Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
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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 overlapping audiences with battle royale FPSes.
Starcraft 2 is basically dead. WC3 remastered flopped. The RTS genre writ large is definitely in a waning phase.
IMO, when a gaming company doesn't make new games, it is going to see some losses in the playerbase. To me it's more remarkable that they've only seen this much of a dropoff.
I'd love to play a new MMO that explores new ideas. WoW explores WoW.
(Other games I spent time on, which yes, are newer than WoW: I really enjoyed the moment to moment feel of playing WildStar and Black Desert Online (largely because they replaced casting/cooldowns/calculated damage values with movement and combos), but of course, RIP the first one, and the second one is macrotransactioned to heck, my wallet couldn't take it. SWTOR's early storyline content is insanely well-done, but unfortunately, once you graduate out of it, it literally is exactly the same game as WoW.)
dust failed and it seems like CCP pivoted towards trying to monetize EVE Online harder. And it was already a fairly heavily monetized game (real-money trading was sanctioned even 15 years ago, the game basically required multiple accounts for high-level play, etc)
Like walking-in-stations, (now in Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous) they seem to be pioneers back in the day but didn't get much credit for it because the execution was so important.
I'm fine with EVE having pay-for-skill points now because you were always able to buy accounts and that was actually scam-free. You'd need to buy a lot of PLEX back then to pay for one with real money though.
I went back to play in a "static" group on the old school Project 1994 servers a couple years ago. Buncha strangers agreeing to meet online a couple times a week to play, drink some fancy beers and shoot the shit. No wonder lost. That thing is still a place of glory.
WoW was the beginning of the end for the genre, in my opinion. Everything about it was smoothed over in all the wrong places. The art design and worldbuilding were just not good, especially when you consider the lore was a hobbled together mess of inheritance. The Colosseum legionnaires of the Iksar in their jungle and swamped wilds or the truly monstrous trolls selling dwarf bits that could have been pulled straight from some Nordic fairytales: that's some love of the grim imagination.
You mean Project 1999: https://www.project1999.com/
(LFG, by the way)
What side of the world are you on?
Usually the 'feel' of combat/animation/movement just isn't up to Blizzard standards, and UIs are often very inflexible compared to WoW's moddable interface (without that, nobody would play healers for long!). Sometimes the travel timesinks are just unbearable (SWTOR), or the global cooldown feels glacial (FFXIV)
And WoW keeps getting more and more polished. Just a shame that it all feels as if it's being run like an F2P mobile project now, probably driven by analytics/monetisation people rather than passionate MMO players.
The WoW community has become accustomed to systems getting launched in a poor state, expecting future patches to fix glaring flaws in core gameplay, with the developers all but admitting this in interviews (if you're really into the details, Torghast would be the latest example of this pattern).
That said, FF14 is a ton of fun! And IIRC these days you can play the free trial up through the end of the first expansion, which is a LOT of gameplay.
I can dream, right?
The environment is beautiful. The fighting is well designed. Dungeons can be a nice social experience. It can be a very fun and relaxing game. But it gets super repetitive after a while. The quests are all minor variations of a few simple formats.
I just started playing Minecraft two weeks ago and I’m loving it. I’ve never played it before either. It has the exploration and beautiful scenery aspects and feels like a much more creative game. I’m guessing it will be less stale after 3 months than WoW was. But we will see :)
The real fun of wow classic is running dungoens and instances with a guild. A clean run of a 40 man Molten Core run is a hoot. I would say join a guild and run instances with them and see if that sparks some of the fun back into it.
This does nothing to solve the parent's problem:
>> But it gets super repetitive after a while. The quests are all minor variations of a few simple formats.
Instead, your proposed solution makes this much worse.
> A clean run of a 40 man Molten Core run is a hoot.
And this is an... unusual perspective. I raided Molten Core in WoW Classic (the recent release, not the original). It's a huge slog in which the only challenge is mustering the willpower to stay in there for the hours it takes to clear. Once my power cut out during raid, and it came as a big relief.
The FPS crowd is extremely cyclical, mostly owing to Call of Duty and Battlefield's annual release cycles. Gamers buy the latest FPS, play it for a few months until the next one comes out. A game like Overwatch just... feels old now, even though it's a high-quality well-balanced game.
My guess is that Jeff wanted to move on, either due to issues internally, or for something different.
Can you expand on this please? Why are things so bad?
The field is in its infancy, and some day the esports pros will negotiate like other professionals -- work/life balance, a big 401(k) contribution, and compensation commensurate with the fact that they'll be replaced by an 18-year-old when they're 22.
* Work/life balance is fundamentally broken for most E-sports players (in all games). Bad habits like playing/streaming 6+ hours after 7+ hours of practice/scrimmages, terrible diets like 100% uber eats + pounding energy drinks, and finally the stress and anxiety of performing what the internet community breathing down your neck. Many E-sports players have never lived on their own prior to moving out to team houses, and some of these individuals can barely take care of themselves - and it shows. Most players burn out within a year or two.
* Meaningful incomes are almost never provided via your salary or tournament winnings - the real money comes in through sponsorships and streaming revenues. Even though OWL has a generous minimum wage and provides housing allowances, top talent has consistently spurned six figure salaries for seven figure streaming salaries. Sinatra, XqC, Seagull, Harbleu, are some examples of top talent who chose not to sustain their professional e-sports careers.
* There's very few roster spots available and tier-2 teams that on paper are supposed to provide a career path into the league are openly considered a joke for most games.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think CS:GO has had like two big updates since like Q4 2020 alone.
There are still niches for specialized audiences, like historical battles with a more strategic bent, but for mass market RTS nothing has been able to beat a 23 year old game.
> It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2.
SC2 had a bunch of design choices that seemed to reflect a shallow understanding of what made BW actually super good. Like, how incredibly tightly units clumped together should've been picked out as an obvious flaw immediately, but instead they never fixed the underlying issue and just patched up some of the negative impacts via econ changes.
Pretty much everyone who used air-units in SC1 abused the "tight" formations of Muta-stacks (or other SC:BW air units). In most fights: tight formations are incredibly superior to loose formations. (Obviously Corsairs / Valkyries changed that, but typical hit-and-run tactics are better when stacked)
Automatically having tight stacks in SC2 meant the skill-curve of tight formations was brought down: so that beginners can benefit from the strategy with less practice. Advanced players can still use their superior APM to loosen the formations (if they go up against anti-death ball units, like Siege Tanks or Banelings).
In contrast to Brood War, where battles tend to unfold as an aggregate of smaller engagements happening simultaneously all around the map, Starcraft 2 hinges a lot on positional play with two giant armies dancing around and probing each other trying to engage at an advantageous position. And then once they get drawn into an engagement it's just BOOM! ZAP! POW! and it's over. If you blink you could miss it.
In the ZvT metagame, Zerg can deploy Mutalisks many minutes before the Terrain have access to Valkyries (AoE anti-air). Terrain's only response at that stage in the game is Marines.
Marines (who shoot one-vs-one) need to group up tightly to have a chance vs Mutalisks. However, a Marine only has 40 HP, and can be KO'd by a group of 11 Mutalisks taking one shot simultaneously.
This forces the enemy Terrain player to group up their Marines before approaching Mutalisks: the Mutalisks are flying however, so they just run away when they see the opponent grouping up. By forcing the opponent to group up, respond, and deploy, you win the "APM / Clicks" war. You're just trying to force the opponent to "waste their clicks" and eat up their mental capacity.
If the opponent fails to respond, you just run into their economy and destroy their workers. If you break the opponent's economy, you pretty much instantly win. Because you have flying units, you always have access to the opponent's backline / economy. (IE: most Terrain players "wall off" their economy so that ground units must destroy a 500HP defensive structure before reaching the backline. But you can get around those walls by using flying units, like Mutalisks)
Otherwise, you take advantage of map features: high-ground makes your creatures invisible (even air creatures are invisible on the high ground in Starcraft: Brood War). So you swing in from the cliffs / retreat into the cliffs repeatedly.
A missile turret has 200 HP, and is a bit harder to deal with. However, a Muta-stack with of 11 can KO the missile turret before it even takes a 2nd shot. It takes much practice: you need to learn the timing of the Mutalisk, carefully watch their animation and positioning (they only take a "instant shot" if they're flying in the same direction that the shot will take place), and Mutalisks can instantly turn-around (you need to move-click 180-degrees offset from the direction of their current movement).
With accurate timing, you can move-click, attack the missile turret, move-click away (causing an instant turnaround, leaving the missile turret range, preventing the 2nd shot), then move-click attack the missile turret a 2nd time and KO the defensive structure. This is the "muscle memory" practice that made Starcraft: Brood War famous. Only those who dedicate many hours of practice to memorizing this strict timing will even reach the barebone basics of the game.
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Eventually, Terrain can go Valkyries and with a large enough group, can AoE kill the entire Mutalisk stack. However, that's later in the game. By that point, the Zerg player has moved onto their main strategy (probably mass ground-forces, like Hydralisks). Valkyries are useless against that, and its well known that Mutalisks are otherwise an inefficient unit in combat. So its unlikely for the Zerg player to heavily invest into Mutalisks.
Whether intentional or not, I think 12 unit select was one of the design choices that enabled the pros and experts to really separate themselves from the average folks.
There's nothing dumber and more immersion-breaking than watching 15 dragoons get stuck in a small opening because the game's pathfinding is the very best the mid-90s has to offer. Or watching a reaver's scarab just ... get stuck, on the way to a target. They solved all of this crap (and a whole lot more) in SC2, and I can't go back.
I wish people would do this today. Release your game and let the rules be the rules.
Last year, Magic: the Gathering announced "by all our metrics, we consider the metagame healthy. So we're doing something we've never done before: we're banning a bunch of cards purely for the sake of change."
Starcraft 2 units really do "what you want" most of the time: automatically balling up into groups or "dancing" together. From one perspective, elite Starcraft1 players who memorized "The Magic Box" and other engine-level pathfinding behaviors saw this as an abomination: other players can gain the same skills now without practice.
On the other hand... lets be frank. Dragoon / Goliath pathfinding was bullshit from Starcraft1. The extraordinary measures you'd have to take to become a competitive player who uses those (ie: Magic box memorization. Dragoon Dance practice. Etc. etc.) was fundamentally unfun.
This is coming from me: someone who did put in the effort to properly dragoon dance / Muta stack / etc. etc. We all do things to seek a competitive edge against our opponents.
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The work / reward ratio needs to be there in some extent. But it can't be so large to turn beginners away. I'm not sure if anyone's found the proper balance yet, but Starcraft2 definitely was better from that perspective.
EDIT: I'm also a big fan of fighting games. Hyper-fighters, like Blazblue or Guilty Gear, have a nice auto-balance called combo proration. Combos are clearly the best way to play, but each combo makes the rest of the combo exponentially do less damage (!!!). This means that a 50 hit combo in BlazBlue will probably only do 10% more than a 20 hit combo, despite the huge difficulty curve in executing. The bulk of the damage is from the attacks before proration kicks in. This allows for the expert-community to practice for those 50-hit combos, while not necessarily granting huge 250% bonuses over beginners. A casual player may only decide to learn the 20-hit combo and still be 90% of the way to playing like an expert (compared to experts who have to work far, far harder to get the last 10% of damage).
While neither game is perfect IMO, letting the game mature without micromanaging it was a very important aspect of SCBW's success. Instead of mucking with units on a monthly basis they let things simmer and ultimately let balance be achieved through proper map design used in the competitive scene.
