Blizzard has confirmed additional details about its plans to reveal the next World of Warcraft expansion.

The studio said last month that it would announce a new World of Warcraft expansion during an online event on April 19, and it has now confirmed exactly when and where fans can tune in.

Players will be able to watch the reveal stream on YouTube and Twitch from 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm BST / 6pm CEST.

World of Warcraft has received a new expansion roughly every two years since its 2004 launch, recieving it’s 8th expansion in November 2020 in the form of Shadowlands. With the 9th set to be announced during this livestream. Though historically World of Warcraft expansions have usually been announced at the studio’s own convention Blizzcon. The event has been suspended due to the global pandemic. This makes the upcoming expansion the first to be announced to a solely online audience.

“With the story in the Shadowlands coming to a conclusion, the time is at hand to get a sneak peek at what’s next for the heroes of Azeroth,” Blizzard said on Tuesday. However, keen-eyed fans may have already unearthed some hints about what could be in store for the game.

Dragonflight Rumours

Reported by Wowhead earlier this month, the expansion’s name may be ‘Dragonflight’. Unearthed from within the code of the official website, an update has been found which is thought to have leaked the name. the website’s public source code shows strings for the Dragonflight Base, Heroic and Epic Expansion pre-purchases. Similarly, the code points to a new, though currently inaccessible URL, which would be expected for a new expansion launch: dragonflight.blizzard.com.

This theory is corroborated by a second apparent leak which occoured on the same day. The leak reveals apparent key artwork for the expansion, along with a logo containing the same Name.The key art itself features Alexstrasza, the Dragonqueen of the Red Flight, in a new outfit never seen before, with her draconic form behind her. Though an imperfect view, the art is incredibly well-made, and appears to be in the form of posters similar to those found at BlizzCon and other events.

This seems to have all but confirmed to many, the prevailing theory that a dragon themed expansion was around the corner for the long running MMORPG. At the end of last year, Blizzard offered a Dragon Pack cash shop bundle, pairing several draconic mounts and minions together in a theming tactic used in the past to hint at future releases. Furthermore at the start of the year Wowhead uncovered new encrypted content going to live servers, which included textures and particle effects for a mount, a pet, and some additional items.The mount’s file name, 9fx_drakemountemerald_buff_4219045, suggested it to be a green dragon, known by fans to be the guardians of the druidic, Emerald Dream.

This led fans to speculate that the next expansion may take place on either the Dragon Isles, or Emerald Dream. Though the latter’s corrupted side, the Emerald Nightmare served as the setting for the opening raid of the Legion expansion, neither location has ever made it into the game as a fully explorable location. This is despite initial plans to include both from the very beginning, before the game’s 2004 launch.

All together, the leaks suggest that the Dragon Isles are the more likely of the two locations to become the setting of the next expansion. This lines up with what was suggested in an interview with game director Ion Hazzikostas, who implied that the team planned to follow up the more cosmic and high-concept setting of the Shadowlands, with something more terrestial and traditional for the games fantasy setting.

Whatever the expansion reveal ends up containing, we won’t know for sure until the livestream next week, on April 19

In other news, in May the studio will offer a preview of Warcraft’s first game built from the ground up for mobile, which is scheduled for release later this year.

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The post World of Warcraft expansion reveal stream, time announced first appeared on Get2Gaming.

The UK Pokemon Center is open for business!

The Pokemon Center, a vast online market for various Pokemon-themed merchandise that can’t be found in regular stores, has been available for US and physical stores have been placed across Japan. However now the UK have also been included in the chain of online stores featuring the cuddly creatures everyone knows and loves.

The website is still very early in its development – “We’re excited to welcome you with the best possible experience, but this site is still in its early stages, so you may see a few hiccups,” A note on the website states as its first customers load the page.

Go back to the year of 2019, where hours and hours of queues were itching for the look into the beloved pop up Center based in London. However as of now its simply a press of a purchase button and wait for “delivery in 3-6 days”.  – Pokemon Center UK Launch FAQ.

With a range of items between plush toy to clothing and even pins, searching for a Pokemon gift for a loved one this Christmas is easier than ever.

But keep in mind though – the best time would be to “order by 11:00 am GMT December 18 to allow for delivery by December 24,” as stated by the Holiday Shipping FAQ, otherwise your order may not make it in time for the 25th.

The post Soft-Launch for UK Online Pokemon Center first appeared on Get2Gaming.

Google taps into the Olympic spirit with this doodle

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games have officially started, with the opening ceremony happening at 12 pm GMT today, and Google has given us another way to celebrate all the Japanese history and culture we could have expected if we weren’t in the midst of a pandemic.

Introducing Doodle Champion Island Games, the 16-bit interactive doodle, created with Studio 4°C.

Doodle Champion Island Games

Doodle Champion Island Games is a series of Olympic event-themed 16-bit mini-games that you can access on the Google homepage from today. Playing as Lucky, the Calico Ninja Cat, players can choose to join from the choice of four teams (Blue, Red, Yellow, Green) that are represented by a different animal: Ushi (cow), Karasu (crow), Inari (fox), and Kappa (Japanese water spirit). Google will track the score of the four teams on a global leaderboard.

The seven mini-games revolve around new and returning Summer Olympic events such as skateboarding, climbing and table tennis, with each event having its own “Legendary Champion” from Japanese folklore and history to challenge.

