The Looking for Group Expo is planned as a fan gathering for everyone who plays massively multiplayer online games, from the most obscure Korean import to the World of Warcraft player who couldn't get into BlizzCon. The show's goal is to "provide the ultimate experience for all MMOG and virtual world fans to check out what's new in the world of MMOs as well as meet friends across all games and participate in exciting MMO related events." Events like LAN parties, concerts, private screenings, guild meetings, and game demonstrations.

The first annual show is being held on June 25th through the 27th in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which could possibly be the most neutral ground on the planet. The event is being organized by Last Straw Productions, itself an MMO Studio and organizers of the annual Independent MMO Game Developers Conference.

Events and exhibitor listings are still pending, though the show does have a website you can keep track of, as well as a rather primitive-looking CG advertisement video, which you can check out below.

It's a great idea, but we won't know how the Looking for Group Expo pans out until the first one goes down. We'll see what happens come June!

But before we get our chance one question remains: Which show had the best dress up?

Take your time, look through the pics of cosplay from Germany's Gamescom, Blizzcon, Penny Arcade Expo and the Tokyo Game Show and then cast your vote. Four will enter, one will leave.

"BlizzCon is operated at a substantial loss for the company," he said. "It's a huge marketing opportunity, so that's the benefit we get out of that. But in terms of any kind of financial gain, it actually is a loss for us."

To give you an idea, then, of how much holding the show costs, consider that 20,000 people bought tickets this year. At $125 a ticket, that's $2.5 million. So for the company to make a "substantial loss" on the show, it must cost a lot.

Then again, when you're Blizzard and you get all that WoW subscription money, you can afford to throw lavish parties for your fans every year.

Blizzard incurs 'substantial loss' from BlizzCon [GameSpot]

BlizzCon's "purple girl" seems to be leading the charge for all things Warcraft, while in Germany the all-female cast of Metal Gear Solid were rocking Gamescom.

Here's your chance to decide which of the gatherings brought out the best in creative game-related costume design.

I briefly got my hands on both the Goblins and the Worgen during BlizzCon 2009, and while I wasn't able to experience either area from start to finish, I played enough to realize that these two races are getting far better treatment than ten previous could ever dream of, all thanks to the bar set by Wrath of the Lich King's Death Knight starting area.

The Death Knight starting experience was unlike anything seen before in World of Warcraft. It introduced new gameplay elements such a zone phasing, which allowed for the area the player was playing in to change drastically during the course of their adventure, while adding in various mini-games to help the player feel that they were playing a larger role in the story. Blizzard takes these elements and applies them to the starting areas for the Goblins and the Worgen, The Lost Isles and Gilneas.

The demos for both races started off at level six. During my interview with lead developer Tom Chilton, he explained that this was simply because the 1-5 areas weren't quite finished, and they felt the 6 and up areas offered a more complete grasp of what they were trying to do.

Both races reach level 6 under dire circumstances. Your Goblin character winds up dead on the docks following a shipwreck, with an NPC desperately trying to revive him using everyone's favorite Goblin engineering item, the Goblin Jumper Cables. Once you've come to life, you set off on a series of quest to help your fellow greenskins recover from the traumatic wreck. The very first quest requires you blast open escape pods, with each freed NPC referring to you by name, hinting at a much more intimate story leading up to the beginning of the demo.

The Lost Isle takes a cue from Northrend in terms of design, presenting a much more vertical experience than standard World of Warcraft zones have in the past. You'll find yourself looking down on areas you've visited previously, in between run-ins with explosive-throwing monkeys, Alliance sailors, and the shadowy rogues of the SI:7.

Aiding in my explorations were the Goblin's two active racial abilities, Rocket Barrage and Rocket Jump. Barrage fires a barrage of missiles at a foe, while Rock Jump launches the Goblin forward for a tiny speed boost, perfect for escaping unsavory situations. The latter should make Goblin rogues absolutely insufferable.

While my time as a Goblin rogue was brief, I did come away with a strong feeling that Blizzard is intending on making Goblins serious Horde business, while maintaining the same lighthearted tone they have with Gnome society these past five years.

On the Alliance side of things, your Worgen wakes up in stocks, with NPCs arguing over whether or not you deserve to live or die. Can you control your curse, or will it consume you? Right from the start it is obvious that Blizzard is taking the werewolves quite seriously. Soon you find yourself freed, tasked with finding ingredients for a potion to help curb your more feral tendencies and helping defend the city from an undead invasion.