In my personal opinion one of the biggest faults with SC2 was their unit design philosophy. The idea that every unit was viable or had some special unlock created a balance nightmare. Its been years since I played either game competitively (played iCCup in BW / Collegiate StarLeague for SC2:WoL) but I remember always feeling like the game had too much "gotcha" in it that SCBW never had. Didn't scout proxy reapers? gg. Didn't scout fast void? gg. Didn't scout x? gg. It was too much rock-paper-scissors where missing one piece of intel was death while SCBW wasn't entirely the same. Taking the Terran/Protoss matchup for example you'd typically expect the early game to be vulture+tank vs. zealot+goon where if the terran player just a-moved into the protoss it was guaranteed loss, but microing the vulture and tanks gave you the chance and arguably the upperhand where the skill of the either player determined the outcome. SC2 didn't have that to the same extent.
So SC2 starts off with SCV-auto split, no more manual splitting at the start of the game (all players now can play the first 5-seconds of every game like a pro: no practice needed anymore) But then muscle-memory people wanted an edge, so they added MULEs / Spawn Larva / Chronoboost, giving players a muscle-memory / simple timer countdown to play with. Etc. etc.
Just back-and-forth changes like that was the real problem. The general balance patches had no idea for the final metagame they were actually going for. Did Blizzard want a game that rewarded manual effort (Juggle MULEs?)? Or did they want a game where manual-effort was minimized (Auto-Worker Split?)
In the end: Blizzard wanted both, even if the two designs contradicted each other. You really can't please both groups of players, but by switching back and forth between the two designs, they only really pissed off both camps over the long term.
Starcraft 2 added "Archon Mode", where you can 2vs1 (Weak+Weak player vs Strong player), controlling the same team. There were far more opportunities to play teams in Starcraft2 than Brood War.
And the 2v2 was always an option in Starcraft 2 anyway.
The overall market killed the RTS genre because everybody has a pretty clear idea of exactly how much money you're going to make selling an RTS and it's not that high. RTS games don't port well to consoles or mobile, and that's the majority of people and revenue.
Blizzard killed the RTS genre by completely optimizing for e-sports click-fests at the expense of everything else. A pox on their house.
It's PERFECT!
"The Blizzard Way" doesn't work anymore.
Fortnite releases content monthly/quarterly. Massive updates with huge out-of-game tie-ins, changing worlds, in-game events, etc. Other games have changed to match/compete. CoD and Valorant both implement similar season-pass style systems.
Blizzard, on the other hand, insists on delaying/cancelling games, releasing "only when ready", continuing to lose touch with their playerbase, etc. They made it public that there would be no more Overwatch updates until Overwatch 2 (and also made it public that Overwatch 2 is actually a PvE expansion). There is no release date for OW2, so Overwatch players will be sitting with no new content for over a year.
It is very obvious why Blizzard is losing players and not really competing in 2021.
> Nothing like Blizzard's best work from the past (Diablo 2, Starcraft) that could be played for years with no "season passes" or other MTX.
The people responsible for that iteration of Blizzard no longer work there, is the problem.
Fortnite can afford to keep artists and programmers on staff to develop a huge amount of content because they have consistent money coming in. This isn't the case for OW and I hypothesize this is why they struggled to crank out new content.
I think it may be more that the content is getting stale too quickly. Like place once and done.
Over watch gameplay and especially movement is largely the issue here.
A lot of players feel forced to play the meta. Then a few don't, and the meta changes.
To compete at anything means making the decisions that put a contestant in the best position to win. A "meta" is the most optimal team composition for a given map. To play off meta is uncompetitive.
> Then a few don't, and the meta changes.
This is not how metas change.
At the time, teams were running Hammond/Sigma/Tracer/Echo mostly. Depending on the map, Rush (Rein/Dva/Mei/McCree/Lucio) was also viable. After the change in the patch you referenced, Hammond was no longer optimal so Sigma/Ball stopped being played in favor of almost fulltime Rush.
More recently Double Bubble has become popular (Zarya/Winston), but Rush is still played a ton and the dominant meta.
The patch notes for that patch can be found here: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/overwatch-reta...
Players will no longer stick around a year or more for new content. Back in the days when there was a dozen different games, maybe, but nowadays there's so much other content out there, why would someone play Overwatch for 4 years straight?
Hate to take offense to this, but as someone who plays Fortnite competitively, it is absolutely not shallow. It's so much more than just another FPS.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNukmNDq60Q [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
I just know it's by far the most interesting competitive real time game I've played in years.
In general, not only do you have to shoot people as in a typical FPS, but you have additional defenses you can put up (builds), you can use those builds for mobility and gaining height quickly, Epic constantly rotates the weapon set, they add/remove mobility items all the time which forces you to change how you move across the map, and the map changes.
And then when I just want to chill there are all sorts of non-fight challenges and (relatively shallow) lore to chase down.
It's never not interesting, and if you like grinding and seeing your own skills and reaction times improve, it's all there
edit: I should link some videos.
1. One of the best players in the game right now getting 25+ kills in ranked play (ignore the rich kid chatter, he's 16 and already made nearly a million in comps which makes him insufferable sometimes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhTCEEeLvdk
2. One of the best teams placing 2nd in the last FNCS, what typical "endgames" look like in tournaments (lots of yelling): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLFCmOFAf_w
I honestly don't get wth they were thinking with OW2... In what world is it the right decision to fracture your game community in two?
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... which I have high hopes for, but with Path of Exile 2 on the horizon, I'm not going to be too disappointed if it flops.
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.)
Diablo 3 was a rocky launch, and the always online requirement was indicative of poor choices by management. Recall, that they wanted a healthy real money auction house (presumably to take their percentage off the top), and always online is typically utilized to block piracy. Of course, anyone with a brain and not currently trying to get a promotion knows, that piracy is a distribution problem. D3 came back into popularity with the Reaper of Souls expansion, a lot of the early problems in the game were fixed, and it still today is incredibly fun to play. In addition, the tone deafness of "do you guys not have phones?" tells you everything you need to know. Some dude at the top saw that mobile is a big trend (good job!), then drew from a hat a name of a Blizzard game, then blessed that title with his brilliance.
Heroes of the Storm, they tried to push as an esport, and invested heavily into... everything except the game itself. What happened to build it and they will come? The truth is, it is a very fun MOBA, it fixes a lot of the problems of the entire genre. In doing so, it rewards team play so much more than being a lone hero. You would think it helps the competitive scene, but in the case of the MOBA playerbase that's often the most toxic and egocentric, it doesn't mesh well. They could have easily enjoyed having the most player friendly, low toxicity MOBA experience that tons of people crave. But no, if there wasn't a world championship scene on par with League of Legends, it wasn't worth Blizzard's time.
Hearthstone had some problems catering to China but I do think with the recent battle pass system and the increased in game economy, there are some great steps in the right direction. Good turnarounds in the monetization area for sure.
Overwatch you would be surprised to know has some very impressive player numbers even now, for a game that gets no updates. Now that Jeff Kaplan is gone, I'm afraid the last of the best of original Blizzard are gone. I really, really, really hope Overwatch 2 is good. I will give it a few solid chances and I will revisit it. I fear the worst though, I don't think Jeff would leave his baby like that.
Warcraft 3 Remastered was a disgrace by management. Truly. You could have literally, and I mean literally, took Warcraft 3 source code, and dropped in touched up models, sounds, and textures. It would have sold like crazy. That's it, no excuse. Why did they have to reinvent the wheel, with a team comprised mostly of interns and fresh college graduates, rush it, with no communication with the delays, oh and did I mention that the main menu is an unoptimized web app running on chromium?
The story of Activision Blizzard is monetization for the sake of monetization alone, and management decisions formed solely on the basis that they sound good to other managers. Overwatch had the pleasure of being shielded by Jeff Kaplan, so it suffered less than it had to. The other large projects usually launch like crap, but after management has had their way with the game for the first year or two, the devs slowly but surely bring it back and make it fun at the very least. Do they have the financial resources on their side? No. But be damn sure they will improve and polish the core gameplay loops.
I have watched this slow death since around 2014 at least, but it's hard to know where along the way the roots became so badly damaged that Blizzard became destined to be EA-like.
This isn't true though. Delaying (and not announcing) Diablo 4 is typical "Blizzard Way" nonsense. Same with the Overwatch content drought.
> Overwatch you would be surprised to know has some very impressive player numbers even now, for a game that gets no updates. Now that Jeff Kaplan is gone, I'm afraid the last of the best of original Blizzard are gone. I really, really, really hope Overwatch 2 is good. I will give it a few solid chances and I will revisit it. I fear the worst though, I don't think Jeff would leave his baby like that.
I wouldn't be surprised about anything related to Overwatch as I have played competitively/semi competitively since the beta. Overwatch is kind of an excellent example of a good idea implemented so poorly it's really sad to watch. I don't think Jeff Kaplan was a great game director.
> The story of Activision Blizzard is monetization for the sake of monetization alone, and management decisions formed solely on the basis that they sound good to other managers. Overwatch had the pleasure of being shielded by Jeff Kaplan
You've convinced yourself of a very flowery narrative about Overwatch and Jeff Kaplan that I just don't think is based in reality. It's pretty bad from a content standpoint, terrible from a balance standpoint, doing horribly as an esport, about to pump out a "sequel" that is actually just fluff content. I think it's about as mismanaged as I can imagine.
I tried to get into Overwatch League, but found it hard to watch. All the rich colors and scenery of the game drowned out by the ugly monochrome of team colors. All the rich sound effects of the game drowned out by the world's most annoying casters. (Seriously, who hired these people!? Are real sports like this?) All the while not fixing obvious UI bugs (you will be watching first person through someone's camera and it will say "STOP THE PAYLOAD" at the top, but that person is actually pushing the payload). If they tried to make it bad, they did a great job. I don't think Jeff was at the controls pushing to erase his artists' choice of colors and sound. I think he did the minimum required to not get fired, and it shows there.
Jeff's a good dude, and I do worry about the future of the game without him. I can easily see a world where they don't even let normal people play the game, and they just make you subscribe to watching vetted pros play the game.
Overwatch was built intentionally to be a game that fostered an esports community. Jeff had a big part in the esports aspect of Overwatch in that the game was meant to be their gateway into LoL-esque esports. They wouldn't have made Overwatch at all had they not been interested in getting involved in esports seriously.
> I tried to get into Overwatch League, but found it hard to watch. All the rich colors and scenery of the game drowned out by the ugly monochrome of team colors. All the rich sound effects of the game drowned out by the world's most annoying casters. (Seriously, who hired these people!? Are real sports like this?)
It sounds like you just don't really like sports/esports. The casters are a big part of the experience. The game would be awful/unwatchable without them.
The viewing experience for Overwatch is terrible. There's too much going on, and if you're not actively involved (playing), it's just awful. Colors and lights everywhere, weird sounds, orbs flying all around etc. I think Overwatch is kind of a failure in that regard as well.
> Jeff's a good dude, and I do worry about the future of the game without him
I suspect there will be massive improvements relatively quickly.
It's not that exactly. There is much that can be learned from the world's best players training together and performing together against an opponent that does the same. It's just the format is unwatchable. I do find watching sports on TV similarly impossible, whereas watching them in person is much more enjoyable.
I mostly watch streams. I don't think solo queue is as interesting a game as full teams playing multiple games together, but you do get to hear one player's thought process, which is always enjoyable. That is probably incompatible with true competition, but is entertaining.
