“Warcraft,” the movie based on the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) “World of Warcraft” will be hitting theaters in a few days from now, initially in Europe, before it starts making it to the other cinemas in the world.
Although the movie is based on a very popular game that has millions of subscribers worldwide, it seems that “Warcraft” will have a hurdle in shooting all the way to becoming the projected blockbuster success that it was being hyped to be.
The initial reviews on the movie indicate that the film is not good and gamers will just be disappointed with it. While non-gamers of “World of Warcraft” would be lost if they just come to the theaters and watch the movie, their expectations would not be as high as the real gamers of the game.
But the producers are still confident of the blockbuster goal of “Warcraft” as the movie expects to draw good support from China, considered as the world’s fastest-growing film economy and home to millions of certifiable “World of Warcraft” addicts, reports the Telegraph of UK.
“Warcraft” will also be released to movie theaters worldwide some 10 years after game developer Blizzard Entertainment made the announcement about the film.
“WoW” has a total of 5.5 million subscribers worldwide and a third of those are in China. Without the Chinese market, the producers would not even dare make a “Warcraft” movie. In fact, the film is funded by Chinese film enterprise, Legendary Entertainment, before it was acquired by the Chinese group Dalian Wanda early this year.
Distinct relationship
Incidentally, China has a distinct relationship with “World of Warcraft,” a game that had a transformative effect when it entered the country’s online multiplayer game arena.
While the Chinese government had operated a heavily-controlled internet since the middle of the 1990s, by the early 2000s, a widening technology gap forced it to deregulate certain aspects of its online culture.
Because of the regulation of gaming in China, Chinese gamers went from the two-dimensional presentation of online worlds to the all-encompassing spectacle of “World of Warcraft,” which drew players together both in the physical spaces of internet cafes and in the online realm of Azeroth.
The game has actually contributed to people forming real friendships online because of their shared experiences and shared failures. The game teaches everyone to know what they were doing and working together while being good at what they do best.
Transmogrification items
With the impending showing of the “Warcraft” movie, Blizzard is giving its gamers some bonuses by equipping heroes of the Horde and the Alliance with a set of movie-inspired transmogrification items, reports the World of Warcraft website.
Players who log in to the game’s website from now until August 1 shall receive special “Warcraft” movie-themed items on the first Alliance and Horde character to log in.
The developer also made a small update to help make sure that gamers are able to transfer their items between factions.
Items that are mailed to an opposite faction characters will now convert to the opposite faction items. But gamers can already mail such items to alternate characters on a different faction to receive their version of each item.
Many of the more than five million subscribers of “World of Warcraft” are still hooked on playing the classic game.
They still prefer playing the original game that was free from all the changes and updates that came its way from 2004 until today. That is exactly the reason why the Nostalrius fan-run server became a hit because it hosts gamers who want to play the classic “WoW” game.
A few years ago, game developer Blizzard Entertainment has given up hosting the classic “WoW” game because its subscriber base has reached an amazing number of 12 million sometime in 2010.
After Blizzard gave up the operation of servers for the original “WoW” game, some gamers have decided to set up their own, in what critics describe as vanilla servers, which have since become technically illegal. Nostalrius is one of them.