Where The Lost Isles are sunny and cheerful, Gilneas is dark and bleak. There's still the same sort of verticality to the playfield, with hills rolling a bit more than hills had rolled previously, but all in all it's a very familiar looking place. Think Darkshire and you're heading in the right direction.

Perhaps if I had tried the Worgen first I would have been a bit more impressed, but after the bright, humorous Goblin experience, the Worgen just felt like a bit of a letdown. It felt less like an exciting new race, and more like humans in furry outfits. In fact, one of their racial abilities lets you shift back and forth between human and Worgen, which means you essentially are a human in a furry outfit, albeit one that can run very fast for 10 seconds at a time on a 3-minute cooldown timer. Another new race that should give rogues even more ways to run away. It could just be that the excitement from levels 1-5 was more necessary to the Worgen experience than Blizzard expected. I suppose we will find out sometime next year.

Still, I can see the direction Blizzard is going in, making the starting areas for these two new races the same kind of epic experience as the Death Knight. My only worry is that rolling a Dwarf, Troll, or Gnome is going to be a great deal less appealing once Cataclysm comes out, unless Blizzard plans to share the innovation with every race.

The subject of StarCraft: Ghost came up during my interview with StarCraft II art director Didier as a joke at first. I asked him when StarCraft: Ghost was coming out, and he replied, "Didn't you get it? It was out at GC in Germany, running on the PS Slim or whatever they're calling it," he teased. I mentioned reading the StarCraft: Ghost novel, and how it really made me want to play the game that didn't exist. "Oh it exists," he replied.

"We actually looked at a lot of the art assets so we could include them in specific missions in the game, or if there was a specific installation in Ghost that we wanted to include in StarCraft II. We look at all our assets."

He likens it to the situation with the cancelled Warcraft: Lord of the Clans adventure game. "Originally Lord of the Clans was like that. We cancelled Lord of the Clans for a lot of similar reasons, but Thrall ended up as the biggest character in the Horde. I'm not saying that's Nova, but we're definitely not throwing away the lore."

It's good to know that all of that StarCraft: Ghost development didn't go to waste. If you're interested in of the lore behind Ghost and its lovely protagonist Nova, be sure to check out the StaCraft: Ghost Nova novel, recently featured in our 2009 Summer Reading List.

It's nearly a year later, and Diablo III game director Jay Wilson is now sporting a rather fetching bit of beardage, but the legendary shirt is nowhere to be seen. The outpouring of demand was readily evident, and third-party companies have made a tidy sum producing knock-offs of the design. Where's the real deal?

"The shirt wasn't produced through normal Blizzard channels," Jay explains. "It was something the team had made on their own." Therefore the shirts never underwent any sort of official approvals process, which explains why Blizzard didn't immediately put them up for sale. There's still hope though.

"It's our intent eventually to make them. Whether we make them for public consumption I'm not sure - I don't see why not. I've got other fish to fry." I think we can all agree that working on getting the game finished is slightly more important than releasing a silly t-shirt. Slightly.

As for third-party bootlegs, Blizzard is aware, and will frown in a legal fashion at any company that seeks to make their own unauthorized versions.

The art director for StarCraft II when he isn't belting out vocals for Blizzard's house band, The Artists Formerly known as Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain, was quite vocal about keeping things fresh across the Terran, Protoss, and Zerg campaigns during our interview at BlizzCon 09. "We definitely have ideas that we haven't include in this one to keep the next games unique. We always joke around that every expansion has to have the snow tileset, so there we go, we've got the snow tileset. We do that just for a goof. "Hey, there's the snow tileset!""

All joking aside, Sam explains that certain ideas have been held back for the two single player expansions, in order to ensure that each has its own unique flair.

"There's a lot of really cool unit ideas that we have that we probably could have squeezed onto one of these, but instead we wanna let them shine more in the next one - let them be a little more unique. This is an expansion, but it's the Zerg campaign or the Protoss campaign. It's not like a one-off sort of thing. It's gonna have all its unique sets.

"We're going to go back to the same planets. My hope is that we can affect those planets somehow, so if you're on Korhol in Wings of Liberty, when you return in the Zerg campaign or the Protoss, I want something radical to have happened to it or changed, whether a change in leadership or some "Cataclysmic" event," he jokes, referring to the newly announced World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion.

"That's the sort of thing that I really dig. I love it in movies when you see a character from the original one except now he has a cool hatchet wound on his face - what happened to him? So basically we'll put hatchet wounds on the planet. The +2 hatchet of doom!"

