Yep. Only a multi-billion dollar company like Microsoft with unlimited amounts of cash can launch a game everywhere across the world all at the same time.

The stage shown above just repeated the Halo 3 trailer over and over. Nothing live or I might have missed it.

I was really disappointed with the swag. There wasn’t anything free. Once you buy a copy of the game, then you get a crappy bag with one of those imprinted pictures that look like it will fade in 3 washes.

And now for more pictures of the Taipei launch:

And yes, the main station always has horrible traffic as you see in the pictures above.

Here are some picture of Microsoft’s hard earned money at work here in Taiwan’s Taipei Main Station underground shopping mall when I was walking through there earlier today.

Instead of giving a full blow-by-blow of the day (other sites like WoW Insider does a better job at this than I can), here’s how my day turned out.

11:10 am

Arrived at the convention center. Yes I’m a lazy bum. There was also traffic on the way to the convention center.

Right as I was stepping into the main convention area, I see a bunch of people leaving. I guess I just missed the opening ceremony.  Instead there’s just a sea of empty seats.

11:30 am

Using my experience from Tech Ed, I decided to buy my souvenirs early instead of waiting. However, this is what I found:

This line was so long, it puts Disneyland lines (which by the way is just a few blocks away) to shame! They should have seriously put a “60 minutes from this point” sign. Now someone correct my understanding: I paid to get into a promotional convention, to wait in line for an hour and half, to give them more of my money? Hm… something doesn’t add up. In any case, here’s what I was able to get:

Just a couple of T-shirts and some posters.

1:00 pm

I’m very close to the counter now

But the next demo is about to start and the topic is WotLK!

1:15 pm

Finally got my stuff and watching the WotLK demo now. As an avid WoW player, you would think this announcement would be really exciting. However, I have quite the opposite reaction. Once they announced the “new” features in the next expansion, I felt the urge to quit. The thought of another 10 levels, does not feel appealing. Haven’t they learned from the mistakes of what happened from raising level caps from 60 to 70 in BC? Everything in the “old world” becomes deserted.

And the announcement of the new hero class: Death Knight. Sure that sounds exciting, but in order to “unlock” the new class, you’ll have to do yet another series of quests. Just sounds too painful rather than fun.

2:00 pm

After the end of the WotLK demo, I decided to go check out the booths the sponsors had setup. I’m still not sure how PayPal fits with Blizzard but they’re a sponsor so they also had a booth. I think everyone was also wondering the same thing as there was nothing (and no one) there besides a few laptops showing some pages on PayPal’s site and a “win a segway” contest.

Intel’s booth was really cool. They had a trailer jam packed with computers and plasma screens showing off their computers playing WoW. WoW isn’t exactly an intensive game though, but oh well, they’re at a Blizzard convention.

Next, I went to check out some of the play locations. Both the Starcraft II and WoW: WotLK play locations were jam packed with a huge line waiting to get in. Oh well, guess I’ll go try playing them tomorrow.

Finally the last location of the convention center was the contest area. This where they were showing Warcraft III/Starcraft and WoW Arena 2v2 matches.

3:30 pm

Decided to call it a day. Since I hadn’t eaten lunch yet, I figure I’ll leave early to get some food and attempt to beat the LA traffic.

Looking around the convention floor, I realized Blizzard is really a design company. All the awesome art everywhere just looks stunning. As a technology company, they’re really not cutting edge as some other gaming companies out there. I believe this is why Blizzard games are so successful and why WoW is so successful compared to other MMORPG’s: it’s not about the technology, but it’s about giving the gamer the full experience through art and story.

Well that’s it for Day 1 of my Blizzcon experience. For tomorrow, I’ll need to:

• Try out Starcraft 2
• Try out WoW: WotLK
• Learn how to play WoW: TCG

So back to Blizzcon. After driving over 8 hours going from San Francisco to LA, I finally got to the Anaheim Convention Center to pick up my badge. As if the drive wasn’t bad enough, they closed down the parking lot so we had to find parking elsewhere. The badge wasn’t anything special and was a let down compared to the badges I’ve seen from Tech Ed. Oh well, at least there are lots of cool looking posters to gawk at before tomorrow.

Though the badge was a let down, the Blizzard bag of goodies is definitely much better than the magazines and spam they stuff in the Tech Ed backpacks.

So what’s there to expect from this year’s Blizzcon? Besides the obvious Starcraft II, supposedly Blizzard will be announcing a new game that so far hasn’t been announced. Rumor has it it will be the next World of Warcraft expansion: Wrath of the Lich King. Other people say it could be Diablo 3. Blizzard has mentioned many times that they will be expanding the Diablo world with another game. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that there’s so many Diablo-related promotional material around the convention center.

Well that’s it for day 0. Day 1 starts Friday 8/3 at 10:00 am!