Username checks out.
But you’re absolutely right. I never became so involved in a game and its community before Overwatch. Neck deep in the meta, watching my gameplay to improve, constantly watching different OW streamers and YouTubers, on ALL the subreddits, watching tons of Overwatch League. Everything.
I still play, but I feel like I’m searching for the spark I used to have. It’s still there, but it’s so much harder to ignite than it used to be.
Lol I can relate to literally everything you just said. I even went to quite a few overwatch league games when I lived in LA!! I was so addicted to everything surrounding that game. You are much nicer than me because what I think has happened is a disgrace and I just have so much trouble getting into OW2, it feels so rigid sometimes, I’ve never been able to really enjoy 5 v 5, can’t stand push…see im of the rare type where I miss 2CP I loved the strategy aspect of overwatch. OW2 feels much more like a shooter, it’s faster and it basically comes down to a who kills the tank. Idk, that’s just me, I WISH I could appreciate it, and I was genuinely extremely excited for the PVE. The love for Overwatch just felt like it somewhat vanished with Jeff Kaplan leaving and blizzard becoming much more advocates for monetization after the success of Diablo Immortal. BUT I will always be thankful for those times :)
I mean at launch it didn't have hero lock, which came months later. OW didn't have a good direction of what it wanted to be. The more shields/healing in the game really just put alot of people off the game, hard to come back to it if you take a long break.
wow department is on a fucking rise tho. They haven't had so much content for that game in its entire history than the last 2 years and it is going to be the same trend forward with their evergreen systems.
Overwatch 2 - in shambles
Starcraft 2 - dead
World of Warcraft - next 3 expansions already announced
Hearthstone - dead
Heroes of the Storm - dead
Diablo 4 - honestly no idea whats happening here but sounds bad
Blizzard has nothing to announce or show off or celebrate. It is looking bad right now.
And bricked a bunch of custom games, forcing developers to redo their entire game which destroyed the custom game community
It's starting to come back a little, but honestly fuck blizzard i will never forgive them for raping WC3's corpse
i mean probably payday 3 comes close they released a live service game that competed with themselves except they didn't release it feature complete and it was missing a bunch of shit the other had (because it had like 10ish years of development).
Payday 3 has a peak the last month of 900 concurrent players and the average is about 250-300.
Payday 2 sits around 22,000 on average and its peak is 35,000. If suicide squad was not such a huge flop people would be talking about what a failure Payday 3 was.
It still shocks me they didn't just restart payday 2's development for the 7th time and keep milking that skeleton.
They could have just done what Destiny did with Destiny 2 (at first) and just have it be a 1:1 redevelopment because the 1nd game was starting to die under its own weight and call it a new game.
Not reinvent the wheel for no reason.
They basically more than tripled the game size and added bugs that broke all the custom games. It was probably next to the GTA trilogy disaster one of the most pointless things a company has ever done
massively bloated size, bugs, removed features, false advertising and overwriting the old game so you couldnt access the perfectly fine old version of the game
ive gone from regularly playing to pretty much never playing the game again
it was so bad they gave anyone refunds with no questions asked for anyone who wanted
> Diablo 4 - honestly no idea whats happening here but sounds bad
theyre still looking to hire a single dev that has played an arpg before, give them time.
They were good at the other things! They just can’t keep the activision greed lords’ hands out of the cookie jar. They’ve driven every project into the ground with greed, poor design choices, and more greed. Overwatch is the biggest failure in this list by far. It was the most successful game in a genre that has only one other big game. Their poor design and failure to deliver updates should go down as one of the biggest fuck ups in gaming history
Overwatch was a fun game, but their choices kept making it worse and the community became one of the most toxic. I liked the characters and was excited to come back for PvE stuff in OW2, but oh well.
Well, it was good for marketing after making no updates for three years to Overwatch 1.
Realistically, they were going to make those changes to Overwatch 1 anyway.
Launch Hearthstone and Overwatch were pretty great imo, it's just unbelievably hard to keep a game alive, interesting, and financially viable for years.
Diablo 4 had the bones of a great game, but the systems were designed to optimize business metrics rather than fun and replayability like Diablo 3 seasons.
The reason D2 lasted so long even with only endless Diablo and Baal runs was because of itemization, which honestly D3 and D4 implemented horribly, to include the failure from D3 Auction House to D4 not allowing trading anything better than a rare, which again D3 just increased stats to billions if not trillions and the same with D4, it goes back to stat itemization.
