481–490 of 557 posts
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It's odd how often people put studios and publishers together, when the relations are (often) a lot less close than people on the outside realise.
In this case though I can sort of understand it. Activision has invaded the battle.net launcher which was long reserved only for blizzard games. CoD is now right next to WoW in their launcher.
I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: They stopped development on Diablo 3 a long time ago. It doesn't have the staying power of more modern online games where new content is added continuously. They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends. Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has over…
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2/3's of the player base disagrees that healers and support are fun. Well more than the majority prefers dps. If I were going to single out one thing that I've never seen anyone mention it is that shields are 1 way only. It makes tanks too powerful and stable, thus support is needed, thus dps is third tier.
It's hard to theorize because Blizzard made so few tweaks to the game. I can't speak on "fun", but before 2/2/2 the problem was supports were way too powerful (Overwatch has always had a problem with supports being too powerful). The GOATS meta was a reflection of this where you were borderline throwing if you chose DPS. It's telling how many metas were driven by a support that was too powerful (Brigette; GOATS, Moth…
*Healing teammates*
Team mate: I need healing
Me: Im already healing teammate
Team mate: I need healing
Team mate: I need healing
Team mate: I need healing
*hasn’t stopped healing*
*Team mate dies*
LITERALLY NO HEALS. FFS HEAL!
End of Match
FFS HEALS UNINSTALL THE GAME.
Cards land.
Top healer of the match, 40% of damage recovered.
Me: What more do you fucking want???
For me, that’s I enjoy the least as being healer. I would rather have 0 comms than that. And the thing is, there is fuck all bliss can do to fix it. Dicks are gonna be dicks, idiots are always gonna be idiots.
EDIT: The other “fun” one is this.
Healers: “We have tracer and or doom fist fucking up out back line”
*tumbleweeds*
Healers: “hey, we are seriously getting are arses handed to us in the back line, can we get a bit of help just so they lay off our back line for a bit?”
*tumbleweeds*
Rest of the team: WHERE THE FUCK ARE RHE HEALERS?
Healers: “Dead, we are both dead. We can’t heal if we are dead or having to attack in order to keep ourselves alive because we have not backup. They have a Rein camping the spawn so I had to switch JUST to get out of the spawn room alive”
Rest of the team: FFS LITERALLY 0 HEALS.
ALSO GROUP THE FUCK UP. And don't spam "I need healing" and then go the opposite way to your healers (If we can't get to you or have LOS on you, we can not heal you), or spam it when you don't need healing (it takes our attenstion off those who do).
Oh and my personal fav(s).. Ask for heals, get a small heal then run away 2 sec's later and than complain you are not at full health, Or be a widowmaker way back away from the team snipping, spamming heals when you are standing 5 meters away from a large medipack. Or be a high mobility char getting healed, take 25% of damage thing "Fuck this PEACE", Leave by a means your healer can't only for your healer to then been stomped on (bonus points if you then complain about healing 0.5 seconds after leaving your healer).
And you wonder why we flip the fuck out, say fuck it and turn into a DPS Moria or a well booping Lucio?
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> Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has overlapping audiences with battle royale FPSes. The competition isn't driving away people from Overwatch. The game is incredibly stale, and IMO, is probably the death knell of full price online games. There has been little to none new content and changes to the game. The competitive community has always complained a…
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…
(Just as a point of reference I played up until the hamster release)
I would say that the core design of characters with cooldown skills and very powerful ultimates that need to be chain to team wipe opposition ARE the crux of why everything is impossible to do right in the Overwatch.
I have played ladder for first few seasons and its essentially, get a 'pick kill' and save ultimates, combo ultimates to push through a chokepoint.
That is very cookie cutter experience that gets old really quickly.
They pushed themselves into making characters that have to have a spike impact in the game (their ultimate) or they are garbage tier character.
Adding new heros that need to follow the same design principles further locks them down into that principle, or they would have to rework +20 characters in one go.
Also the cancel and force movement abilities are extremely frustrating. I remember reading Team Fortress 2 dev blogs and they made a design point of never doing those, and limit the one shot kill experiences (since then I believe there are couple mechanics like that in TF2 and they are unfun).
There is nothing more frustrating that getting hooked and spending next 2 seconds knowing you will die. Taking away player agency is frustrating experience.
As you mentioned the characters are locked into set meta, railroading players into who you pick and how you played given hero. No flexibility, no verity.
I haven't played CS or TF2 in a long time but on odd occasion I would watch a twitch stream of some tournaments. CS is one of the best competitive esport to watch - hands down. Its very easy to understand, rounds are quick and economy makes sure that there is some verity to available weapons and tactics from round to round.