Players will also be able to navigate Lucky through a festival populated with the games and champions, complete side quests, and experience the cut scenes created by Studio 4°C.

Doodle Champion Island Games is available to play now.

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The post Google’s New Interactive Doodle: An Homage to Video Games first appeared on Get2Gaming.

As I start writing this, Summer Solstice is upon us and I am surrounded by my comrades here at Go2Games, many of whom have been brought together by the one cataclysmic event that, whether we like it or not, unites each and every one of us – the global Covid-19 pandemic. We are all human and we are all beset by worries on a good day. Throw into the mix a global pandemic and those worries are magnified tenfold, with an added sense of existential dread. Will things ever be the same again? Probably not. Will my job still be there when all this is over? Who knows? Why do I feel weird about venturing out to see people who I’ve known for years? What am I even doing with my life right now? For many people – myself included – these are the questions that have beset every waking hour since the before times became, well, the before times.

Dealing with things over the last year has taken many forms – from Tiger King to Tik Tok, working from home to home workouts, banana bread to Dalgona, people have re-found themselves through new experiences that have helped while away the days, the weeks, the months and indeed the last year. However, there has been one thing above all else that has dominated time spent during lockdown that is not simply a lockdown fad, but rather a lifestyle choice – video gaming.

2020 saw an exponential rise in sales for video games, with an estimated £7bn spent on gaming last year. This was played out by the fact that almost two-thirds of adults here in the UK turned to gaming to help them get through lockdown and amongst the younger demographic of 16-24 year olds, 92% played video games during the pandemic. The key takeaway from all of this was that half of all gamers stated that playing video games helped them get through lockdown. As Coronavirus drew the curtain down on life as we knew it, it also made mincemeat of the one thread that holds most people’s lives together – structure.

Yet in a strange way, video games have given many people that structure to their lives, in a way that say, recorded music or films and TV shows are unable to. Turning your Ultimate Team on FIFA 21 into a world-beating outfit capable of taking any gamer in the world, figuring out how to eliminate Urias Strajer in Resident Evil Village on that brand-new PS5 you managed to somehow get yourself or reconnecting with your youth by picking up where you left off all those years ago on a Nintendo Switch with Mario Kart 8 have given spiritual sustenance, mental salvation and emotional fortitude to many worrying about whether they’ll ever be able to work again, or if their mum and dad might get Covid – or worse.

my local, smyth's, is coming along nicely. there's even some lad standing on a table next to the jukebox pic.twitter.com/Y5SECG08bo

— cian maher (@cianmaher0) March 19, 2020

I remember a time when video games were denounced as the next coming of Satan, the inspiration for school shootings – a claim that even Donald Trump made in casting blame in the wake of the Parkland shootings (nothing to do with social atomisation, gun culture and racism obvs) – and that “If you were Mario and you jumped on turtles, you were more likely to kill turtles in real life”. Yet the reality is altogether different. Video games have been the ointment to soothe and calm the worries and stresses that lockdown life has brought upon us, a way to connect with our friends in times of isolation and in some cases, a way to raise our glasses together to that most hallowed of British institutions – the local pub, recreated via Minecraft! As they say, if you can’t bring Mohammed to the mountain, you gotta bring that mountain to Mohammed! And this is just the thing – while building your local pub on Minecraft might seem like just a bit of a laugh, there are organisational skills, attention to detail, selectiveness and creativity all rolled into one task here, all of which are skills and abilities one might use in the workplace, in the classroom – in real life.

Of course, apart from our immune systems, the biggest assault launched by the pandemic was on our mental health. My personal happy place is creating/playing music, something which has been with me ever since my days as a toddler. Like video gaming, it is a place where one can operate solo, or collaborate with others. It is often said that politicians and politics are always well behind technology and the speed at which it advances (this may well be by design, as this writer anticipates the soon-to-be incontrovertible need for an egalitarian-like-Star Trek future of fully automated luxury communism in a world tended to by machines of loving grace). The social advances made by video gaming during the pandemic vis a vis the positive effect of gaming on mental health may well have helped to write a different narrative around the place of video games in modern society. No longer should video games be blamed for the ills of society when the research and evidence is there right in front of us that gaming has had a positive effect on the well-being of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here at Go2Games, we have done our best to ensure that people do not miss out on this, partnering with Crystal Palace Football Club to get games and consoles out to those disadvantaged families and places in need.

In the coming decades, we shall soon become a world that knows nothing other than the digital age, a world where gaming was either for some of us, always present and for others like me, something that began when we did. Where once video games were a lightening rod for everything seemingly wrong with the world, they are now increasingly becoming recognised as a force for good in this world (watch this space however for a stinging critique of sexism, racism and homophobia in the gaming universe – Incels, I am coming for you). Gaming has been proven to help stave off the early onset of dementia amongst the elderly (who knew Super Mario had it in him, eh mum?) and is now being credited with playing a major role in the combat against Coronavirus and its resultant social symptoms. It is now down to us to ensure that gaming grows from this point in history, that it remains a unifying force socially and culturally and that we learn from the part it has played in the fightback against COVID-19, the biggest of all bosses.

No turtles were harmed in the writing of this article.

The post Gaming in the time of Coronavirus first appeared on Get2Gaming.