I think someone decided what esports should be, and everyone else just copied that, but we haven't actually hit the global maximum for the format quite yet. What's strange is that we often take steps backwards. There was one season when you got the ability to select your own camera angles and chat in a members-only chat, and that was the season that I enjoyed the most. Chatted with the regulars in there, got to watch whatever player I personally felt was most interesting to watch (usually Jjonak fragging people as Zen), etc. Then they removed that, as well as the ability to pay them extra for the privilege. Strange decision!
> The viewing experience for Overwatch is terrible. There's too much going on, and if you're not actively involved (playing), it's just awful. Colors and lights everywhere, weird sounds, orbs flying all around etc. I think Overwatch is kind of a failure in that regard as well.
I hear that a lot, but don't really have a problem with it myself. The thing that gets me whether I'm playing or not is when people use an ultimate at some range outside your current camera position, and it's totally silent and you have no way of knowing that they used it. There was a time when ults were map global sounds, and that got patched out for no apparent reason, and it's never really been discussed as a problem. But I think it's weird to play around a Zarya with grav when she just used it to kill some Wrecking Ball over in Narnia. Why punish players that are tracking ults? Never made sense to me.
I consider myself to be a pretty heavy gamer, played OW casually in the past but mainly Apex now. I used to go to Blizzard Studios in Burbank to watch OWL with my wife as she was a huge fan (funk pops and all that) and holy shit, even being a causal player of OW, trying to understand what is going on at all times and trying to glean any semblance of "exciting plays" or "clutch moments" from the pro gameplay is virtually impossible. The gameplay is essentially an unintelligible explosion of colors, sounds, and strategies that brings you to the brink of a seizure before ending for indiscernible reasons because it's impossible for the camera to view the important elements of the match at once.
This is in comparison to the popular competitors currently beating them in Twitch viewership above. I watched competitive Apex before playing it and it just made sense. Teams of 3, battle royale, they have different powers, now go survive. Done, easy. Same with COD, Valorant falls inline more with CS:GO which is equally understandable. All of which are proving to have more staying power than OW.
I think esports are best suited for games that are slower paced (LoL, DOTA, CS:GO) or easier to understand (CoD, Rocket League). Overwatch is a game that is very fast paced (Dive fights took like, 2 seconds from start to finish), and doesn't really have analogues in real life, so it's harder to connect with or intuit.
Unlike most people here, I have fun pretty much every time I open the game. It's exactly my style. Nearly 100% uptime where you're gaming. Lots of dumb voice lines and silly characters. Always something to do or see or be amused by. I didn't play computer games at all before Overwatch, I bought it on a whim, and it became my thing. There is always some way to play better, a new hero to explore, new custom games, new friends to meet, etc. I'm still getting a lot of value for that initial $40, probably more value than I've ever gotten out of anything.
At least for me, Blizzard made something I didn't even know I wanted. That is really impressive for a Fortune 500 company.
Starcraft Ghost :(
Paradoxically, I've noticed an uptick of new creative Starcraft 2 content on Youtube (similar to those "can you beat the game by doing [insert crazy premise here]" types of videos you see in the Mario community).
I think the two company direction things that were noticeable for me were that they decided to try to embrace two major cop-outs: milking cash shop (skins, voice packs) and trying to pull Disney-like re-runs of classics (SC and WC remastered). Many in the community are lamenting that e.g. the dev team behind Starcraft is essentially disbanded. It's like they fundamentally gave up being a game company, and decided to be a collectibles company instead.
If there's one business lesson to take from the history of the video game industry, it's that being a video game company is extremely unreliable. Being a collectibles company is much more reliable.
As the company leaders look for ways to make their business endure, it's natural for them to turn to more reliable business models.
Nobody likes layoffs.
On the other hand, Mario keeps reinventing the adventure genre with creative mechanics, even though storyline/CGI of each new game is basically non-existent compared to Blizzard's capabilities. WoW obviously did very well in spinning the Warcraft lore into new directions, and Starcraft Ghost was also highly anticipated before the vaporware lost its steam. I think the main difference between Nintendo and Blizzard - and why Nintendo still commands such strong brands - is Nintendo plays the long term game, never getting drunk on a single unicorn success.
I think a large part of it is that after around 10 years of dominating Starcraft 2 and 20 years of dominating Starcraft 1, there are now some European players who are repeatedly beating Korean players (and everyone else) in the big tournaments.
(Including in-person tournaments, so you can't chalk it up to latency differences. Though of course there haven't been any of those in the past year, so we'll see if that'll be sustained.)
The two main usurpers, Serral (Finland) and Reynor (Italy) also have a really entertaining rivalry. I'd go so far as to say that those two may have single-handedly kept professional Starcraft 2 interesting and alive.
I think the uptick in challenge youtube videos is also no coincidence. These are games where there's depth in terms of acquirable skills, and there's definitely interest in the community for displays of mastery in these types of games.
(SC1 was actually the first computer game I ever played, back in 2000 or so, which I think is why it still holds a special place in my heart. Funny to think "computer game" is kind of an antiquated term now.)
ASL looking strong in Korea.
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.
SC2 did something very smart with its last expansion with the coop mode, and it became very popular despite being only sort of fleshed out. I could easily see that kind of game mode making for a hit RTS if it was the central focus, and had the standard MMO-lite stuff like loot and missions and raids and story and customizable units/armies and support for other group sizes.
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.
1) the release of the HD and Definitive Editions of the game, with graphics and gameplay that still hold up
2) availability on popular game stores like Steam (though it's a Microsoft game)
3) continuous balance patches, content updates, and occasional DLC
4) talented Twitch streamers and YouTubers casting games, commentary, and analysis (See T90Official and Spirit of the Law)
5) an active, mature, and welcoming player base on Reddit, Twitch, Discord, etc
6) frequent and varied tournaments with increasing prize pools (the recent Hidden Cup had the highest prize pool for an AoE2 tournament in 20 years)
According to Wikipedia:
> It was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X in May 2012, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in September 2013
So i struggle to see how different it is from other blizzard games
Further, one of their most cherished metrics is how much time people spend doing a certain activity. Instead of making those activities more fun and rewarding, they made them take longer to complete and with fewer rewards.
To top it all off, they are nearly completely deaf to their player's concerns, and instead focus on metrics instead of gameplay or fun activities.
People at Blizzard certainly have forgotten that games are supposed to be fun.
They try to cloak their declining userbase by saying they have the highest number of logins ever, but they quit reporting individual subscribers a long time ago. One of them is a completely worthless metric and the other keeps the lights on.
The last of the original WoW dev team quit Blizzard last year, and they are running with a crew that don't have the chops to make engaging games.
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Not to mention they seem to hate flying yet keep creating terrible zones unless you can fly. There aren't clear routes between common locations like roads in Skyrim. That can be ok, but in that case they really need to have a flatter level design like in Oblivion.
Yes, this is just an ongoing disaster. My sense from their communications over the years is that, when players fly through zones, that hurts the feelings of the artists, which Blizzard doesn't like.
> There aren't clear routes between common locations like roads in Skyrim.
I actually really liked how roads were handled in original WoW. They twist and turn, and yet somehow they're always faster than going offroad. And they were reliably safe -- until in Duskwood there's a wolf right on the middle of the road, which added to the atmosphere for me.
For the latest expansion, my main complaint is that they provide a bunch of cosmetic features, which they know are a draw -- but you can't use the cosmetics on your other characters. All shadowlands cosmetics are restricted to characters who belong to the particular faction. (Which is, overwhelmingly, just the specific character who unlocked it.) I characterized this once in guild chat as "welcome to Shadowlands! To enjoy this expansion's new content, please wait for the next expansion to release", and got many pained agreements.
You can't use your mail-wearing toon to unlock plate cosmetics, either. You need to go through the entire rep grind, again, if you want two sets of cosmetics from the same vendor.
Flying should never have been allowed in WoW, period.
Beyond the whole issue of players skipping content in zones artists spend months building, the mechanism severely distorts gameplay. A player being able to hover, descend to the ground, pick up an item, then immediately remount and rise back up—avoiding monsters—is ridiculous.
If flying had to be introduced, it should at least have been done with some sort of meaningful takeoff/landing process.
I do not give a rat's ass about the "artists spend months building" anything, I just need to be there, pick something up or kill something and I am out.
With all respect for those who enjoy the "zones artists spend months building", I am here (WoW) just to beat stuff up in a repetitive & predictable way. Until today, I have NO idea in what zone what dungeon is, or what the background of the story is of that particular monster that lives there. I have never seen a cinematic in full, turn off the sounds and run graphics at to the lowest level possible so I see stuff that is relevant (fire) and am not bothered with cosmetics (grass). And I have been p[l] aying this game (on and off) since over 10 years.
It is just a nice time waster which allows for easy & cheap boosting so I can show up with the same gear as the addicts.
With some tuning not only would it prevent complete flyovers, it could actually be really fun and add another option for progression. Like a basic mechanic where climbing altitude quickly consumes stamina, while gliding consumes it slowly. Add thermal drafts to strategic locations and let the player improve their flying stamina over time.
Now you can limit how much a player can fly and when, and create fun game moments with crash landings in hostile areas when you misjudge your stamina.
I like the suggestion. I suspect, however, that making flying harder could only have happened before flying first appeared in the game, and that Blizzard has calculated that any such move now would cost too many players to be worthwhile.
Those things are the game though and pretty much always have been. Raids, dungeons, or PvP. If you don't want to do any of them why would you have ever picked up WoW.
That is, content that provides new/better gear, more challenging fights, etc. That is: content that heavily rewards a hardcore from day one play style.
They consequently are in something of a race against time: the current game is hostile to casual players, who quickly give up and leave when it takes hours to find groups for leveling, and stale to hardcores that “beat” it quickly.
So one can intend to play casually or hardcore and be poorly served in both cases.
There's not even a "You'll have to put in a lot more time." It's just a lockout.
This is basically Goodhart's Law.
The latest systems encourage time sinking less than they did in Legion, where there were infinite diminishing returns for playing, now there is just a full-stop end to your week. Legion was the most abusive expansion with regards to a player's time. The latest expansion fixed a lot of that for me and others, but it isn't enough to keep me sustained.
WoW Classic actually kept me enthused and is extremely enjoyable, however if you were on a streamer server, there were artificial queues for ages and it was exhausting living around a queue when trying to be competitive at that top tier of play.
If TBC fixes that (doesn't have the queues at release), I will be a lot happier with it.
Note that I don't think this stuff is casual friendly. As a casual, my problem with the way Blizzard does these systems is you want to do something every day/week/etc.
Quite frankly, it turns the game into a chore. It tells me that not only how much time I spend, but also when I spend that time significantly impacts my rate of advancement.
Disclaimer: I haven't played Shadowlands at all.
Their WOW playerbase are getting older and if you don't treat them will respect even more will be lost. There are so many games out there right now, sure not of this genre, but they provide options for someone who wants to pick up gaming and not necessarily invest in WoW.
May I ask why you don't just simply let these brain dead grinds be done by someone else?
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 about the slow trickle of balance changes and the casual community has always complained about the lack of new content (maps, events, heroes). The communication was decent at first then fell off a giant cliff. A lot of competitive players and streamers burned out of playing boring and/or frustrating metas (for a year or more) and casual players ultimately got bored.
My theory is (I'm stealing this from someone else) is essentially Activision saw they had a huge player base who paid $60 once and never again. The extremely consumer-positive loot box system (you can get ample loot boxes by just playing the game, and loot boxes avoid giving you items you already have) means that most players didn't need to buy loot boxes; in fact if you played the game a lot (as a potential whale) you didn't need to pay at all for your favorite skins.
