystroke, you're just like, oh my god, it sounds exactly like the keystrokes that I know from my own personal experience of hitting keys. Jeff Tate: Based on the game's big success, Blizzard Entertainment is already looking ahead to the next release planned for fall of 2009. Jonathan Parrish: Fans love World of World of Warcraft and we know they're going to want their characters to be able to play the game as well, so we've already started work on World of World of Warcraft, the World of Warcraft round. Jeff Tate: For the Onion News Network, I'm Jeff Tate. Tom Bolgman: So this game you can customize your own avatar, so my avatar, I, uh, made him, he's like 20-something years old, he works at a, a video game company, he's, uh, really good at puzzles. Your character can do anything that a real human playing the World of Warcraft could do, so there's almost like no limits. Kyle Dierkes: The worst thing that can happen in the game is that your avatar's internet connection goes down, then you have to make your avatar get on the phone with your internet service provider.