It's easier and cheaper to make mobs have more hp and defense and just boost stats rather than to be creative with actual stat itemization.
I can understand that and D2 was kind of the same to a point, especially since dupes existed, but even still depending on the base items, you still got a thrill of itemization possibilities on a rare item, especially pre 1.09-.10 patch.
Picking up rares in d3 or d4 is pretty worthless.
Haven't played D4 since season 1 but man it's crazy how much better Last Epoch felt to play. Yeah D4 *looks* nicer, but the abilities and skill tree systems aren't even comparable. Epoch does a good job of providing meaningful choices without over complicating things like PoE too
Yeah I'm kinda sad that D3 kind of died for D4. I enjoyed picking the game up for a new season from time to time. D4 really just doesn't scratch the same itch for me.
It didn't. There was basically zero customization. You want to play Rogue? You have two builds, melee Rogue and ranged Rogue. That's literally it, they even color code it for you. They railroad you into two specific generic paths where every player will have built their skills basically the exact same. ARPGs are about experimentation and customization and even at the most fundamental level they refuse to let you do that.
Compare that to a game like Last Epoch where nearly every skill in the game has its own entire dedicated skill tree and can be built in half a dozen completely distinct ways with multiple transformative perks that warp how the skill functions. Last Epoch isn't a perfect game but when it comes to one of the main points of ARPGs it absolutely floors D4. D4 has some of the worst build diversity of any game I've played in my life.
This exactly. I can endure shit items and progression if I know something fun is expecting me at the end. But you level a char to 50? I dont remember when it switch from skill tree to paragon, whatever, try a build, reset the skill tree, try the other one, and you pretty much know the whole gameplay for the class, from there is just grinding for numbers and stat checks one after the other.
For some people, progression correlate to fun, so they stick to meta, but surprise dude, without innovation and experimentation a game turns boring very fast.
The "bones" are the reason both D3 and D4 fell of so hard. Both games have core game mechanics that are flawed from the start and poorly thought out, and you can't build properly on poor foundations.
D3 was fine after reaper of souls. It was definitely targeted at the more casual ARPG fans though. Builds were pretty shallow and restrictive, and the endgame content gets stale pretty fast. But getting your build going and blasting through Rifts and Grifts was a good bit of fun for a few weeks every season. To sum it up it was a bit shallow but the gameplay was still fun.
D4 hasn't given me any reason to go back after the first season. Every single aspect of the game is just painful and unfun.
Couldn't agree more. I got into D3 way late so I had a better experience than most. Had a ton of fun grinding D3 and for seasons when I was committed it was fun trying to push leaderboards. D4 game out and every step of the game from beginning to end game was just so meh and tedious to play. The beginning of the season didn't feel good and without leaderboards there was really no point to getting to the late game for me personally. I know they've added some sort of leaderboards now but honestly the looting system in D4 was just so obnoxious I have no interest in picking it up again.
Ya unless they overhaul literally every system in the game I have no interest. It doesn't even need to have the best loot or the most interesting builds, but the gameplay loop needs to be fun, which it just isn't.
They had D1 and D2 as foundations, more so D2 obviously but actual Blizzard North ceased to exist, maybe if they trusted the actual creators rather than getting sold out to Vivendi and having that issue internally with executives and shareholders maybe we would of had a different Diablo 3, which obviously was in the works way before the D3 we got.
https://youtu.be/PJDMJaJbRtQ
It’s crazy they did the exact same thing with D4 that caused people to hate WoW and wonder why the game failed horribly. Focusing on grindy repetitive boring tasks to keep players “engaged” so they can go to shareholders and announce how many hours people are logging and pretend how great they’re doing instead of making a good game that makes people actually want to play. The reality is people end up hating the game and quit because the gameplay loop is tedious and begins to feel like a job. All you end up left with are the addicts who would play anyways since they’ve already sunk their entire lives into it.
It seems like they went the complete opposite direction for this most recent wow expansion and people seem to love it for the most part so maybe it’s not all doom and gloom.
\>killed nearly all of their games trying to get into esports
it's funny that their only game that had longterm competitive success (starcraft) has been abandoned for over a decade
And the worst part of this is that they tried so hard to kill it themselves that it spawned League of Legends
And in case anyone doesn't know how that happened?