Despite playing overwatch their esport is not fun to watch. Its messy, hard to follow. Again due to ultimates you have game of hide and seek into all ults are out screen is flashing and after dust settles back to hide and seek.
... man I care way too much about this
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I feel like it's relevant to mention how huge Hearthstone is, and that's a mobile first game (at its best on iPad which is rare) that I feel is totally Blizzard tier quality with expected polish and substance to it, and both satisfied a lot of Blizzard fans + successfully tapped into that 10x market. There's fair criticism to how it monetizes but it still dominates its category for a reason, they continue to own it l…
Hardcore gamers love to trash ATVI/Blizz but they are without a doubt dominant gaming developer/publisher in the business, and it's really not even close unless you count Tencent. Ask people on HN if they like CoD and they'd laugh at you but the games are IMMENSELY popular every release and they print cash for ATVI.
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> Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has overlapping audiences with battle royale FPSes. The competition isn't driving away people from Overwatch. The game is incredibly stale, and IMO, is probably the death knell of full price online games. There has been little to none new content and changes to the game. The competitive community has always complained a…
Why is it that online video games require these steady streams of updates to be viable? Chess hasn't seen an update in, well, I don't actually know the history, a thousand years maybe? Although actually, perhaps a better example would be Smash Brothers Melee...
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I suppose they mean in the commercial sense, new RTS games certainly don't drive industry leading sales for instance. Certainly in the context of talking about a publisher like Blizzard nothing but raw profit is of any concern. Arty ambitions is the something for the game studios that appear and die off, not for the publisher that seeks to endure.
Nothing wrong with being a solid niche imo. Classical music will never sell as big as pop, but there will always be musicians and concerts keeping it alive on a smaller scale. No reason the same can't happen with RTS.
They are focusing on games that can monetize user-base actively via micro-transactions and subscriptions RTS games are not really capable of this.
Last example i can think of is CoH 2, which was disappointing and the 'pay to win' commanders drove me away from it quickly. Plus i think original CoH is much superior game in terms of balance and fun.
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It still works. The problem is that when they used to delay titles, they came out as blockbusters. The death knell of Blizzard as a premier game maker was WoW. WoW became so amazingly profitable that Blizzard became "the WoW company." I remember being excited for Diablo 3 until I heard that they took away 8 player games so that D3 wouldn't compete with WoW. I never bought D3 and was completely unsurprised to find out…
Diablo 3 was a disappointment at release due to the always online requirement (which was rare back then), the ultra boring campaign, real-money auction house, and no end game. Diablo 3's expansion though fixed all of those mistakes set a solid foundation. It was very good for several years. But then they stopped developing it, presumably (hopefully) because they started to pour all their resources into Diablo 4... wh…
Came back after the real-money AH was gone, then played the expansion - have sunk many hours into it since then, coming back again and again for a week of play in a fresh season. It's a good game now. And I like it a lot more than D2, that always felt too grindy and I hated that there were no talent resets. (AFAIK they added them at some point, but not when it was current.)
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Being able to teleport in GW2 ruined any sense of where I was in the game. In WoW classic the flight system was incredible. You had to actually fly to the different flight points. Like OP it created a sense of the world you were and grounded you to the zones. Not only that, it was an incredibly unique system that to this day hasn’t been rivaled. No other MMO that I know of has a similar travel system. I remember goin…
The travel system in original WoW is beyond compare; the boats, the blimps and griffins, walking everywhere, finally getting a mount - it worked so well. After that long trek through the mountains to find a flight pint - so worth it. Even with a mount you’d still use the taxis (and the update letting you “travel through” was a good one) because it’d auto steer. Once the hub cities in expansions appeared it all was re…
It gets old after a while you know. I remember flying from Darkshore to Gadgetzan took 40 real time minutes where you did absolutely nothing. Do you really have infinite time to play?
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Yeah, definitely. A lot/most of the top pros and commentators have been playing since the start of SC2 and often since early SC1, so all these new, young players are a huge breath of fresh air. They're growing up on a metagame that's been forming for a decade and putting their own creative spin on things, in addition to probably having a bit of a speed and reflex advantage. Reynor's keyboard cam is often pretty insan…
SC1 and AOE2, have more streamers and events than 3-5 years ago from my Twitch browsing. Both games that are more than two decades old. Really shows the staying power of the RTS genre IMO, sure it's some nostalgia, but there have been remakes and an upcoming AOE4 sequel too.