Activision saw that after Year 2/Year 3 the revenue growth for OW fell off a cliff and deprioritized people who would have been making new art/content for the game. In order reclaim that revenue those people were then moved to "Overwatch 2" and all new content was focused on that game. However that game has been delayed (again, and again) so now the player base is hemoragging even harder.
I say this as someone who loves the game, and doesn't play any other game. The game might have lasted longer if they followed Riot's model and made it free to play with micro transactions.
Forcing two tanks, two healers, two DPS characters leads to eight minute DPS queues. But if you don't force this kind of team composition, the game becomes incredibly unfun for the team that has five DPS characters and no tank.
You'd figure that this would drive DPS players to switch to the other roles, to reduce the time they spend in queue - but no, the queues today are as long as they ever were. It's probably because a lot of people don't find the support roles fun to play.
Contrast it to something like League of Legends, where queues for each role are much closer in length - probably because a large portion of the player-base finds supporting roles fun in that game.
The other issue is that if you play casually and get a terrible healer, then you will almost certainly lose. Being a fantastic player only gets you so far.
Other people mentioned Valorant, and it appears it has a very different style with exchangeable weapons that apply to all classes, but just different abilities and more strategic games. It seems like a really good player can make a bigger difference and play solo. I'm going to look into that now.
This has been a criticism of Overwatch since day one. If the core problem was the actual core formula it wouldn't have grown so large to begin with. Millions of people wouldn't have billions of hours into the game in the first place if the core formula wasn't fun. I think you have a valid point, but I don't think it's why Overwatch hemorrhages players. None of the issues your brought up are any different than they were for the past 5 years (except role queue).
Also, you can't point to queue times, then mention League has a better system. It wasn't rare at one point (I don't play League anymore) to have 30 minute queues even in diamond. DPS queues in OW currently are 10 minutes max even in GrandMaster.
Then they started restricting your team choices. You could no longer have two of the same hero.
You then had to be forced into meta-roles ONLY.
You then had to queue specific roles and were not allowed to pick anything else at all.
All lack of balance and content aside, what the hell?
The worst part is/was (unsure if this has changed) that you are hard locked into specific hero categories even if you are queued as a full premade. Even when you are with a full team that is OK with swapping, you can't swap roles as needed. Incidentally, I played dps junkrat back when it was categorised as a defence hero. And the categories were decided and changed by Blizzard - Junkrat might have been the only defense hero I'd be willing to play, and now the only offense hero since they recategorised him - I would rather heal than play mccree, but there you have it
Maintenance requires switchups to these dynamics, but when you have created a system that's devoid of these events, your game is going to be stale no matter what you do. New maps, new characters, etc.
Power spikes can be fun because it can be fun to have a feeling of power, or see the balance change in your favor in a game. They can be frustrating because you can be faced with a power spiked player and feel helpless. It is a design choice with pros and cons.
The company also has a lot of hubris. They spend tons of effort on things like trying to make healers and tanks fun. There's many good reasons to do that and they gave it a good try, but the conclusion should have been: we aren't able to make healers and tanks fun, let's try something else. Instead, they forced people to play them.
Other mistakes include not understanding "the meta." Once they think the meta is balanced in a game, they get conservative and don't want to tweak things too much. They don't realize that the meta is an equilibrium state found by the players. Change the game, a new meta will be found. They don't seem to get this and just let their games run stale because they think the competitive scene drives the player base, instead of the other way around.
Overall the facepalm factor has been too high for too long. Blizzard has always understood the science of game design, but since at least SC2 they lost the art.
I hate getting just completely run over way more, personally.
of course the numbers don't work when you're exclusively playing against other people
this is why smurfing is so popular
I actually wonder a little if smurfs in a game like overwatch with a steep starting cost are tracked and treated special to keep that revenue stream.
Maybe things have changed, but up until recently Smurf detection usually didn't work all that well
This is why I think PvE is more sustainable for a player base and more conservatively solid as a business plan. WoW for instance.
But then by definition it isn't PvP and isn't going to get the same player base.
I think the future of PvE games is going to be in AI. If game developers could put a DeepMind-playing-StarCraft level of AI into games without immense cost, then it's going to change games quite a lot. It wouldn't be perfect, but you could have AI offer a challenge to players for longer without feeling unfair. (It's still AI that doesn't learn based on the player though, which means that the players would eventually figure out the puzzle of the AI.)
I think the immediate future is asymmetrical roles for humans.
For example, one side is playing FPS for a Kill/death ratio basically, the other side is a single person playing RTS for a win/loss ratio.
IE Mechwarrior team deathmatch. Team of multiple human FPS players against a single human MechCommander-with-basic-AI-team.
It'd give scenarios more flexibility and allow for human intelligence to combat the meta.
And allow the FPS people to get a 2 or 3 to one kill ratio.
Remember OW was supposed to be a different game, one that they cancelled. They reused a lot of the assets and so on and hashed them together with the ultra-popular genre of the time. It mostly worked at the start but it was pretty clear to me after a little while that they didn't really have any clear idea about where to take it. It always felt like a "recovery" game, a "we spent a huge sum of money building these assets, let's at least get something out of them" rather than something with a well-thought out long term plan behind it.
Overwatch has one of the best custom game mode designers I've seen in a game since Garry's Mod. The amount of things that people are able to do with the custom games in Overwatch is incredible and I'd recommend checking them out if that's what you're looking for.
Healers and tanks are fun! The problem is that they keep introducing balance changes that make it incredibly frustrating to play certain tanks/supports. With DPS, this isn't an issue, because there are literally more DPS characters than there are healers and supports combined, so there are more to choose from.
If they made the experience of playing tank/support more consistent, or if they actually expanded the pool of tanks/supports by having more than 8 tanks and 7 supports, there would be more interest in playing those roles.
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.
[citation needed]
> Well more than the majority prefers dps.
Well more than the majority of characters are DPS characters. If Blizzard provided the same variety in tank and support characters that they do in DPS, there'd be more of a draw to play those roles.
Of course Blizzard had a challenge designing supports - if they were too weak they were unfun to play but if they are too strong then your entire dedicated player base complains for months.
Ultimately I think the problem was the lack of diversity among the other supports/tanks. The relatively few amount of tanks/supports ultimately meant that the community would quickly coealesce on an optimal tank setup (Rein/zarya, Winston/dva, etc), and as a tank/support player it became boring to play because picking an off-meta tank would be seen as a throw. There's little that is worse than queing to play your favorite tank and the other 5 players yelling at you to switch to $meta.
*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?
The problem with DPS is that you can either pick a fun one with a ton of weaknesses that loses your team the game, or you can play hitscan. Pro players and people with a background in other games really love the hitscans, and Blizzard obliges them, to the point where it's kind of throwing to not pick one. (Have you ever been upset to have a McCree on your team? Stun the dive. Cancel ults. Two tap someone across the map. Flank around and McRightclick a support. The dude does everything!) That's not to say you can't win games with the off-DPS -- there is someone out there streaming how you can pick Symmetra or Bastion every game and win 60% of them against the pros.
Support is a fun role. I've always said that Ana is the sniper for people that think Widowmaker is too easy. There's a character where if you play perfectly, you win the game. You make a mistake, or your mechanics falter, you lose the game. (Does anyone ever watch ML7 play and not want to play Ana immediately afterwards? You can do so much... if you're good.)
I'm pretty happy about the current state of tanks. It wasn't always this way, but you can pretty much pair any two of them and not instantly lose. Both players can pick "a fun one". Shields were once pretty much mandatory, but people got better at the game (and they shields got nerfed into the ground), and they have less effectiveness than they once did.So you can get away with the weird combinations. Ball/Hog was meta for quite a while. Winston/D.va has always been good with the right players and coordination. Rein/Zarya is of course a lot of fun for the Zarya player. I've even lost some games to Hog/D.va, though I'm not sure I'd personally pick one of those if the other was already locked in ;)
Anyway, I keep reading that nobody wants to play tanks, and I don't get it. You can spend 15 minutes in DPS queue, pick Widowmaker, get one sick kill for your montage, and then spend the remaining 8 minutes of the game being chased around by some Wrecking Ball spamming "Ho ho ho!" with a D.va in tow that shows up from time to time to remind you that it's the perfect weather for a hotteok. I'd personally rather spend 30 seconds in the queue and be able to switch between 8 dramatically different heroes depending on the situation that unfolds.
I like the overtime mechanic. It feels fair -- you're about to win, but you ran out of time. But there's overtime, so you don't just insta-lose. I agree that it brings out the worst in players. The calm and methodical team always wins here. (I haven't heard the term "Route 66 effect" for a while, but it's a thing. Players panic, forget everything they know about the game, and lose 2 checkpoints while they stagger in. Don't do that.)
> They spend tons of effort on things like trying to make healers and tanks fun. Instead, they forced people to play them.
Role queue was to force people to play DPS. The problem OWL and the high ranks were suffering from was that 3 tanks and 3 supports won every game against any team that had a DPS character on it. They nerfed the tanks into the ground and buffed the DPS to nightmare levels, and they still couldn't fix it. (They made the mistake of creating the most oppressive meta ever on the same day they introduced role queue. Sigma/Orisa. That was not great, even as someone with Sigma and Orsia at the top of their favorite character list.)
> Once they think the meta is balanced in a game, they get conservative and don't want to tweak things too much. They don't realize that the meta is an equilibrium state found by the players. Change the game, a new meta will be found.
Some of this is the community's fault. They get locked into thinking they have to do certain things, and the result is that they make the game stale for themselves. Blizzard changes something, and it has a totally random effect. Most recently, Orisa got that buff where she can't take critical hits during Fortify, and the meta became Rein/Zarya again. What? It always amuses me.
(Speaking of shaking up the meta, did you play that April Fools experimental card at all? Even though it was an unbalanced shitfest, I found it incredibly fun. I love those kinds of experiments.)
I think a lot of people think they've figured out Overwatch, but they don't play like they have. There's still a lot to unlock there, with or without Blizzard's help.
I also think that Blizzard is often too hasty to adjust things that players complain about. 2CP and Mercy have long been points of contention. The way the attackers win 2CP is to walk onto the second point and use 0 ults (even when it looks good!) to bait out defender ults. You all die horrible deaths, and then walk in and use all 6 ults to get a clean wipe. You win. The counter for this kind of overcommitting was Mercy's team rez. She sneaks away in the heat of battle, people kill everyone they can see, and she then flies in to resurrect everyone. By the time the attackers realize, it's too late. All 6 enemy players alive and well, and 33% of the point not captured. All those ults wasted, and then you just spend the rest of the game losing the ult economy and eventually lose the match. Someone should have noticed that they only killed 5 people and sent someone else to go shut down Mercy, but nobody ever did that, so instead they complain to Blizzard and ask them to remove the only ability in the game that counters overcommitting. Blizzard does. People continue to play 2CP wrong, now that there is no counter to the strategy of a dry push and a clean wipe. They mess it up every time, the defenders stall for 5 minutes (which is a beauty of orchestration and coordination when done correctly), and they complain to Blizzard and ask them to remove 2CP.
Something I like about computers is that you can't negotiate your way out of being bad. But Blizzard listens to the community, and that has actually become an option! Instead of playing the game they're given, they play the game they think they personally can win, and then convince Blizzard to change it to that. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you get to listen to some streamer have a meltdown about how tough it is to play computer games for a living. Metagaming at it's finest, and a great strategy in real life. But at some point, I think players should try to play the game as implemented and see how it goes. There's probably a strategy you haven't considered yet -- go try it! It might be good.