Did I mention I love this man? He's like me, only with a fully-working face and hair. He's even at my same skill level in StarCraft. "Everybody is better than me. I get beat by the UI. Not the AI, the UI. Waitaminit, what do I have to build here? What, I have to build a - ah damn."

New lands are all well and good, but seeing places where I've spent countless hours over the past five years completely changed is simply spectacular. Changing the existing world so drastically is an amazingly elegant way of adding new content without slapping another undiscovered landmass or alternate dimension to the game.

Some of our readers were a bit put off by the suggestion that the single player portion of StarCraft II would require logging into Battle.net, as evidenced by some of the comments in the post following the Battle.net panel at BlizzCon this weekend. The next day we followed up on the issue with Blizzard vice president of game design Rob Pardo, who clarified the single player situation for us.

"You don't technically have to (login), but you'll want to. You can play in offline mode if you want - I just don't think you're going to want to. You'll be giving up lots and lots of features, and why would you want to be giving up features?"

We covered the features exhaustively in the original post, but perhaps we didn't draw your attention to the button on the above screenshot labeled "Play As Guest." That button kicks off the game without connecting, so those of you without internet who couldn't possibly be reading this post should be happy, unless they try to set up a LAN.

To give you folks a little background information, the BlizzCon press room is a place of joy and wonder. They line two walls with kiosks playing the games available on the show floor, so the press can play without having to be complete jerks, butting into the front of hundreds of patiently waiting fans. They also have excellent Italian dinners, which I stopped eating the moment a Diablo III kiosk went free, leaping over rows to furiously-typing journalists for my chance to play the Monk.

The Monk demo started out in the Sundered Pass, an area of shifting desert sands. An NPC sporting the signature yellow exclamation point quest marker tasked me with travelling out into the wastes to find something or some such. Honestly? I wasn't paying all that much attention to what she was saying. I wanted to get out into the sands and kick some ass, Street Fighter style.

Yes, the Monk has been designed with Street Fighter in mind. As lead designer Jay Wilson told me during our interview, there are a lot of fighting game fans on the Diablo III team, and they wanted a character that added a bit of that feel to the game. Have they succeeded?

It was hard to tell at first. The initial enemies you encounter are wasps, which pretty much go down in 1-2 hits, so the massive destructive power isn't nearly as evident. If I was lucky I'd pull off the full Exploding Palm, a combo move that leaves the enemy with a damage-dealing dot, making them explode in an extremely satisfying manner if it drains their heath completely.

As mentioned previously, many of the Monk's moves are combination moves - moves with multiple stages. The Exploding Palm, for instance, delivers a couple of weak hits before the third step, which applies the explosive damage effect.

As I progressed through the desert, strong enemies began to appear, including members of the demonic Fallen, who took more than a few mouse clicks to dispatch. The Monk's damage was fine against these larger creatures, but the differences between the Monk and the more powerful Barbarian became readily apparent the first time I took a heavy hit. The Monk isn't all that good at going toe-to-toe with enemies. The best tactic seemed to be to jump in, hit the enemy with a quick barrage of strikes, and then move before you get hit.

This became even more clear once I started running into large groups of enemies. Running in, feet and staff swinging wildly, did not work. I was quaffing healing potions like they were going out of style, and I actually managed to die. The key to large groups is the Monk's Seven-Sided Strike ability. A semi-ranged attack, the Seven-Sided Strike has you tearing through groups of enemies in a flashing display of holy power, leaving song dead, and some weakened. Combine it with the explosive effect of the Palm, and you've got a very effective way of taking out large groups without dying in the process.

The key to playing the Monk would seem to be in combining his combination powers to create your own play style. I didn't get to explore this much, with the limited skills at my disposal and the limited time I had to play, but one can easily see how a skilled player can turn the Monk into a devastating engine of destruction. It's a character class that will take a little work to master, but the results should be quite satisfying.

Ozzy is not exactly known for his clarity, so you'll have to forgive us if we cannot tell you exactly which game he was talking about being addicted to during Saturday night's interview. I'll go ahead and give you what he said, as best as I can make it out. Then you folks can help us fill in the blanks.

"The only one I ever played is that fucking (unintelligible) I got addicted to that instantly years ago was that fucking video game where the fucking guy jumps off the fucking cliff. Sort of this old (well, or whale?). I was playing all fucking night."

