I can't really tell you what's going on with World of Warcraft these days. When I stopped playing, there was no achievement system, the machinery seemed reasonably steampunky, and you couldn't level past 60. Motorcycles? No way. Back in my day, we fought VanCleef and we liked it! And then I encountered someone who kept responding with "KK LOLZ" to everything we typed and realized I didn't want to become that guy.
Now, the game sounds like it's gone completely bananas and barely resembles the game I obsessively played through two cycles of the beta and the first year or so of the live game. Take, for example, this shot from MMO Champion's investigation of the upcoming 3.1.2 patch:
ROBOTS!!!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!! They're described as being new mini-pets that can be summoned and refueled. This seemed totally out of place for World of Warcraft to me, but remember, my knowledge is way, way, way out-of-date. I briefly exchanged words with Andy McCurdy, our resident raider and obsessive WOW player, and he said it's not so far-fetched when you consider that the Ulduar raid dungeon is full of tons of evil robots and sentries and stuff.
WOW Insider picked up the story, stared at the images for awhile, and speculated that the robot pets, which can be refilled with red or blue fuel, would be some kind of tie-in with the upcoming Warcraft-themed Mountain Dew flavors, which are supposed to hit at some point this summer. Like the in-game fuel, the Dew will come in red or blue, and the "Game Fuel" title has "fuel" right in the name!
Seems pretty plausible to me. I ran the story past Blizzard to see what they'd have to say about these probably awesome and possibly Dew-fueled machines and received back something that sounded a lot like "no comment."
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