(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
Having a mechanic that forces fights during inopportune times helps, that’s why I tend to like Mobas with creeps and side objectives. That’s something that OW could add that might force a less “everyone push down mid” mentality.
CS is about reading opponent, creating opportunities and reacting to what is happening.
Pixel hunting is very last step.
That said, DotA is by far the best esport to watch if and only if you played it before and can follow what's happening.
By contrast CS offers nothing like this - movement is always strictly along the ground/ladders/stairs etc, and gunfights are more like who saw who first. It just feels boring to play in comparison - sure the tactics are interesting, but there’s nothing like the feeling of freedom you get from some other games.
I’d like there to be more of a focus on games that are fun to play, in terms of movement and combat mechanics just feeling awesome. Horizon Zero Dawn is another great example of making combat awesome.
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 hard to win and get 100SR, only to have two consecutive games where people would leave early and then lose 4v6 or 3v6 and have that SR disappear. 3. Elo hell was real. I was in Bronze because that's where I started from when I began the game, but eventually when I got better, I could never jump out of the ELO hell. I ultimately had to create a new account, and lo and behold I was immediately placed in Diamond. 4. SR awards were bs. I was a Moira main who'd get 40 kills and pretty much own the game, but just because Moira is rewarded on healing and there was a Lucio on the team, you barely get any SR for carrying your team, meanwhile Lucio reaps all the SR. 5. The event based content was so bad, recycled game modes from 3 years ago, recycled skins, recycled pretty much everything. 6. PvE modes were garbage. 7. Lootboxes were so frustrating, I at one point spent $50 to buy a fuck ton on lootboxes for a special event that had a ton of legendary skins, I managed to get just 1. Had a ton of repeats, that have minimal payoff. 8. Constant meta changes were brutal towards the end. Everything that came after Brig was just ridiculous. 9. 2-2-2 was BS. 3-3 was worse. 10. Everything, EVERYTHING was more catered to OWL than the player base.
At some point these MBA types who don't game, decided what's best for making more money and went ahead on executing in that direction. Player base was forgotten. And that has been pretty much the state of OW and all the Blizzard IP.
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 support main)
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.
but if you have a high win rate you climb more or less immediately (once you've unstuck the MMR confidence value)
This might not be a big deal, but the game isn't static. It changes, which means that the skills someone picks up might not be as useful in the next patch anymore. This keeps the rankings somewhat unstable.
Team games inherently require more games to stabilize a rating too. You can get lucky or unlucky with your teammates. On top of that, a game where you can end up with a character you're not strong with probably increases the number of games to stabilize a rating even further.
On average it might work out, but are enough games played to actually reach that? My guess is that for most players the answer is 'no'.
true: SR change isn't constant, delta SR after a game is based on the difference between your MMR and SR
SR is essentially irrelevant, MMR is the only number that matters
your SR oscillates around your MMR, essentially at random
MMR also has a confidence value, "elo hell" is where you can't win enough to unstick the confidence value
if you win more than 50% consistently the confidence value will drop, your MMR will increase, then your SR will follow it
a new account has a zero value for the confidence, which is why the MMR (and SR that follows it) is more volatile, at least to begin with
Ended up creating a new account, ended up in high plat and quickly became diamond, never to drop lower again.
Why/how did this happen? I'm not sure, but ELO hell was real for me.
(Dva main)
as a 4k support main I found qp games with silver friends extremely frustrating due to the extreme chaos and lack of structure (normally devolving to team deathmatch)
the tanks don't know what they're doing (e.g. rein charging on cooldown, sniper dva feeding, etc)
the DPS don't know what they're doing (mccree going for cheeky flanks and dying most of the time/getting a single pick)
the other support doesn't know what they're doing (wandering off alone to duel people)
adjusting your playstyle works, so as a support you become super aggressive, the enemy makes near constant mistakes and you pounce on them immediately
vs. a GM game where everyone knows what their role is and the game plays much more "normally", and I can't get away with that sort of behaviour
Although actually, perhaps a better example would be Smash Brothers Melee...
Which to me isn't surprising as HotS' way to stand out from the rest is also why it's not fun long-term. At first it seems cool that every map in the game has a unique objective that the teams compete around. But the game is balanced in a way that you either win that objective 2-3 times or you lose the game, with rare exceptions. So now suddenly you do have a couple different objectives, but those never change and set the pace and timing for every single round, always in the same way.
In comparison, LoL and DotA always have the exact same map and objectives on it, but the teams are free to do what they want. Stay in lane for 20 minutes? Sure, why not, if none of the teams force the next phase. Focus on teamfights and kills or try to get the next dragon? Whatever you want.
I played HotS for 2 weeks and then I just needed to see the next map's loading screen to know where I'd need to stand exactly 2 minutes into the round. It becomes a game of kill-and-fetch quests where you also have to rely on 4 other people to do the right thing. Not fun.
The issue is they were late to MOBAs and made the game entirely free so there was no reason to really support the game. Eventually the finance people notice
The maps remove variety because they shrink the possible space of what you can do to a finite number of gameplay objectives. The game tells you that some objective starts in exactly 1:27 from now and if you're not there at that time your team is disadvantaged and probably about to lose. That's not variety, that gets old quick, as a player as well as an audience for a professional league that you'd need to even start competing with any other Moba.
You mean you are pretty much stuck doing just that for half the game. Hope you like lasthitting all day, GLHF.
Laning involves pushing, farming, last hitting, denying, harassing, taking down towers, jungling, runeing, and ganking. It isn't stale at all. But maybe I just haven't gotten tired of the game yet. I am having more fun with Dota than any other multiplayer game (save for WoW circa 2010.)
Do you have source for this claim, because population in StarCraft is fairly stable, at least based on ranking statistics.
Blizzard isn’t the same company it once was. It used to be known for deep gameplay and creative stories but now it’s focused entirely on the free to play skinners boxes of card games, a mmo, and loot boxes to monetize the other games. Almost the entire early-days staff has moved on to other companies. Blizzard doesn’t exist any more, just a big corporation with the same name
The writing was on the wall with Diablo 3's item market. D3 itself is just... Forgettable?
Was really looking forward to playing Helm's Deep on Bnet like good ol times but alas
It's because the current culture at Blizzard is dominated by theorycrafting eggheads who believe that the poor, misguided players aren't playing the game "properly" and need to be told what to do.
The article does say that Shadowlands and WoW Classic carried the torch for revenue. One is old-Blizzard quality I guess, the other pretty much as expected for a new WoW expansion. People are going to buy it. Whether or not they stick around is another story. It does note that they did not confirm if subscription numbers are rising or not in WoW (modern).
Everquest 2 is such a game. It is basically dead in terms of attracting new players, but people who love playing it have been keeping the parent company afloat for a while. IIRC, WoW and EQ2 came out at the same time. I can easily see Blizzard having the same fate in the not too distant future.
In f2p or bolted on cash shops like FFXIV I'm always wondering, should I buy some mtx? I don't really want to encourage them too much. I don't know what is reasonable to spend to keep the game afloat, I don't want to feel like a leech, but I really have no interest in cosmetics. I don't know if buying or not buying sends a stronger signal to them to spend more effort on mtx rather than the game - sometimes it just seems like all roads lead that way.
FFXI is in a similar state to EQ2 I'd guess, it only has the monthly sub but a really hardcore base who's still there (or dips their toes back in like I did for a bit) after all these years. It still gets minor monthly updates and probably has a nice ROI for the effort.
I've been longing for a good RTS for a long time. Give me something like Lords of the realm 2, C&C Generals, Future Cop: LAPD (ps1) plz.
I just started playing. Awesome game.
I wouldn’t call SC2 “dead.” You can still queue up for a game within a couple of minutes if you want to play, which is all that matters. This is even true of Brood War.
I think the dominance of Starcraft 2 on the RTS esports scene basically smothered any contenders in the crib. The oldheads who still like it seem to prefer playing Brood War with all its incomprehensible esoterica (to uninitiated audiences) to anything new. Now that Blizzard has put the game in maintenance mode I expect there will be more sunlight to nourish new seedlings as its canopy withers. All the influential Blizzard RTS developers seem to have decamped for Frost Giant games to create a new RTS, and it looks like they have the industry clout to make a splash when their title finally lands (maybe in 3-5 years ha).
Meanwhile Sunspear Games, which made the innovative “Vanguard” mod tor SC2, just got done with a (purely hype-focused) kickstarted launch for Immortal: Gates of Pyre (slated for late 2022). And then Relic is putting out a new Age of Empires as well.
I am WAY more optimistic about the future of the RTS genre now than I’ve been at any point since Heart of the Swarm came out and half of SC2’s active player base decided it wasn’t worth it to continue playing.
In context, there's no surprise Overwatch is haemorrhaging players. They've as much as told people "go away, Overwatch is dead, check back in 2022 for the sequel".
Meanwhile on the World of Warcraft side, the Warlords of Draenor expansion (released 2014) was badly bungled; many headline features were scrapped, and the pipeline of content that keeps subscriber numbers up between expansions wasn't there. They (very obviously) panicked, and threw EVERYTHING at the next expansion, Legion (released 2016). It was quite well received, and it was clear player numbers had recovered. The problem is that the following expansions (Battle for Azeroth, released 2018, and Shadowlands, released 2020) have been pretty underwhelming. But with a two year expansion release cycle, and two underwhelming expansions in a row, that lines up with a sharp drop in active players over the last three years.
Also don't forget the announcement of the Diablo mobile game; some PR missteps made the fans think it was a Diablo 4 announcement; when it turned out to be a mobile game it was, basically, worse than nothing.
There's also the misteps relating to WoW Classic. It had been a perennial fan request, but Blizzard had always refused, at one point infamously telling fans that "you think you want it, but you don't". Well, they finally released WoW Classic, and it turned out the fans really DID want it. Without that the collapse in WoW subscription numbers during BfA would have been much worse. But when you think about a team that struggles to make compelling new content, then argues with fans about whether there's any appetite to revisit old beloved content, then finally discovers they were wrong and there is...well. It raises some serious questions about whether the current team understands what the player base even wants. Because on some level, you can look at the last few years as Blizzard saying "you guys are wrong, you don't want Vanilla back, you guys want BfA!" But no, the player base wanted Vanilla, and did not want BfA.
Finally, there's been a long, long series of horrible esport misteps, from the re-written EULA that ensured the Warcraft 3 remaster couldn't possibly become an esports staple, to their successful efforts to ensure that if they couldn't run a SC2 esports scene nobody else could either, to some very puzzling choices around Overwatch team and tournament structures, to the killing of of HoTS, to their repeated awkward attempts at creating an esports scene in WoW, despite the game being unsuited to it and the player base having no interest. (Seriously, between Startcraft 1 and DoTa, Blizzard had the modern esports scene handed to them on a plate, and threw it away in an attempt to gain control.)
29% decline? You don't say...
I think it has its own set of problems but they seem different from the ones you mention.
This company has been contemptuous of their players for years. They fell into that classic trap of "If we [do something that will alienate all our customers] we can get 10x as many customers from [untapped market]" As anybody should have been able to foresee, the old customers were indeed alienated and the new customers never materialized.
There's no context as to what each player wants. The loop just works across the whole player base, not really aimed towards any context of the player.
I can't really blame either side. It sucks for enthusiasts who want games that are complex, to be offered a watered down experience full of MTX. But it sucks for studios when they sink a 10xs the money into producing a complex PC game and earn maybe half the revenue.
