> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”
In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started.
> Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.
Blizzard needs focus, though time will tell if Microsoft can help with that.
Overwatch is a mess right now. The release of Overwatch 2 has gone poorly. The balance is poor. They only do patches like twice a quarter, so it feels like they always have to make very conservative changes because who knows how this change interacts with the 30 other ones in the patch notes. It means heroes that are broken or unplayable tend to stay so for months on end. The pro league is in shambles in the best case, and dead in the worst and most likely. They've been losing players. PvE never really launched, and now they're charging extra for the shitty scraps that came out of it.
Diablo 4 is basically dead. 5 million players on launch, 300k last month. They're down to ~5% of the players they started with a year after launch. The core gameplay was not fun, and I can't believe no one noticed it forever ago.
WoW is WoW, but it's stale. The most exciting thing they've done in ages was re-releasing old versions of the game. They're basically just waiting to get upended by something actually innovative.
At this point, I love Blizzard's characters and worlds, but I think their games are D tier. They have the half-finished feel of a Bethesda game, but they don't have any of the fun. They don't resemble the same Blizzard that originally released SC2 and WoW.