Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

I may have allegedly jumped for joy earlier today after receiving this news, “Congratulations! You’ve been selected to participate in the beta test of World of Warcraft®: Mists of Pandaria™.” All of my previous evening plans have been cancelled. The download is currently running in the background. Pandora is streaming some music and my Netflix account has been queued up for an all night “How I met your mother” episode  marathon.

World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria Beta Test software Download

The WOW beta software download worked. The first time I tried to launch the game I got a strange error, “This application has encountered a critical error: ERROR #132 (0×85100084) Fatal exception!” I sent the error off to Blizzard. I’m hopeful that the Blizzard game engineers will be able to fix the issue this weekend. You have to wonder about what percentage of the beta group are running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview operating system…

WOW Beta Fatal Run Error

Here is a screenshot of the uber-sweet WoW exception error in the wild…

WOW Beta Run Error

A solution to the World of Warcraft (WoW) beta ERROR #132 is easy to implement. This discussion of a workaround is provided for entertainment purposes only. I will not provide any warranty for this solution express or implied. If you implement this solution, then you do so at your own risk. The two step solution takes about five minutes and requires no real knowledge of programming.

Step 1: I opened the standalone version of World of Warcraft and copied my Account, config, and launcher files from the WTF directory to the beta implementation WTF folder.

WoW Beta WTF Files

Step 2: I opened the config file using notepad and added one line to the top of the file: SET gxapi “d3d9″

WoW Config set gxapi

After completing steps one and two, I was able to load the World of Warcraft®: Mists of Pandaria™ beta. I hope you agree that the WoW ERROR #132 fix described in this post was easy to implement.

WoW My 1st Panda

The World of Warcraft®: Mists of Pandaria™ beta is pretty crowded at the moment. It looks like a couple hundred people are handing out in the same staging area.

The beta has so many pandas

Full disclosure: I purchased Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo III with my World of Warcraft (WOW) annual pass a while ago. That disclosure aside, please sit back relax and enjoy my review of the Diablo 3 (D3) beta release. Blizzard provided just enough game play to get a sense of how the game was designed. After about an hour of gameplay, I successfully defeated the skeleton king and got the message, “Congratulations! You have defeated the Diablo III Beta.” I built a barbarian and played within public games. Collaborative gameplay was a hallmark of Diablo 2 (D2) and a key element of WOW. The graphics engine used to power D2 allowed designers to setup fields of game play and defined path dungeons. From what I could tell while testing the beta release the designers have adopted a mixture of very well defined paths for characters mixed with some more open areas.

D3 WOW Pass Deal

I downloaded the Beta Patch 15 version of the D3 beta. The download process took about an hour.

D3 Beta Launch

I have already pre-downloaded the D3. The Beta Patch 15 release has been fairly stable. Sporadic outages did limit gameplay for the beta testers.

D3 Beta Patch 15 Downtime

Here is a screenshot of my first D3 character Snackfu.

My 1st Diablo 3 Character Snackfu

From what I can tell after getting the, “Congratulations! You have defeated the Diablo III Beta” message people are making additional charters to play all of the different types of characters.

Congratulations! You have defeated the Diablo III Beta.

Blizzard has to be careful about splitting the WOW and D3 gaming communities. I wake up as close to 5:00 AM mountain time every day as possible. On the weekends, I have elected to play video games for a couple hours to decompress from the week. I have spent a few Friday evenings listening to Pandora internet radio and playing Blizzard entertainment products. I’m not sure if I will want to give up playing WOW in favor of transitioning over to D3. Obviously, Blizzard entertainment designers have the capacity to make great products. People are still playing D2. We will see what happens.