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Blizzard Entertainment has announced that a ladder reset will take place today for Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. The reset paves the way for this year's Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne 2010 Tournament.

We have completed our back-end testing of the scheduled ladder reset for the Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne 2010 Tournament. We will officially be resetting the ladders on Monday, April 5. Thank you all for your patience.

Warcraft III The Frozen Throne Tournament 2010:
We're pleased to announce the Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne 2010 Tournament. The upcoming tournament will use a similar format to those of previous years, with three invitational ladders hosted on the Kalimdor, Northrend, and Azeroth Gateways. Once again, these ladders will initially be populated on an invitation-only basis and feature the world's most established and successful Warcraft III players. Each will function as a standard Battle.net solo ladder, with their own Web interface displaying rankings and their own map pools.

WC III Frozen Throne Ladder Reset

Blizzard Entertainment

WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne

Buy WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne

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Two Worlds Vault has posted a new interview with Reality Pump CEO Mirek Dymek about the company's upcoming RPG, Two Worlds II. The interview focused on the multiplayer game's options for players. Two Worlds II will send players to the unexplored land of Eastern Antaloor and will feature detailed graphics, an active combat system, and a complex storyline.

TWVault: Can you tell us something about the PVP aspect? Will there be balancing involved, allowing e.g. a pure melee player to defeat a mage-oriented character?
-Mirek Dymek: New modes, as I said, may come in time. For now we have three basic types of online activity, with guild village, PVP and co-operative mode, and some unusual stuff like horse racing. The balancing… that is the hard part. Frankly, you can’t really balance out an archer vs. a warrior, simply due to the archetypes’ designated strengths and weaknesses. We did an astounding amount of mathematical balancing, excruciating spread-sheet analysis for months on end, just to balance out PVE. And it was a daunting task, believe you me. We have 3 classes of NPCs, monsters, what have you – they all have different paths of development, strengths and weaknesses. We started out with a goal of making typical fights here last for 6-7 hits to kill an enemy, but the player vs AI dynamic has been further complicated by the inter-AI combat as well… I’m telling you, this was no small task, and to take it into PVP realm… Just boggles the mind. A simple archer may damage you for a small damage, that already depends on an immense amount of factors. Now, take Multihit skill into account, this damage grows (or lessens) depending on targets chosen and arrows physically landing on a target. That adds a whole new layer of complexity towards the real-time PVP combat. PVE killrate (or amount of hits to kill a typical “mob”) is quite stable and level-based, but amount of additional skills and abilities that can play into that makes it a much more intricate system – and an unlimited system when those skills are rolled against one another. We’re currently just starting multiplayer balancing and it’s going to take us a while.

Two Worlds Vault: TW II Multiplayer

Two Worlds II

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Mac.Blorge.com has posted a short article on playing Quake II using the Safari web browser and without the need for Flash. The feat is possible thanks to a recent port of the Quake II engine to HTML5.

Google’s Web Toolkit Blog brings us the superlative news that they’ve ported the Quake II engine to HTML5. No, this isn’t ready for prime time — some command line voodoo is required — but gussying up the code with a point n’ click user interface shouldn’t be too difficult.

"We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!”"

Again, to play Quake in either Chrome or Safari, you’ll need to download, compile, install and run the code, as well as some necessary add-ons, like Ogg Vorbis and lame. That said, you can get started here.

Mac.Blorge.com: Quake II Safari, No Flash

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Gamer Informer has published some new concept art for Valve Software's upcoming first person action puzzler, Portal 2. The company recently announced that Portal 2 will be making its way to Mac users along with the Steam digital download service and the company's other game titles.

While our month of Portal 2 coverage has officially drawn to a close, it isn’t going to deter us from sharing one final look at the game with fans. Check out the gallery for the complete collection of all Portal 2 assets we’ve shared throughout the month, including screens, concept art, and character renders. Additionally, there are a handful of never-before-seen images tucked away below.

Game Informer: Portal 2 Concept Art

Valve Software

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