Blizzard's first real-time strategy games had a profound impact on me as a young immigrant to Canada in 1994 and '95. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness helped me learn how to read and write in English, and formed the basis for some of my oldest friendships in a brand-new country. Suffice to say, I have a lot of love for these old RTS games -- maybe more than Blizzard itself. So you can imagine my excitement at remaster rumors for Warcraft II and its expansion, Beyond the Dark Portal. When Blizzard aired its Warcraft Direct last week, not only were those rumors confirmed, but it announced that the original Warcraft would receive the same treatment, and both would be sold alongside Warcraft III: Reforged (itself a remaster) as part of a new battle chest.

In 2004, Holly Longdale was a game designer on EverQuest, then the champion of a new genre of video game that allowed for multiplayer role-playing on a huge scale. In these online fantasy worlds, players could quest together rather than alone, adding a fascinating new social – and competitive – dimension to the static, offline role-playing that Holly's generation had grown up with. But whenever she could, Longdale would sneak in a few hours playing EverQuest's main competitor instead. That game was World of Warcraft (WoW). "There were so many moments in WoW I was envious of," she says, "and completely lost in. I remember running through Ashenvale as a Night Elf Hunter and the music and the ambience – there was a mood you couldn't deny. Then I saw another player running in the opposite direction, a Druid who buffed me on their way by. That was when I knew I was going to be in this for the long-haul."

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Warcraft gaming universe but there's not going to be a BlizzCon gathering to celebrate it. So Blizzard is doing the next-best thing by holding a live streaming event. Blizzard announced that its special Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct stream will start at 1PM ET on Wednesday, November 13. The broadcast will run on Blizzard's official streaming channels for Twitch, YouTube and TikTok. There aren't many details available about what Warcraft fans can expect to see during the livestream except for a special concert celebrating World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary.

This week, Blizzard released Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, an expansion to the wildly popular fantasy action-role-playing game that tasks players with slaughtering masses of screeching demons and collecting the randomized gear that they leave behind. Since coming out last year, Diablo IV has been a big success for Blizzard, earning more than 666 million (yes, really) in its first week. But before that release came years of fits and starts, including a predecessor that was perceived within Blizzard as an embarrassment and an iteration that was so drastically different, people began wondering if it was really still Diablo anymore. Today, Diablo is one of Blizzard's most important franchises. But to at least one Blizzard executive who was around in its early days, it wasn't even a "real game."

Over the past three years, as I worked on a book about the history of the video-game company Blizzard Entertainment, a disconcerting question kept popping into my head: Why does success seem so awful? Even typing that out feels almost anti-American, anathema to the ethos of hard work and ambition that has propelled so many of the great minds and ideas that have changed the world. But Blizzard makes a good case for the modest achievement over the astronomical. Founded in Irvine, California, by two UCLA students named Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime, the company quickly became well respected and popular thanks to a series of breakout franchises such as StarCraft and Diablo. But everything changed in 2004 with the launch of World of Warcraft (or WoW), which became an online-gaming juggernaut that made billions of dollars.

World of Warcraft has an enduring identity problem. What was once one of the biggest games in the world is now approaching its 20th birthday, and with every year that goes by, developer Blizzard has the unenviable challenge of trying to prove that WoW still has a place in today's gaming world. This goes some way to explaining the many times that Blizzard has tried to reinvent WoW. Six years after its initial release, the developer attempted a radical do-over of the game's world in 2010's Cataclysm expansion, in which an ancient dragon ravaged and reshaped the realm of Azeroth (an experience you can relive through the recently relaunched Cataclysm Classic). Since then, Blizzard has experimented with numerous gimmicks to try to keep WoW current, including a now much-maligned mechanic that saw players building their power level for two years, only to lose that power at the end of every expansion cycle.

Many recently published Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems produce audio close to real speech. However, TTS evaluation needs to be revisited to make sense of the results obtained with the new architectures, approaches and datasets. We propose evaluating the quality of synthetic speech as a combination of multiple factors such as prosody, speaker identity, and intelligibility. Our approach assesses how well synthetic speech mirrors real speech by obtaining correlates of each factor and measuring their distance from both real speech datasets and noise datasets. We benchmark 35 TTS systems developed between 2008 and 2024 and show that our score computed as an unweighted average of factors strongly correlates with the human evaluations from each time period.

Thousands of magical projectiles whizz across the horizon, arachnoid infantry hack the armor of our troops to pieces. As Orc Warlocks, we throw ourselves into battle, a water spirit at our side pushing back the enemy troops, but General Thrall can barely hold the line. The intro to The War Within is a strongly staged invasion on the beach, which then leads into a siege battle around a dwarven fortress. The intro to The War Within is a strongly staged invasion on the beach, which then leads into a siege battle around a dwarven fortress. The intro to The War Within is a strongly staged invasion on the beach, which then leads into a siege battle around a dwarven fortress.

Everyone wants to be like Apple. The largest publicly traded company in the world, with a flagship product that prints money, and a cultural footprint that has reached world-historical importance: the 21st-century Ford. On a surface level, the companies that get slapped with that comparison are obvious enough. If you pump out well-made, slickly designed consumer electronics that arrive in a nice box, someone somewhere will compare you to the Cupertino giant. Dig a bit deeper, and there's more meaningful comparisons to be made.

It is widely agreed that 2023 was a stellar year for video games. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 … barely a week passed without some blockbuster hit or independent gem. But beneath these accolades there is a sadder, more worrying story: it was also a year of widespread industry redundancies, and the trend is continuing into the opening weeks of 2024. Microsoft laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard staff after its 69bn purchase of the company. Publisher Embracer Group let at least 900 staff go across its many studios, as well as closing veteran UK developer Free Radical Design. Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, one of the most successful titles of the decade, laid off 830 employees; Electronic Arts shed 6% of its workforce, amounting to approximately 780 jobs.