Trying to sell games to mobile/casual gamers is fine, but they probably should have invented a new brand for the purpose (like they did with Hearthstone) instead of burning an old brand for little gain.
This is obviously what the bliz heads thought, but I doubt it's true tbh.
That legendary status lives in our head, and isn't necessarily translated because people hear about it. You can't inject nostalgia by describing it.
1. What's Diablo?
2. Diablo 2 was great!
3. I played Diablo 3 but tired of it...
This seems obvious, but there are examples to the contrary (Zynga, etc). Assassins Creed was a legitimate artistic experience long before Ubisoft began milking it for everything its worth. Stories out of Bungie during the Halo trilogy era paint a picture of a college dorm, filled 24 hours a day with people working because they loved the product; a far cry from the billion dollar delayed outsourced forced-overtime disaster of Infinite (though, to be clear, nothing is all roses). Near every franchise that is worth anything nowadays started in raw, true passion.
Its difficult to simply say "Money shouldn't matter", because it absolutely does matter, but when it starts entering into the equation guiding development decisions, the quality of the product will decrease, and over the long term the company will begin making less money from their games. Call of Duty is a great example, which has seen reducing sales every year, until the Modern Warfare remake (also a bad sign; when a company has to reach back to their glory days to reignite the playerbase). Warzone captured a zeitgeist, but Cold War met with poor reception; the passion is gone, and players recognize that. More applicable to the article; WoW as well, where every expansion released since Wrath has seen a decline in player-count (except spikes when they first release, and Legion saw a small uptick, which per the previous parenthesis was mostly just a "hey remember Burning Crusade" expansion); its not a coincidence (though certainly not the whole reason) that Wrath introduced Dungeon LFG late in its cycle, and Cataclysm introduced Raid LFG soon after.
I don't know how companies can engineer an environment which helps maintain this flame of passion for the decades a franchise can last, except to say that the business should absolutely be firewalled as much as possible from anyone implementing the artistry. No talk of revenue; no metrics targets. That's a trust fall; businesses don't tend to like trust falls, but on the other side of the coin, this is more-or-less the model Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo all follow with their first-party titles, and the general high quality shows. Its a luxury for them, but seemingly a necessary one. Centralizing artistic power in an individual also seems to help; many incredible games, despite being the work of many, tend to have names predominately associated with them (The Last of Us? Neil Druckmann. Mario? Miyamoto), whereas bad games tend to be associated with a company (which may point to less artistic agency in any individual and more design-by-committee).
The world would benefit from learning about what makes some game companies so insanely successful (Nintendo being a big one); but, I also suspect, companies which have nailed the culture & process necessary to make it happen aren't keen to share, as its a serious, serious moat. One thing is for sure; I would not jump at the chance to emulate whatever Activision-Blizzard is doing right now.
There's fair criticism to how it monetizes but it still dominates its category for a reason, they continue to own it like the MMO genre with WoW.
I don't know where I'm going with this, I guess just that between Overwatch and Hearthstone I actually mostly enjoyed this recent era of Blizzard and I'm more hopeful for what's next. I didn't feel contempt from them playing these games, I felt that old Blizzard spark.
Yet it seems people still play it.
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.
My point was that these criticisms never acknowledge that ATVI is massively successful and the critics are always in the minority.
They assume because a few hundred on a message board said something the entire company is a failure and everyone agrees.
For the record I agree with most of the criticism...I also acknowledge what I want isn't necessarily what others want.
I think people just got fed up with online trading card games and the grind/monetization that they have. At least with MTG I can resell the cards... In fact MTG online with cockatrice is way more fun than HS or any of the other clones.
the following year diablo 4 was announced and much was forgiven. the mobile game is still not out (in closed beta rn) and early reports are good.
you can fault blizzard for thinking its core fans at blizzcon would be excited about a mobile game, but if you are a game developer with a popular IP you're making a huge mistake not developing for mobile, as it will be the majority of the global gaming market for the foreseeable future.
I see your point and agree totally on the "want to play" level.
However it is really legit to consider new options. After all Blizzard's games are community driven - and why not try to increase the community?
Execution was really bad. That's where I agree again. So it is a tough business after all. Like show business. Have a look at Star Wars for example.
World of Warcraft is still being milked till it dries up (and I'm saying that as someone clocking 560+ days in game). Diablo has been abandonned (see the announcement of a mobile Diablo game last year¹, and its reception by the player base). So has StarCraft. Overwatch is stagnant (no new hero for a year) and Overwatch 2 is probably in development hell (pure speculation on my part I'll admit). Heroes of the Storm is also pretty stagnant (the game went from a hero every month to only two last year, nothing in 2021 so far).
In the meantime, there has been a very heavy push for e-sports with Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm (though I have not followed any of those). These efforts seem, to me, extremely centred on American audience, unlike League of Legends which has multiple leagues around the world. I'm sure a ton of money has been poured into this venture, but I'm unsure it has improved the games...
Anyway, the last time I launched Battle.net was for Destiny 2... and it has migrated to Steam in the middle of 2019!
¹Wow OK, that was in 2018 o_O Time flies, especially with a global pandemic, it seems...
Based on past track record, I don't hold much hope, though
The truth is a lot of the good developers left, their new mmo Titan was a massive flop that was rolled into Overwatch, HotS wasn't very compelling, and Diablo 3 never had a compelling endgame to be a "forever game" with constant revenue, Hearthstone was a creative grass roots effort that has since been hit with heavy competition and WOW is an aging workhorse but its not the phenomenon it once was.
Activision is the cause of all that?
Sometimes I wish I had a character but I heard they are messing up classic by introducing power leveling!
Blizzard is a private company, it's their tournament, their platform. If they don't want that to be instrumentalized as a political platform then they have every right to disallow that.
For another, very recent, example of this: The International Olympic Committee just issued a strict warning against wearing BLM apparels, or any kind of social protests, at the Tokyo Games [0].
Yet the popular mainstream response to that is not "The IOC is bowing down to attempts of censorship by an evil regime!", as it was the case with Blizzard and China, but all around agreement how the Olympics shouldn't be a political platform.
[0] https://thebridge.in/tokyo-2020/wearing-blm-apparels-social-...
then they put their president on stage wearing pride pins, make statements about BLM, and go on at length about how "every voice matters"
... whilst simultaneously banning people for saying "free hong kong", censoring the fact that Tracer/S76 are gay (in countries where this would hurt profitability), amongst other things
That's a broad claim to make. I have seen plenty of prevailing opinions and discussion the other way; commonly referencing Tommie Smith, prior country boycotts and similar events.
In any case, I think it's reasonable for Americans to think that US companies should not sacrifice American ideals on the alter of foreign profits by cowtowing to (perceived) regressive demands of foreign countries.
It's not really broad, even here on HN I'm getting downvoted for pointing this out, even tho out of all places we should know better. If you want to see the overwhelmingly non-controversial responses to this you can check out the Reddit discussions about it [0], those are mostly defined by understanding, and not outrage.
> In any case, I think it's reasonable for Americans to think that US companies should not sacrifice American ideals on the alter of foreign profits by cowtowing to (perceived) regressive demands of foreign countries.
And there it is again: The narrative that there were demands from the Chinese government to do it, instead of Blizzard just proactively putting the lid on it because it's bad for business.
If we would apply similar assumption to this situation, then that would mean the IOC was apparently pressured by the US government to make that statement, yet that's not something anybody even dares to speak out.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/n5i7iu/black_liv...
It felt like a big personal sacrifice at the time, but I’m glad to see that it added up into a noteworthy headline here, even if there are other reasons for player decline.
That combined with the fact they've lost a significant amount of what constituted their top senior creative talent I'm going to say two things:
First they're probably a sound investment, they'll probably keep climbing as the MTX proliferates and as things like Diablo 4 on the horizon release and Warzone through Activision is still massively popular as ever.
And second they're probably not a place where you can expect massive innovation and polish in games any longer, and if you were a fan, like myself, that magical time is over, maybe look to Dreamhaven that some of that senior creative talent founded and others have gone to since leaving.
They've figured out a clever model of rotating out the old content to make room for more new stuff. No doubt Hearthstone is very profitable for Blizzard!
Starcraft 2 and HotS, on the other hand, have basically been abandoned. Even Overwatch seems to be stagnating somewhat.
edit/ The addition of classic mode may make it more approachable for casual players. Time will tell.
I think the last thing WoW needs is more expansions.
But I’ve really lost trust in the company and have a hard time imagining Diablo 4 being much better than Diablo 3.
Diablo 2 Resurrected looks intriguing and seems to be going about things in the right way, involving the community, etc. but I believe it’s a contract job by a third party? I have a hard time imagining Blizzard proper ever making a single-player, offline-friendly game.
At launch, it was alright. Now that I’m a wildly powerful godlike thing that can kill Diablo by looking at him sideways, it’s an awful lot of fun in a completely different way.
There was a time around the Reaper of Souls prepatch where the game could have been reworked into something actually quite good, and that just never came. Coupled with a multi-year content drought up against massive PoE leagues every 3 months, it's just a tough sell.
For one it felt too easy. Some of this was likely console controller vs. mouse - and so maybe not the game itself’s fault - but it felt like point-and-click turned into just click, making it more one dimensional.
And two, I felt less weight/permanence in character building decisions. One of my favorite aspects of d2 is specialized builds, that you can screw them up, and generally delaying spending skill/stat points until certain. I thought d3 character customization felt more cosmetic and like my choices ultimately didn’t matter as all builds were so strong. Like it didn’t matter how I allocated points on my tree in the same way it felt like navigation and attack, described above, had lost some nuance. And that seems off to me when every character pretty much plays as a gear-independent caster.
They did a cosmetic pet thing recently, tied to donations to Doctors Without Borders and I found myself hoping it would fail. Instead of a fun thing where the community would come together it felt like being asked to donate to a charity at the walmart register in order to boost the company's profile.
As far as I know war 3 reforged is still screwed up. They acted shamefully during the blitzchung thing and then tried to post some twee black lives matter stuff during the george floyd protests last year. The people who actually cared about the games have fled, most recently Jeff Kaplan.
They'll still keep making money to appease the blizzard/activision shareholders but the soul is gone. RIP old blizzard
Otherwise, why would you drop a whole slew of people suddenly? For the fun of it?
0.9%-2% is not a "mass layoff".
There have to be some epic stories of mismanagement or hubris, if only someone would tell them.
But I didn't buy reforged after how bad it was - and still is. It should have been easy money for them, and instead it was just a half finished money grab.
If I'm angry about anything with blizzard, it's that they've stiffed a bunch of these existing communities by not giving long-term support+content updates. Like, reforged had pretty much the same level of bugs or unfinished stuff practically every game has on release, but after a couple months of the devs fixing a bunch of these, blizzard's management got cold feet and laid the whole team off. We might have gotten the promised cutscene upgrades. But now - now we'll never get them.
SC2 has this wicked game mode, "co-op commanders", that supposedly is one of their most popular things (and directly sells DLC), and what do they do? They stop making more content for it - all they'd have to do is make more DLC, and it'd print money. I've been playing a bunch of it lately, and I'm just plain mad, knowing that what I'm playing is truly all I'll ever get.
I genuinely don't get Blizzard, these days. I could understand them diverting their investment towards a far more lucrative pot (much like how Valve has doubled down on their real moneymakers like Dota/CS:GO, at the expense of i.e. Portal), but ... what is Blizzard even investing in? I thought Overwatch and Hearthstone were the new hotness, but if even those are getting stiffed, and blizzard's making money hand-over-fist, then...
