SC2Mapster

Swarm Launch Live

Hi everyone, as I said in a previous announcement, I was able to attend the Swarm launch event live, in California. This post will simply be my reflections of the live event; essentially the things behind the curtain, as I'm sure most of you probably watched the live stream. If you haven't gotten a chance to see the livestream, you can catch all of the videos on the Official Starcraft Twitch page.

My day began at 6am, getting ready to head to the Phoenix airport for 10am to California for this launch event. Once I arrived, I met [all for the first time, might I add,] Temp0, ChanmanV, LivinPink, Kevin Knocke, and Derrick from ONOG in the hotel lobby. For the next hour or so, we just chatted in the hotel restaurant while we waited for the event to begin. At this point, it's about 1:30pm, and the great pug from Blizzard met us outside the lobby with a shuttle and a couple of other community figures (Clutch, Russelo, Barbie from NASL, Amber Dalton from Twitch, JP McDaniel, and a few others), which we all boarded to head to the event, however not before Mr.Bitter and Rotterdam got some footage of us all getting on and a few interviews. In addition, Temp0, at the request of Amber from Twitch, did a small verse of one of his parody songs on the bus (he's way too good, someone needs to give this kid a deal)!

Now is when the interesting and important stuff starts for you. Again, most of my day consisted of walking around, meeting/talking to community figures and Blizzard employees, and just generally hanging out and watching the event unfold, but I will do the best to stick to a timeline! Back to the story... We arrived at the Blizzard campus after a relatively short shuttle ride from the hotel, where we were greeted with an awesome Kerrigan poster (as seen above) right outside of the registration point (yes, we had to register, make sure we were on the proper list, show ID, and get an awesome badge to have access, this was a special VIP event). While we waited for Blizzard to go snag some badges, we were directed back outside, where they had boxes and boxes of pizza hut and a few huge heroes (just big sandwiches), cookies, drinks, and lots more. In addition to the food, they had a few boxes of StarCraft: Risk out, as well as a few Blizzard poker sets for us to play with. Word of warning, never play Gretorp in poker, you're going to lose, -_-;.

Once we were done eating and got our registration taken care of, we were able to enter the live stream room; it was set relatively dark with lights focused on K[9] (the Day9 and Husky duo), and had probably 50 chairs or so, set in front of a large projector screen, for us to hangout and watch the stream live. I walked in and greeted Husky, who looked completely exhausted (this was only the middle of the afternoon, he had been up since 5am casting games, and still had another 10 hours to go). The next few hours I spent walking back and forth, talking to employees and figures outside, and watching the stream inside. Although, it was pretty awesome getting to watch some of the community videos, like the /r/Starcraft one by Leafeator, the one from the NASL, and Gretorp's commercial, and getting to see their reactions to them. It's like watching a movie for the second time, you know what's going to happen, so you're just looking to make sure the other person is enjoying it, haha. Anyway, not much to say here; at about 8pm we all made our way over to the Irvine Spectrum (a large outdoor mall for the area).

Clutch and I used our amazing navigation skills to get from the parking garage to the right place in the Spectrum, however it wasn't very hard to find, as there was a giant purple, glowing stage right next to a ferris wheel. Again, I spent this time walking around a bit and talking (if you couldn't tell, I love to network), but I also stopped in a few stores. The Barnes n Noble there actually had another Kerrigan poster, and put a bunch of Flashpoint and other Starcraft novels up out front to make some sales. There were also employees from the local stores handing out coupons (man, do I love pretzels), etc. Due to the fact that I had an awesome badge, I was able to get into the VIP area, which was literally right up on the front of the stage. From about 10pm to midnight I hungout with Carbots and his wife, and Traysent, (all really awesome people,) as we watched the EG.Suppy and ROOTVibe showmatch, just before the final countdown. Day9 and Husky also interviews Carbots, just before showing his , as well as Robert Clotworthy (Jim Raynor's voice actor), and Chris Sigaty. You can catch all these interviews from the Twitch channel as well.

Toward the end of the event, we all counted down to midnight, similar to you would on New Years Eve, with the 12:00 marker launching confetti, lots of lights, and the ferris wheel lighting up purple and yellow, which was a really cool sight to see. The night ended with us getting lost, missing the shuttle, and Traysent saving the day. Once we all got a special present from the Blizzard employees, I headed back to the hotel with Carbots and his wife, Temp0, and ChanmanV to conclude the night. The day ended like it began, just like an ironic movie, hanging out in the lobby. Of course, my flight back was at 6:45am, so while they all slept, I just sat and waited for my flight home, caught a shuttle to the airport at 5:30am, and got home around 10am after all said and done... and then of course, after passing out, I had to play some Heart of the Swarm!

Heart of the Swarm Game

I won't spoil anything within the Swarm campaign, I'll just my very brief, general thoughts on the game. Honestly, I thought this was one of the best storylines of any Blizzard game, to date. That may be quite a bit, as it's competing with the campaigns/stories of the entire Diablo series, the Warcraft RTS series, and SC1, BW, and WoL. I just feel like Swarm was exactly what I needed, personally, out of the Starcraft series, at this point in time. It set up Legacy of the Void for a perfect conclusion to the series. Once you complete Swarm, I feel it's pretty obvious the direction Legacy will take the series to an end and it gives me nerd chills thinking about it, let alone the nerd chills I got at several points through the Swarm campaign as we met new and old characters alike. I'll give a much more in-depth write up at some point in time, once everyone has completed the game. If anyone needs catching up on the lore of Starcraft as a whole, I joined Clutch on NASL.tv to give a rundown of the story so far, up until Heart of the Swarm, including some of our own speculation. We'll be joining together next month to do a follow-up lore show about Heart of the Swarm and speculation about the future as well.

I hope you enjoyed y write-up of the experience I had at the live Swarm launch. If not, hopefully at least you got to see some cool pictures and videos, and got some insight into what goes on at Blizzard events. I got a chance to meet some really cool people (you all know who you are, ;) ) and genuinely had a blast. It was a nice change of pace for me, as I'm graduating from university pretty soon, and have been so focused on completing that. The next big Blizzard event at this point will be BlizzCon 2013, see you there!