You can see where we might be confused. So far we've come up with several good suggestions. Owen suggested Jungle Hunt. Luke thought it might be World Games, with the cliff diving. Some of the members of the press I talked to after the interview thought it might be Super Mario Bros., or maybe even Lemmings.

I would have asked for clarification, but he then launched into a story about Sharon playing Tetris.

"Tetris - my wife got addicted to it. I remember lying in bed and saying, "Shit. Are you playing that fucking game?" And she'd say, "No." And then I'd hear "Bastard! Fucking asshole!" And then the exploded one (exploding sound effect) in her fucking hands!"

That didn't help anything, did it? I sure hope her hands were okay.

So what are your thoughts? What cliff jumping video game was powerful enough to fell the prince of darkness? The fucking comments section is yours.

At a panel that took place while I was knee-deep in interviews, Blizzard introduced the new Sarah Kerrigan to the world, smashing previous rumors that voice actress Karen Strassman was taking over the role. Helfer is no stranger to video game work, having appeared in voice form in Spider-Man: Web of Shadows and Halo 3: ODST, as well as a live action appearance in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Is Helfer up on her StarCraft lore?

"It's intimidating to come into a game and do a job that you don't really know the history of it, I'm kind of a video game virgin in terms of playing. Personally I'm not technologically savvy," Helfer said at the outset of her introduction to the crowd. "At the time, I didn't know what Zerg and all these things were. It was fun to find out all these little differences."

Along with Helfer, the panel also revealed that original cast members Robert Clotworthy and James Harper would be returning as Jim Raynor and Arcturus Mengsk respectively, putting to rest earlier reports that Clotworthy wasn't deemed worthy to fill Raynor's space boots.

BlizzCon 09: Kerrigan Gets Cylon'd [IGN UK]

Among all of the changes coming in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, raising the level cap to 85 instead of following the pattern set by the game's previous two expansions is one of the strangest. Blizzard lead developer Tom Chilton took a little time during BlizzCon this past weekend to explain the smaller jump.

"It's certainly different. More than anything else it's a question of what we thought was the best use of our development time and what we thought the players really want the most. With this expansion we're delivering more total level up content than we have before - it's just not all post current max level."

But don't the players enjoy the rush to level up?

"We've gotten a lot of feedback from players that don't necessarily like it when an expansion comes out and they feel that they have to level up to the new max level as quickly as possible and then go back to their endgame activities. There are players out there who enjoy the level up experience, but by no means is it all of our players."

The decision all comes down to the goals of the expansion. With a brand new 1-60 experience on hand, the team really didn't need to put the endgame that much further out of reach for the influx of new Goblin and Worgen characters.

"In this case, we're trying to better balance the time and development effort we put into the different areas of the game. We're trying to make sure we get a little bit more endgame content while still appeasing the level up crowd with five more levels."

Diablo III's rune system, as we explained last year, is an ambitious feature in which every skill for every character can be modified using various runes, changing the way the skill affects enemies. One rune might simply add an additional attack to a skill, while others have more profound effects.

"We can't really do any runes for a skill until we've locked a skill down, and we're notorious for redoing things. When we do finally decide to lock a skill down, that's the point where we say, "Okay, now we can develop the runes for this." So we design out the runes for it, and we do those last."

SO the system, itself involving a massive amount of brainstorming and design work, is dependent on having skills set in stone. With four characters revealed and a fifth and final one still waiting in the wings, it feels as if a fully-realized Diablo III is a long way off, no matter how polished the demos were at the show.

Jay continued, giving us a status on each character. "The wizard and the barbarian both have runes - the wizard has the most, and the barbarian has some. The witch doctor has a few as well, ."

After running into confusion with internal testers over why some powers had runes and others didn't, the team decided to turn the feature off until they could deliver a more complete version of the rune system.

"It was a big disappointment that we couldn't show the runes off in their entirety, but hopefully the next time we do a big unveiling of the game they'll be there."

It wasn't too bad this year, truth be told. Initially I came out relatively light, only picking up the Murloc nOObz figure for $30 plus a t-shirt and Murloc plushie for a close personal friend of mine whom I hope to ply with presents. Then Stephen Totilo's former co-worker Tracey John showed up. Tracey and I like to pal around during shows, and while I was taking photos of cosplayers and the show floor, she suggested we stop by the store, to which I said, "Sure. I'll just...go with you and buy more stuff." I cave so easily that people don't even have to make an argument.