... ? Like, what's even left?
But it's not stolen -- they didn't invent the genre, someone did off of their platform.
>I love the new graphics, the bugs were pretty minor and quickly fixed, and the stuff the community complained about was either irrelevant [...] or was not a regression against the prior version of the game
I have played the game a lot since it came out, and that is not true. There were multiple network-related issues that might have been in the original game, but were fixed by custom hosting bots long ago (GHost++), which cannot be used anymore (so you're stuck with high-latency). Some were not though, you could wait ~45 seconds for someone to fix their network issues, whereas now they get kicked at the first lag from online games.
There were also gameplay-related changes which have somewhat been fixed, although custom game development has become a huge pain, with crashes and desyncs way more common then they used to be (even before the custom hosting bots).
Arguably they didn't break the normal games AFAIK (but they did break the ladder, especially 2v2, 3v3, etc), although there are no more tournaments, but the main fun in wc3 were the custom games and they:
1) Made user-hostile ToS changes (why? map makers are working for free to make your game better)
2) Broke the netcode making desyncs way more likely and removed custom bots making latency way higher (playing USA + EU is now a huge pain because of where their servers are hosted)
3) Broke an important part of the community (clans, channel bots, etc)
4) Made the client way laggier and heavier
For artists, there's a concept of "moral rights". Art may not be destroyed senselessly, no matter who owns it, because it goes against the human creative spirit - rights like that. We need similar rights for old games. You can sell a new remaster or even turn down the servers, but you can't remake it into a monstrosity that you can't opt out of.
Their legal team forced the ToS to include a clause where they claim any and all player-made content, stories or intellectual property belonged to Activision-Blizzard and not to the modders who made them. They did this because they believed they "lost" DOTA to Valve, instead of realizing that DoTA originally helped them sell a lot of copies of WC3 and they had no moral right to the IP anyway, something the courts recognized, thankfully.
I have a wild theory that no honorable veteran Blizzard dev actually wanted to work on Reforged because they knew about Legal's position and therefore knew Reforged had no chance of actually matching it's former glory days. The chance that a lot of modders would want to create content for it were effectively zero.
Looking at the screens for the Diablo 2 remaster, it looks like that they are using the same outsourced art company to create the new models, as its style is way too similar to the WC3 remaster - I believe that it will flop too.
as Blizzard aren't working on it: it's possible it might actually be good
WoW died for me when they introduced the random dungeon finder in Cataclysm and cut down the player-to-player interaction outside dungeons by 99%.
Starcraft 2 ... might have been polished and all, but honestly I don't see much difference from Starcraft 1. Also, I don't like memorizing openings (either chess or a RTS) and the multiplayer is toxic enough. Been called a stupid noob a lot, especially when i won :)
Diablo 3... i sometimes play that when i feel like doing something that doesn't require even one active neuron. It's about like watching TV.
Hearthstone was fun until I realized it's like MTG and you have to spend real money to improve your card collection.
They made WoW classic unplayable with their decision to cram 10x as many people on one server (and refusal to fix it). Then WC3: Reforged came up. So two botched remakes/updates.
Their other titles don't run on Macs, so considering how good the current titles are, I didn't even look. Heard that the Diablo 2 remake will be Windows only as well.
So... i guess good luck to them. They have to do A LOT to convince me they're worth my time now.
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 quickly.
I do think the best thing they've done in WoW recently though, for bringing some of that discovery back, is adding secret events and global puzzles. Going into Gnomeregan, seeing a small hidden button, pressing it and having a lvl ?? boss show up and obliterate my max level character was just awesome. And I had a ton of fun doing the Uuna quest-but-not-really.
But so much of the game has just stopped being fun.
I don't know... i think they originally wanted to sell WoW by the hour (I think it actually was sold like that in Asia somewhere) so time wasting travel was more linked to that. Don't forget how long it takes to craft multiple items too.
A lot of other WoW clones allowed some teleportation. Or non WoW clones. Being able to teleport basically anywhere (that you've walked to at least once) in Guild Wars never hindered socializing for me.
I remember going on flight paths through Ashenvale with the full moon and was struck by how beautiful the game was.
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?
But still, if I compare that to hearthing to some location, hopping into a portal, flying to some objective, landing at the marker on my minimap to pick up some item, flying to some quest giver for the reward and then flying away, the latter feels so much more shallow.
And during those 40 minute hiatuses is when chat discussions would happen (and you'd also plan your questing/travels around that travel time). I'd made some decent money just taking things from the faction auction house to the neutral one and back.
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 left, just mindless queuing and loot collecting.
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.
A game like WoW shouldn’t be made so “everyone can do everything” either - sure it’s nice to see a raid but I never really felt the need - I had enough fun plugging along at my own pace.
Of course, they removed it after a while, too much interaction between players is bad mmmkay?
I used to feel this way more but in the past couple of times I picked the game up Raid Finder and Dungeon Finder were completely irrelevant to myself and every player I interacted with. I did 0 Raid Finder and like 2 queued dungeons on my raid geared characters.
Having a guild is more important than ever in my opinion as relying on getting invited to pug groups is very frustrating. Especially if trying to gear up a character later in the expansion.
Blaming lfg/lfr for the current wow community is misguided at best. The rewards from it are just too low for it to have such a large impact.
I mean the game has become pay to win at this point as you can pay real money for ingame gold... Which you can use to get carried through mythic raid/pvp/m+, giving you a gigantic ingame advantage.
This isn't even a niche thing anymore. There are spammers constantly offering carrys for all ingame content.
We specifically did PuGs with 4 people from the guild and one random for recruiting ;)
I beat it once, and I tried playing it through again with a friend, and it was just so utterly dull that we shut it off out of frustration.
Our software company is not even 10 people big and we are able to deliver extremely high quality software multiple times per day to many customers, while supporting a wide range of business contexts. The annual budget for our whole team is something like $750k. Our part of the AWS bill is less than $400/m, but we seem to make due and get shit done.
Blizzard in particular has something like 2 billion dollars in free cash flow to work with. Obviously not exactly the same problem domain but effectively the same sort of cost structure around core product development. Nothing ever works out linear at scales like this, but even assuming a 10x loss in efficiencies of scale (i.e. due to organizational overhead), you would still have resources to run ~200 copies of our software team in parallel on ~200 unique projects. How many teams would have to succeed before that model pays off? 1/200 figuring out how to build a proper WoW killer could get the job done...
To Blizzard I say: Take all that capital the gaming community has been injecting into your money bin for the last 2 decades, and invest in an internal startup culture. Spin out tens or hundreds of smaller teams with their own independent creative direction to try out new ideas. If you find some hits on one of these teams, maybe you take a less successful team and add their resources to the more successful one. In this way, you can dramatically expand the portfolio & diversity of the product base. This has caveats for any "common" creative vision, but judging by the comments in this thread, you may want to re-evaluate any convictions around that idea.
My impression is that big game studios would rather put all their eggs in one basket where they're (fairly) certain they can make a decent return rather than spreading it around a bunch of smaller projects and hoping one of them turns out to be Minecraft. This is the same dynamic driving large movie studios to invest huge sums of money in a shrinking number of huge blockbusters.
but then the standard development process sunk in, at least to Overwatch, and now the content pipeline is dead
It's like thinking if you have $100 Million and the right production schedule, crew, actors, and producers in place and they work really hard you'll have a major hollywood blockbuster!
Creative arts don't work like that.
Edit: although you are right and you make a good point.
Publishers need to continually cater to a fresh generation. They risk alienating their existing playerbase when this happens to a firm degree, which makes this an art. Blizzard has failed to compete at young peoples attention as well as other distractions on the market, for this new generation at least.
Take Mario and Pokemon for example. Those IP will always attract new players for years to come. The formula is simple but it works.
In contrast, people aren't as crazy about RTS games as they use to be.
Back when I was still in their target market, Blizzard was definitely known for imitating successes better than their rivals. Starcraft, Diablo and WoW were all quite late to the RTS, RPG, and MMO scene respectively, but they had a depth and polish that the pioneers in these fields lacked and that made them powerhouses of their respective genres. They were the Shakespear of popular genres, doing nothing original but doing it better.
Overwatch seemed like it was an example of that approach into the... not sure what to call it, Team Fortress genre perhaps? But I've not seen anything similar since, they seem to have stayed out of the sandbox RPG genre altogether.
I wonder whether they were so focused on customer experience that they couldn't emulate the loot box model, and therefore were left behind.
It's kind of a shame we never got to find out what MMOs could have become if the market had remained more competitive.
The fall from grace started with the advent of paid services, and in game cosmetic shop in WoW and all of the issues surrounding the launch of Diablo 3 (let alone the disaster that is OWL/Overwatch, complete abandonment in HotS, etc.)
What finally killed it for me is the role-based queueing. It locked in the developer-proscribed 2/2/2 meta and made the game feel very static and uninteresting. Previously, if you saw a gap on your team you could switch to a completely different role to fill the void. Though even before role-based queuing there was a (very annoying) portion of the community that believed you had to be playing the high-end "meta" even when you're at the lowest ranks or playing casually and would complain endlessly if you did anything different.
There were huge org buy-in fees (in double-digit millions) for even fielding a team, completely unheard of for an esports league, and it was coming out of the gate with almost zero community competitive scene to back it up. Esports scenes thrive on an amateur/semi-pro/pro feeder system and for the parent company to dump a hundred million dollars at the top end without waiting for organic growth at the bottom smacked to me of a cash-grab by Blizzard. Also, Blizzard established itself as a monopoly with exclusive rights to create tournaments, which really rankled with the semi-pro players.
Aside from the tedious balance issues that resulted in us watching an entire season of OWL where top-tier hitscan dps players were forced to play tank, the whole top-to-bottom emphasis on "support team [geographical location] [adjective]" did nothing to foster support for particular squads. Esports leagues are rootless - there are no Wolverhampton Wanderers or Gunners on the Internet - instead people follow specific players for their individual playstyles and skills.
The most hilarious example of the most tone-deaf enforcement of this was when Seagull (one of the OG beta testers that somehow exploded and got thousands of viewers on Twitch) got signed to Dallas [whatever adjective] and proceeded to spend the next 6 months benched (and offline on Twitch) because his skillset wasn't meta. He then spent a single season in competition, quit, returned to Twitch and made orders of magnitude more money from doing whatever he wanted than he would have got in the League.
The thing that sealed the League as a scam for me was the introduction of linkage between a Twitch account and your OW account - you could gain in-game tokens to buy cosmetics from time spent watching OWL on Twitch, but this was trivially defeated by setting the stream to 160p resolution, muting the tab and continuing to do whatever you wanted. At that point it was obvious it was all about gaming metrics and not making a game, and I got bored and left.
Really just highlights Blizzard is terrible at esports. Lots of examples here for MDI, AWC prize pools vs. investment required to be successful.
however it's managed really, really badly
it's a billion dollar franchise and can't even put out a new map for the regular game mode in 24 months
(or slightly alter two broken ones in 12 months, hlc + paris)
There was a great article in Kotaku[1] that illustrated this quite nicely. Essentially, what made World of Warcraft successful when it launched can't really exist today, especially with our hyper-connected world. Blizzard has made many attempts to make World of Warcraft more modern, more accessible to newer players (and some have even worked!), but nothing they've done has been able to recapture people in the same manner as it did originally. I think this isn't so much Blizzard's fault as it's just a factor of our world now; there's so much competition for our attention that the "average" gamer doesn't really have the motivation to immerse themselves into the game world (nor can they really when there's so much research you end up doing while playing).
