351–360 of 557 posts
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You are right. Plus, the Diablo 2 remaster announced at the same time as Diablo 4 (IIRC) Based on past track record, I don't hold much hope, though
D2 resurrected looks like it's lining up to be fun. The company that was outsourced to rebuild has said they didn't want to fix d2. They wanted to overhaul it's graphics and give it QoL. Same bugs. Same game.
It's anecdotal, but I know at least five or six people who stopped playing blizzard games, especially HS, after they punished a player and staff for expressing support for Hong Kong in a post tournament interview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy
I'm one of those people, but let me tell you, they have made it very easy on me. They haven't made anything even vaguely interesting in years.
Sometimes I wish I had a character but I heard they are messing up classic by introducing power leveling!
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Overwatch is a frustrating game to play because they almost have it right. It's almost there, if they could just tweak a couple things. A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into. For one, it creates artificial and spiky emotions in players, which just burns people out. It's amazing they don't realize basic things like that, which means they actually haven't had the right tal…
This is the first time I'm hearing any complaints about the modern overtime system. It seems totally fair to me, the defending team has to actually win the final fight. What would you change about it?
Maybe if they took some of the CEO pay and put it into game development and community building... they wouldn't be losing players.
> https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-03-17-activision...
As a long-time fan of Blizzard games... have to say... what others have said mostly in here.
WoW... peaked in like 2010. They know this, and that's why they re-release WoW Classic. They have been slowly ruining what made the game fun by taking away the community and need for communication. It was too hard to make friends and form groups... so they built automatic group finders. Cool, except they didn't keep the core values in place. The game was about making friends. If you take that away... what's the point of a social game? They dumbed down all the stat weight mechanics to just a gear score. They had that whole expansion where you had to spend all your time not raiding in solo-player mode in your Garrison... oof. Just feels like the people they have running the games aren't actually gamers, but people who sit back and say, "How can I increase hours spent playing... WITHOUT making it more fun?" I hated all the modern cut scenes and NPC's who talked to you, "You're the greatest hero Azeroth has ever seen!" Oof. Like I don't need some pixel playing a recorded affirmation message, if I wanted that shit I'd play a single-player game. I need fun shit to do with friends, I need just enough down time and waiting while we travel between dungeons to talk to people and get a sense for who I like and who I don't. I quit in Wrath, but tried to go back a few times and each time it's pretty painful. So like fair to say I don't have enough experience with the game to say, but it really has no community feel at all to me any more. WoW Classic - relaunch under way.
Diablo... D3 sucked. It got a lot better with later releases, but on the whole it's pretty meh and has been pretty meh it's whole existence. The scaling is off, I don't know. Like you get in, and you play for 30 minutes, and you're instantly able to do like nightmare level 15... there's no effort to get there. There's no struggle, so there's no sense of achievement. All that's left is an endless grind, doing the same boring thing, hoping the "Primal Ancient" version of the item you need drops so you can do 1.5% more damage. Again, no community to speak of. They never had a way to monetize Diablo 3, and the "real money auction house" was a disaster. The content was always so stale, they just didn't make enough of it. Or make it challenging enough. When I play... you either zoom at max speed, or you get one-shot and killed. Other than equipping the right gear (based on the instructions of a website), doesn't ever feel like you make any meaningful choices when playing. There's no, "Oh I would have lived if I used X instead of Y..." moments. Always just, "I would have lived if I ground out 400 more stamina by doing ultra-repetitive rifts. Diablo 2 Remastered - relaunch pending.
StarCraft... Great game, I thought SC2 was well done. And... inexplicably it has sat dormant. SC2 was never as good as SC. StarCraft 2 Remastered - relaunch happened a few years back.
Overwatch... never played it. Don't do FPS. Looked fine, but I hear it's not as fun as PUBG or others. And apparently one of the new heroes really unbalanced some things.
Heros of the Storm... never played it. Not a fan of the the gimmicky "hero-based" RTS.
Hearthstone... tried it, it's just Magic the Gathering. It's fine, but I didn't have all the cards other people had so I couldn't win. I don't know, I'll blame that. I just wasn't into it. For me, too many bells and noises. Animations were too detailed. Every time you played a card, it gave you some sort of drawn out "oh look at this, this is happening!" animation and it felt like the game was slower as a result.