The second trip resulted in the $30 nOObz Ragnaros, a $30 special BlizzCon edition of the World of Warcraft comic book hardcover, and another Murloc plushie, so the first would have a friend. That's exactly how I ended up with two cats, and I suspect it's how Noah came up with the whole ark idea. Tracey John was probably involved somehow.

Ozzy Osbourne took the stage around 7:45 PM at the Anaheim Convention Center to help bring BlizzCon 2009 crashing to a close. Thousands of fans screamed along as he burned through classic songs like "Iron Man", "Paranoid", "War Pigs", and the song featured in Blizzard's World of Warcraft ad, "Crazy Train." Ozzy seemed to be having a great time on stage, bowing to the crowd when he wasn't spraying them with a fire hose, but he wasn't so sure about the BlizzCon gig going into it.

"Coming here (unintelligible) to the show tonight I thought, "They're all gonna be like scientists and fucking brain brain (unintelligible) fucking audience." Glasses wearing spectacles and coke bottles. I didn't know what the fuck to expect. I kept saying to my wife Sharon, "Sharon, do you think you'll like me? Do you think they'll understand what I'm about?" And it was even better than some gigs I've done. It's a gift that I've had a good life through music."

The audience definitely understood what Ozzy was all about, singing along with all of his music - songs that were released before many of them were born. I was ushered behind the stage halfway through the set, where Ozzy's enjoyment of the crowd was evidenced across the countless video monitors scattered about the control area. Some time after the music went silent I was ushered into a well-furnished back room, where the aging rocker sat court in a chair that might as well have been a throne for the man's presence. As he talked, his hands shook, but his eyes never wavered behind his tinted circle shades.

I marveled with the man over the fact that his music has been embraced by the gaming culture - one that didn't even exist when he started his career.

"This video game where they play the guitar - my son is like "Hey dad, you gotta play this game." He's up for three days playing this game. The Rock Band people told me that up to a billion people play that game. A billion fucking people. That's a lot of fucking mouths. It's incredible. I doubt that many would buy my albums. You've gotta embrace it or you'll fall by the wayside."

And embrace it he has, though I'm not so sure he wasn't already one of us, if only in spirit. When I asked about the people wandering about it costumes - the scantily clad girls in blue paint and horns?

"I think it's fucking great. It's like the Star Wars bar."

Did Ozzy just make a Star Wars reference? Perhaps we're not so different after all.

Pardo was in good spirits when we spoke to him yesterday afternoon when I touched on the controversial subject, which has spawned a wave of forum rage and countless petitions calling for the reinstatement of feature. "You're the first person who asked me about that this weekend," he joked. When I asked if the company was still receiving flack over the decision, his good humor continued. "Only from you guys. Only from the press. Everyone else has accepted it."

Once I finished giggling, Rob got down to brass tacks.

"Everyone is going to give us flack until it's out. None of us is going to know how big a deal it is until it's out. We believe that it's really not that big of a deal - that most people are not really going to notice that it's missing. There's a lot of people out there I think that are just afraid that they're suddenly not going to be able to connect to the internet tonight and they won't be able to play. I actually think that case is extremely rare, and I think we're going to be okay."

And what of the rare cases where no direct-connection option wouldn't be okay?

"There's a few legitimate cases that we're going to try and address over time. Location-based tournaments, or let's say I'm in a dorm with a firewall or something like that, hopefully there's a way to determine that and maybe start a peer-to-peer game."

So it really doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but as Pardo said, we won't really know until the game comes out.

That, of course, is Ozzy Osbourne, this metal legend who set the crowd at BlizzCon's closing ceremonies on fire tonight, playing classic songs like "Iron Man", "Paranoid", "War Pigs", and of course, "Crazy Train." When he wasn't setting the crowd on fire, he was spraying them with a fire hose, or dumping water on them, or just basically being Ozzy, which is what he does best.

And check this out:

I took that in the backstage area, while waiting for an interview with the man himself. Stay tuned to Kotaku for that interview and much more, once I actually figure out what Ozzy was saying.

Rows of computers and lines - that about sums it up. There are some statues as well, some of which we've seen before, and a lot of blackness. Just tons and tons of blackness. There's a nice long wall for people to write there names, which was nice until it became illegible, and a space for people to decorate their blank nOObz Space Marines, which is a fine thing. There are always plenty of places to spend your money, which is perfect for those of you allergic to not being poor, like me.

And no, I wasn't stalking the Queen of the Blades statue.