The last truly transformational gaming experience I had was with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild back in 2017. I suspect much of that experience was due to the fact that, in those crucial first few days, there wasn't really anything online about the game. (Sure, there were articles here and there, but nothing near the vast amounts of information about World of Warcraft that exist now). To a lesser extent, I think a lot of the experience I had was due to the single-player nature of the game.
I've said this for years, and I still stand by it: Blizzard should create single-player games set in the Warcraft universe in the vein of Skyrim. They've spent so much time and effort crafting these elaborate stories and worlds that I think the best way to really experience them now is with a single-player game. I could be convinced to accept a group-up mechanic for larger enemies (sort of in the vein of Monster Hunter), but a single-player narrative-driven game set in the Warcraft universe (with art done by the cinematics team) could be a blockbuster if done correctly.
However, there's no indication that Blizard cares about crafting that sort of experience anymore. They seem to be almost commpletely focused on multiplayer, microtransaction-based gaming, which is probably the way to be the most profitable these days I guess.
[1] https://kotaku.com/world-of-warcraft-classic-maybe-you-cant-...
Overwatch and HearthStone are much bigger jumps to be fair.
However I think that was the model of many of the older games. Once the game has been developed and released, single player improvements are largely either bugs, quality of life improvements or platform changes. The first 2 were needed less because of old school blizzard's dedication to quality.
Since I didn't want to waste time searching for random people to party with, I convinced my wife and a friend to start playing with me. We're all about to get to level 20 and are eager to see if the 3 of us can complete Deadmines.
I haven't experienced the kind of "ghost-town" feel that the writer described. Even minor towns usually had people running around them. Also, the writer's use of "everyone" and "we" doesn't apply to me or anyone I know. The 3 of us are learning how to play together effectively, and having a great time doing it. At the rate we're progressing, we probably have many hundreds of hours of fun gaming ahead of us even if we never do anything more than 5-man dungeons.
Last time I played a WoW expansion I got to level cap basically solo.
Do you plan on staying on classic or going to TBC next week?
If you're struggling with gold, I would suggest buying some. I'm not normally one to cheat, but my group bought 4000 gold for $100 on g2g.com and it helped quite a bit. To the extent that there are rules against this, they are basically not enforced. It's unheard of for anyone to be banned for buying gold.
For me it was Subnautica. That game *hooked* me so hard. It had an incredible progression and such an interesting game loop. Recapturing that experience is like lightning in a bottle, which I agree is like when WoW hit peak numbers.
They feel like icky skinner boxes through and through.
Every aspect of their games are a/b tested up the ass to convert as many MTX as possible and personally it's a total turn off. I downloaded Warzone and tried it out this weekend and uninstalled after 2 matches, it just felt off. Hard to describe. Like a AAA graphics Candy Crush. yuck!
You can have hybrid entities, and you can have game studios/developers chose to self-publish, or whatever. The relationship between a publisher and studio can also vary. You can have one offs, where an independent game studio pitches a single game to a publisher, and they sign a deal for just that one game. Or you can have longer term relationships. For example, after Bungie re-spun out from Microsoft, they signed a 10 year deal with Activision (but they weren't owned by Activision). Or sometimes, publishers can straight up own game studios (they'll usually own a whole bunch of them). For example, Microsoft owns a whole pile of game studios (like recently acquired Bethesda).
Activision-Blizzard is the parent holding company. Activision is the game publisher arm, and Blizzard is a separate game studio arm. Call of Duty for example is developed by a family of studios (for example: Infinity Ward) that all (well, at least IW) operate as parts of Activision. Like any creative-ish field, the exact relationship between the creative types, and the money types is... always contentious?
Blizzard's relationship with Activision (the publisher) is different from say Activision's relationship with Infinity Ward in that Activision the publisher actually owns IW, while Blizzard is technically an equal business unit with Activision the publisher.
Testing costs a lot of money, automated testing isn't widely spread / feasible, and the cost of distributing patches is low - so many studios opt for the economic advantage of using their players as guinea pigs.
The last 6-8 years of WoW have basically been 1 long paid, subscription based beta test.
Still, Overwatch was released in 2016, and announced in 2014, so there is also the possibility that there was some shift happening after that time.
I believe HS gets major updates that are considered well polished, just to add another data point.
Maybe somewhere inside the carcass is a new Blizzard with fresh ideas and a passion for games. I hope so, but I don't hold out much hope.
I am in no way condoning Activision, and I think their approach to Warzone maintenance has been pretty horrible (they are just turning a corner on that it seems), but Warzone is a good game without any gameplay-obtrusive MTX
* Best load-outs are faster to unlock with the paid game, so it is semi play-to-win
* Warzone client is MASSIVE (seriously, like fill your entire SSD massive) because it installs other games alongside
* Servers are awful, with extremely low tick-rates, so movement and shooting feels pretty ropey
* A general sense of sameyness crept in after a few hours. I have a hunch that this is due to a low skill ceiling to the mechanics. Whilst I'm sure this makes the game more accessible to a wider audience, I found it left me with no sense of progression. Like eating a Big Mac rather than a nourishing meal.
* it’s the biggest game I’ve ever seen and updates way too much. Feels like it ate my entire 1.2TB soft cap last month. Sadly the other games are also coming with +60-80gb on top of wz itself
* agreed
* in solos, it is a pretty terrible game, but the other modes require good team play and utility usage. I think there is a big skill gap, but the game is very slow paced, and it’s hard to objectively describe success. Is it frags? Placement? I suppose it depends on your goals. I can say watching streamers get 25 frags against top quality players shows you that aggression and mechanical skill are still rewarded in my opinion
I really was torn about going back to play Classic WoW, but I chose not to, simply because I hate Activision/Blizzard. I refuse to support that company with a single dollar.
Their games being lifeless and greedy is bad enough, but as a company they are mean spirited, and will plant a boot in the face of anyone in their community just because they can.
As an individual cancel culture or voting with my wallet is my only path forward, but as a corporation (specifically in gaming) cancel culture is going to be a huge problem.
Its not clear to me what the right solution to this is going to be.
They also released player reporting and endorsements though it’s harder to say what the overall impact of those are.
Then it launched and I got bored after 1 month. Too few maps too few variety.
short of reducing the power of the ultimates: I'm not sure they can do too much about it
Instead, they've scaled down the investments in Starcraft to such a degree that the servers were almost completely offline over the past winter holidays and despite hundreds / thousands of complaints there was no official reaction from Blizzard. :(
They let some other studio make Torchlight III.
They have:
- an MMO (not a growth area compared to other genres)
- a FPS that tried to create a unique twist
- a card game that essentially created a new genre (with a commercial ceiling)
- remastered classics
Compared to the rest of the market that is growing in the following areas:
- large mobile presence
- MOBA (HotS has been discontinued)
- battle Royale
- HS is strong on mobile
- OW is arguably a MOBA/FPS hybrid
- CoD/warzone is the most streamed battle royale on twitch
And is an Activision title.
> HS is strong on mobile
The category is still niche compared to other big titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-played_mobile_gam...
> OW is arguably a MOBA/FPS hybrid
Fair, but isn't doing well. Will be interesting to see how Valorant does.
Development has certainly slowed down but it's still alive with new content, Hero reworks and balance patches.
> "We can't have new games like Brood War anymore, because devs would patch out everything that's fun about it in a few days."
Please get the designers away from the spreadsheets and in a game. Trade some of that polish away for a soul. Delegate more responsibility to junior people, instead of forging them into (strictly inferior) clones of the senior staff.
As I said, I don't think many players left hearthstone on account of this, but I do think it's one example of the many ways large publishers like Activision aren't capable to serve the communities they've acquired due to the many perverse incentives that comes with huge companies.
[0] https://www.vox.com/2019/10/8/20904433/blizzard-hong-kong-he...
That said, classic WoW exposes Blizzard for what they are even more than their recent expansion flops. Where you could write off the short comings of the expansion as them trying something innovative and failing, their support for classic is shocking compared to what it once was and make it apparent they are just a shambling zombie shell of a company.
There's nothing new, with the exception of expansions to WoW, which is essentially also just "more of the same". They tried to make the entry bar to WoW smaller by squishing max level from 120 to 60, but somehow completely failed to accomodate casual players by timegating everything worth doing behind a massive time investment.
I really hope Blizzard doesn't give up on the franchise and creates a Starcraft 3 for the next generation of kids (and adults).
To me Starcraft is like a modern form of chess, and one of the best games ever created.
I can't think of a single release from them I would describe as 'ambitious' other than Diablo Mobile which has the distinct honor of being dead before arrival.
Speaking anecdotally, no one I game with or any of the forums I go to talk about Blizzard games. Many of the Discord servers I play with used to be big into HotS and Starcraft I/II, but I don't hear a peep from them about either anymore.
Perhaps worst of all, several of the Path of Exile players I game with are no longer even worried about a Diablo 4 launch affecting the long term health of their favorite dungeon crawler. It's just expected that Blizzard will deliver a polished but shallow experience that will be over within two or three months at most.
Maybe they just aren't nimble enough anymore to leverage their huge war-chest of experience and cash.
Examples in my opinion:
Diablo has always had repetitive gameplay, but the stories/lore seems to suffer with each release.
They are either working on SC3 in secret or have given up on the franchise.
Their management of WoW Classic and rollout of releases has been awful. Without fresh progression servers, Classic is going to truly die in a couple of weeks with the release of TBC.
Their business decision to re-release WoW with WoW: Classic was a poor one
They should have made either a sequel, or a full REMAKE, not a lazy-milking-re-release, it just plain stupid
And let's not talk about the way they "reforged" Warcraft 3..
They print lot of money, but sadly it goes in the wrong pockets.. poor management, 0 vision for the future, stuck milking an aging player base
Doesn't sound great for the future
The community would have lost its mind if Blizzard tried anything like a remake, purely because Blizzard has spent all the goodwill it had a long time ago and did nothing to make people think it wouldn't conk it up. To the point everybody was knee-jerkingly refusing any change at all to the game, regardless of how minor or justifiable it would be (which was a mistake, Classic would have been much better with some increased difficulty).
But in these years they don't seem to even try to develop new franchises at all. All they do is just shitty remasters - it seems to me that the equity holders want the suck all the value from the brand and the company and then just get rid of it. So disgraceful.
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.
Hearthstone is a money sink with each expansion release the cost of acquire new expansion cards is too much. the wild format is not balance. Blizzard rarely trying to rebalance the card after the expansion goes to wild. after buying couple expansion bundle. i stop purchasing each expansion bundle. i only buy some special bundle.
Heroes of the Storm, its an interesting take on MOBA but it seem like Blizzard is abandoning it. i've spend some money on early deal but eventually stop playing the game.
Diablo II and III, II is a great game. III suck until Blizzard fix it with Reaper of Souls and they wanted $15 for diablo iii rise of the necromancer that just add another class.
They have lost the ability to innovate.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunspeargames/gates-of-...
MBAs are the reason China will eat the US.
By the time they released their own version, Heroes of the Storm, it was too late.
Not to mention many other MOBAs that are direct copies of DotA such as Heroes of Newerth and many others.
That, and projects like Diablo 4 were the signs that Blizzard is now dead inside and starting to rot.
No sane person would make those decisions. Those decisions can only happen when a company is ran by powerpoint-oriented people that is disconnected from the customers.
Their developer churn is through the roof, having a huge impact on their capability to ship quality which they compensate with shoveling in low effort extrinsic reward content systems.
[1] - https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/hong-kong-hearthstone-b...
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.