Lost Vikings... GREAT game for SNES back in the 90s. Re-release pending. Ha.
Overall theme... they stopped trying to build new great stuff, and just focused on re-releasing old great stuff. The old stuff appeals to some of the old players, maybe some of the new players, but pretty clear example of how a company can "run out of good ideas" and every bit of news you hear about how the company is run... layoffs, more layoffs... old founders starting a new company to get back to "good game development"... CEOs getting huge pay days... it doesn't sound like it's healthy.
Those are nearly free these days ;) (at least the online part). Maybe not current AAA quality, but nothing better than the raw speed and fraggin everything you can see (and where the crosshair sees it) with no waits and respawning every time...
Seriously, try one of them. Sauer or xonotic would be a nice start.
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> The game is incredibly stale This is what I would describe as the state of Overwatch. After sinking thousands of hours in this game, I stopped playing my favorite game because Blizzard didn't care. 1. They pretty much gave up on any new content for OW2 development. 2. Competitive was broken from the beginning. Good behavior was rarely rewarded and bad behavior was rarely punished. Most of my games were grind really…
you have a warped view of how the MMR/SR systems function essentially all that matters is your win-rate, if you can win more than 50% of your games over a reasonable stretch of time your MMR will increase and your SR will follow it performance based SR is only a very small bonus (up-to diamond) initial placement is essentially a guess: over 25 or so games your MMR will converge to where you're supposed to be (4200 su…
I find the competitive in OW especially bad considering other games like Apex really do it well. There is simply no excuse to ignore all of these problems. I’ve literally had games where 5 of my teammates quit, and I sit through it because I’ll lose SR to only find that I lost more SR by sticking around. It’s inexcusable.
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So true about WoW. Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder made it so you didn't need to find people or be in a guild to do these things. They also took the sense of enormity out of the world because you don't have to physically go places anymore. The deeprun tram, boats, zepplins were all such elegant solutions to create a breathtakingly open and connected world, and flying mounts & dungeon finder killed the feeling so quick…
The game became anonymous and lost the sense of having a server community and getting to know the regulars. Cross-realm everything and the phasing systems were fundamental changes. Being able to do things alone was always part of the design, but they made it where even the group things could be done "alone." It's nice to remove friction and pain points, but if you make the entire game frictionless there is no game le…
My favorite moments (and most hours spent) in that game were being so under-geared I'd drool in blues while I /inspect people in IF, desperate to find the next party/guild good enough to get some myself. Trying to figure out the perfect combination of saps and traps to kill a 3 pack. The occasional fear into a second pack, but the even more rare "teamwork" to actually survive (...thank god I threw up that soul stone, I almost never do...). What we got was item levels, rng oranges, and more rng loot boxes.
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Maps get stale when they lack depth and an evolving meta. Map size, assets, etc are almost completely irrelevant. Over watch gameplay and especially movement is largely the issue here.
The meta is almost completely dependent on the hero balance at the time IME though, outside of Havana always having snipers at the top levels.
It's anecdotal, but I know at least five or six people who stopped playing blizzard games, especially HS, after they punished a player and staff for expressing support for Hong Kong in a post tournament interview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy
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Because I can? I said nothing about anonymity. Odd... I'm from an age when anominity was a good thing. But do encourage all the current folks to move away from it, because I want to see them fail. Lol I dont support any social media company. Social media is a net negative for the human experience, but that's just my opinion. I'm just a person who found the internet more fun before it needed to be safe for day time te…
> " Because I can? I said nothing about anonymity. Odd... " Not odd at all. You claim to be "standing up against something" but you aren't, you're not standing there, you're hiding. Your actions undermine your words. Rosa Parks didn't write an anonymous letter to the editor about people's right to sit on bus seats. Those who did write anonymous letters to the editor about it don't get to say "I'm standing up for blac…
I agree that private companies can do as they please.
Im not warring in any greater sense than im warring against big business when I buy a recycled product over another. I support companies that, in my view, support principals I care about.