The 1st of April is never a dull day for gamers. Every year game developers, publishers and services announce the craziest ideas and this year’s April Fools’ day is no different.
Ranging from Blizzard to BioWare, FilePlanet to Good Old Games, there are plenty of pranks to be had today. I sought out whichever ones seemed noteworth and assembled them in one giant list that you’ll definitely want to browse through at least once.
A Blizzard of pranks
As you might expect, the king’s of April Fools’ are back at it over at Blizzard. They’re not sticking to a single April Fools’ joke, but have four of them going all at once. The most prominent is certainly their World of Warcraft prank: the Dance Battle system, supposedly coming in the next patch. You can face off in 1v1 dance battles anywhere in the world, but also go into arena-style teambased competitions, including character customization, rewards and Armory integration. Well, you might be if it weren’t April Fool’s day. Check out the full page describing this exciting update here.
Yet another World of Warcraft practical joke can be found on the European website. It’s not quite as out-there as Blizzard’s other pranks today, but still moderatly funny: P1mp My Mount. Add a gattling gun to your mount, or maybe install a few spoilers. You’d be able to do it with this update for the European version of WoW.
Next on the Blizzard list is a newly announced Diablo 3 class: the Archivist. These masters of the written word and lore of old have turned deadly and started using their vast array of knowledge in battle. From their mighty Lorenado (tornado of books) to their Quest Bolt ability, this surely is a class to be feared. It might die in a single hit, but with abilities like Shush (silence the room, literally) their limitless power is clearly worth it. You can check out this new class design – gameplay videos included – on this page.
But their most impressive prank was yet to come in the form of a newly announced Terran unit for StarCraft 2. Well, maybe unit isn’t quite the correct word for this thing. You see, in their never-ending quest for bigger and better weaponry, the Terrans have finally arrived at the penultimate unit: the Terra-tron. Rather than being built in some factory, this thing is the factory – all of your factories (and assorted base buildings) in fact. You can see this monstrosity in action here. No puny mothership can stand up to this kind of firepower!
CDProjekt's Good Old Games service offers filthy virtual game shelfspace!
Practical jokes from CDProjekt
Aside from Blizzard another major contender showed up with plenty of tricks up their sleeves this year. Polish CDProjekt banked out with two initiatives of their own. Their Good Old Games services offered a quick sneak-peek at an upcoming feature for all members: a redesigned virtual game shelf. Rather than the generic game shelf with ordinary box covers set against a plain background, they’ve introduced dust and litter, randomly distributed games (not just covers anymore!) and even fingerprints on the boxes. Yes, you even need to clean your new virtual game shelf if you want to keep it nice and shiny. See the screenshot, courtesy of GOG, above.
Their other practical joke came from the CDProjekt RED team with the announcement of a brand new, revolutionary, game! The Witcher: Mysterious Secrets is an incredible 2D side-scrolling game with unbelievable graphics and game features so unique you won’t believe it when you see it. “The game is in development for all current-gen, next-gen and gen-after-next-gen handheld systems and is scheduled for release between Tuesday and Friday 2010.” Amongst its unique features are:
FREAK system, or Fully Realistic Environment and Killing system, does away with archaic save/load mechanics. If you die, the game will cease to work. So don’t die.
Unlimited gameplay allows you to travel left and right as long as you want.
You can read more about this revolutionary title here. Or you can watch the developer introduction video below.
FilePlanet goes green
Gaming download service FilePlanet follows the aforementioned parties and today announced its plans to better the world. FilePlanet will help make the world a greener place with per Gigabyte tree-planting. Every GigaByte you download will directly translated to a new tree being planted in the FilePlanet park. Subscribers will be granted preferential treatment as always, with non-subscribers having to wait 10 minutes for their tree to be planted, while subscribers get instant trees. Visit FilePlanet for their view of what the park will look like in the future.
HellRazer – the ultimate fusion
Razer and Valve have also picked April 1st as the day of their grand announcements. These companies will be working together in bringing us HellRazer: Triple Helix. This game will be made available through Steam in Fall 2010 and will be developed specifically for play in combination with the Razer Anaconda gaming peripheral. The Razer Anaconda will be the first true motion sensing and gesture recognition gaming device. The special edition looks to be extra good, with a plush toy of Gabe and Razerguy. How they intend to make this downloadable over Steam is not mentioned. See this page for all the details.
The Ewok Republic
KotorMMO comes with news of a grand BioWare update for Star Wars: The Old Republic. The release date of this promising game has been set at 2021, when technology will be up-to-scratch in order to facilitate a game of such grand scope. In addition to the good news of a solid release date, BioWare has supposedly also announced a new race that’s being worked on. The fiercesome carnivorous Ewoks will be one of the playable races in this game and paths to Sith-hood have been confirmed! See the official press release on kotormmo.net.
World of Quake Live promises to shake things up in the Quake scene!
World of Quake Live
ID Software comes with news of a sweet update for Quake Live. The new title will be World of Quake Live and it will entail exciting new features such as a leveling system, mounts and the ability to use multiple weapons (even BFG’s!) at once. With the overwhelming popularity of Quake Live, they’ve now also found a well known community figure to represent their game and guarantee its quality. Visit the official Quake Live website for more details (or see the screenshot below).
Dragon Age Cinematic Trailer
And lastly BioWare has a sweet new trailer for Dragon Age showing off the improvements they’ve made to their engine technology and storytelling. Be warned, these cinematics are beyond anything you’ve ever seen before in a video game! After this trailer – there is no way you’ll be able to resist pre-ordering Dragon Age, so make sure your budget is up to it. See GameSpot for higher resolution video.
Further April Fools’ Day pranks:
- Guild Wars player characters have been transformed into anime-styled little Gwen’s.
- Lord of the Rings Online had a chicken related mini-quest, but this was disabled due to the extra load it generated (must have been very popular indeed).
- EverQuest featured renamed player classes to further clarify their intended use. The Warrior was renamed to Meatshield, Shadowknight to Emoknight, Wizard to Burninator, etc. Visit Massively for a more comprehensive list.
- The Star Wars Galaxies forums have been redesigned with a useful new word filter. Certain words you might type will be replaced by a more suitable counterpart: the = cupcakes, SWG = awesome, Jedi = JarJar, etc. See the link at EverQuest for a couple of other filtered words.
- Meanwhile in Star Wars Galaxies itself a Dr. Fool has lost control of his latest inventions and they’re running amok.
- A new column was also added to the Star Wars Galaxies website, in the form of Ask a Dog. The expert dog to answer all your SWG questions.
- Bristlebane’s Day was in full swing in the world of EverQuest II. Celebrators in every city are handing out quirky quests for daring adventurers to complete.
- The team at Cryptic has been busy as well, as they’ve announced a new title to be released shortly. City of Heroes: Golden Age will be the premier superheroes MMO of tomorrow, with super-next-gen graphics, innovative gameplay and required system specifications as we haven’t seen them in over a decade.
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