Blizzard have been quietly, modestly honing and perfecting their movie making skills over the last decade. They’re now quite good at doing CGI sequences where a woman looks confusedly at her hands, and her hands start glowing with some nice wispy particle effects, and then she points her hands at a baddie and lots of magic comes out while both the baddie and the woman look surprised about it. So you should be excited that the opening cinematic of upcoming World of Warcraft expansion Mists of Pandaria will be shown on day one of Gamescom – that’s August 16. It might feature a panda with magic hands.
The cinematic will be showcased on giant screens at the Blizzard booth, and while the Battle.net blog hasn’t mentioned whether the event will be live-screened, previous Gamescom revelations have been broadcast for the entire world to enjoy. Of course, Blizzard’s intro cinematics are events in themselves. The Diablo 3 opener was premiered during the VGAs last year and showed off the individually rendered beard hairs of a high-def Deckard Cain. Here it is now, if you’d like to be reminded of Blizzard’s talent for this sort of thing.
Meanwhile, you can check out our impressions of Mists of Pandaria’s starting area.