Robert Rodat, best known as the screenwriter of Saving Private Ryan and The Patriot, will now try his hand at adapting World of Warcraft for the big screen.

Warcraft film director Sam Raimi revealed that Rodat will handle the writing duties in a recent interview with MTV News. Read more »

No longer will the choice between Horde and Alliance be so daunting, as Blizzard today launched a service to let World of Warcraft players change their character's faction.

"Each Faction Change costs $30.00 USD (not including applicable taxes)," the company explained in an FAQ. This covers a single Faction Change for a single character." Read more »

Several sources "close to the situation" have told WoW.com that the next World of Warcraft expansion will diversify the game's population with two new playable races.

The expansion--rumored to be dubbed "Cataclysm"--will add the Goblin race to the Horde side, with the Alliance gaining the werewolf-like Worgen race, according to the report. Read more »

World of Warcraft has netted 8.6 million sales across its various releases, expansion packs and bundles from US retail, according to NPD data provided to Gamasutra.

The figure includes the base edition of World of Warcraft, the Collector's Edition, its two expansions The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and Battle Chest bundle. Read more »

Blizzard is preparing "a new service" that will allow World of Warcraft players to change their character's faction from Alliance to Horde or vice versa, the developer has revealed.

"The basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm," the studio wrote, noting "there's still much work to do and many details to iron out." Read more »

Blizzard has revealed that the upcoming "Call of the Crusade" content patch for World of Warcraft will deliver a new player-versus-player battleground capable of supporting up to 80 combatants in the "ongoing struggle between Horde and Alliance."

Of the five battlegrounds currently in Blizzard's ultra-popular PC MMO, only one other--Alterac Valley--supports up to 80 players. The remaining four max out at 30 or below. Read more »

The next major World of Wacraft patch will bring a new look for the animalistic Druid class in the form of texture options for its cat and bear forms.

"There will be five different designs for each of these forms for the Horde and Alliance," writes Blizzard. The company plans to introduce out the new designs in four screenshot installments, the first of which highlights the five new textures for the tauren bear form (seen left). Read more »

Blizzard today updated its ever-popular MMO World of Warcraft to 3.1.2, adding a new equipment manager that allows players to easily toy with their loot, in addition to various class tweaks.

Grab the patch on FileShack for the US, UK or German editions. Read more »

Rolling its weekly charts into one monthly bundle, sales-tracking firm NPD has compiled a list of the 20 best-selling PC games at US retailers during March 2009.

As seen below, Empire: Total War has ended Lich King's four month-long reign of the monthly charts, with the Diablo and StarCraft Battle Chests continuing to hold ground. Read more »

Now available over on FileShack is the 3.0.9 to 3.1.0 World of Warcraft patch.

This latest update to Blizzard's monstrously successful MMORPG adds Ulduar, a new dungeon where you'll fell Titans and their metal minions, as this story trailer explains.

Blizzard dedicates the patch to the memory of D&D co-creator Dave Arneson. Read more »

A new Nielsen report on PC and console game usage estimates that a surprising number of female World of Warcraft characters may in fact be played by real females.

In a chart comparing the PC game usage of females and males aged 25-54, World of Warcraft was the most-played "core" game for females, with over 428,621 unique female players estimated in December 2008. Read more »

Animal rights group PETA is using World of Warcraft to launch a new propaganda campaign against Canadian seal hunters.

The campaign draws a parallel between the in-game slaughter of seals by Horde characters and the real-life hunting of seals in Canada.

"Thrall refused to ban the slaughter of seals, despite multiple requests from the Alliance to do so, because Orgrimmar stands to make a large profit from the fur," writes PETA on its blog. Read more »

Former World of Warcraft lead designer and current next-gen Blizzard MMO director Jeffrey Kaplan today detailed a behind-the-scenes system of drop percentages secretly added in the WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King.

The system, called "progressive percentages," was cribbed directly from Blizzard's own Warcraft 3, which used it for critical hit mechanics. It relates to how and when quest items drop from creatures--an important issue to all WoW players. Read more »

Blizzard has released a preview trailer for Ulduar, the new dungeon included in the anticipated World of Warcraft 3.1 patch.

World of Warcraft developer Blizzard has unveiled the next major addition to its successful PC MMO, the Ulduar dungeon, which will arrive via the 3.1 patch.

Available to those players with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Ulduar is described as the game's "most ambitious raid to date." It kicks off with players utilizing a fleet of siege vehicles to face off against a "massive iron army" before encountering the Flame Leviathan tank, a boss that requires combatants to rely on those siege vehicles. Read more »