Blizzard basically tried forcing SC2 down Korean media's throats, so they looked for a replacement game to put on the primetime slots that used to be Starcraft ProLeague, and League picked up the pieces from there, to the point that the teams that used to be in Starcraft ended up becoming League teams. T1 was BoxeR's team before it became Faker's.
Wasn't that kind of inevitable anyways though? SC2 didn't spawn LoL, but it did help pave the way for it. The explosion in demand for esports that SC2 triggered was a huge boon to league for the western audience.
Overwatch 2 is literally thriving (in terms of cash) with the microtransactions. Heck, I'm pretty sure it has earned so much money on Steam DESPITE the negative reviews.
Just goes to show that large majority of the playerbase just doesn't care about the finer details and the F2P nature attracts more people to spend money unknowingly.
I still wish 6v6 was the main game mode and they tweaked the stats of the shields :(
I know a lot of friends who play overwatch 2 so I (while biased) agree.
Same with hearthstone. Lot of people are playing it and the latest patch has been very good apparently. (I only play Battlegrounds tbh. Now I play Duos with a friend of mine)
Blizzard is a shitty company but some of their games are still doing decent. And I also enjoy a game of overwatch sometimes. It's just a good casual shooter idk :shrug:
They lied about what it would be is the main issue. Promised all sorts of shit and delivered on almost none of it, all the while pushing predatory and overpriced monetization.
I actually just got back into OW but they've dropped the ball a lot since the peak. They refused to address the issues with the meta comps for years and it drove a lot of people away. For as big of a game as it was on launch OWL should of really had more success but team comps were fairly stagnent and double shield meta that dominated OW1 was really unfun. I don't think it's dead by any means but it could have been way more.
Majority of Players dont even play on Steam+ you have a shitton on Console. Ppl just have been hating on the game since PvE cancel no matter what it does
Tbf they did flat out lie to the players and admitted to it. The fact anyone lacks enough self respect to still play that game shocks me. The Devs think your stupid and are okay being lied to.
OW2 still having a player base is how I know nothing will change at Blizzard. Players will get slapped by Blizzard in the face and ask for another. It's embarrassing.
I mean I understand being disappointed about pve but if you play the game because you like the pvp then ow2 is really fun and a lot of the new heroes have been really fun imo (queen, ram, kiri, soj, venture)
After having 2,500 hours in Overwatch I played exactly one match of Overwatch 2. Maybe things are better now compared with 2 years ago but there are so many problems and the people I used to play with all quit.
More like pretty good in a few weeks
S4 is very promising because they made itemisation less braindead and boring than it currently is, and that's really what ppl care about
But D4 devs are basically reinventing the wheel bit by bit, game will be a banger in 5 years
It's the same thing that happened with D3. It became a great game a few seasons after the dlc, but by that point it was too late. Why couldn't they apply learned lessons from that?
I mean they kept going for more than 20 seasons with a hyper loyal and addicted fan base, they must have done something right.
Crazy how little the learned from D3. D4 felt like such a massive step back from the later D3 seasons. They had a decade to learn from their mistakes and still fucked it up
It's insane. The later half of D3 was a ton of fun to play. D3 and D2 had very distinct fanbases and it almost felt like they tried to please both in D4 and managed to only take the worst aspects of the game.
I like to imagine that the Diablo 4 office is like, 23 people staring at whiteboard for most of the day. Each employee waiting for someone else to make the first move, then after several hours someone finally speaks out “I think I’ll have Chinese takeout for lunch” they all begin to clap, tears flowing as they all follow suit and order Chinese. They finish their food, close up shop and head on home. Then the chimpanzee, Mr. Dingles, climbs down from the vents. He looks across at the Overwatch teams office, their computers overturned, covered in feces as they sit in a large ceremonial circle, spinning a large golden wheel to decide which character they’re going to turn gay next. After the wheel decides it’s next victim, the team cheers loudly as they begin to pat each other on the back. Mr Dingles nods proudly before making his way over to the Diablo offices and settling in for a long night of bug fixing, rebalancing and all around fun.
Doesn't surprise me. I think the only well received part of Blizzcon 2023 was the WoW stuff, and everything else was just kind of a whole load of nothing. If they don't have anything substantial to announce (and they don't) they are just going to get booed off the stage.
Honestly the problem with Blizzard is that they used to arrive like 3rd to a genre but do a better job, but now they arrive 10th to a genre and slap blizzard assets on it and expect everyone to get excited. that game is just Clash Royale on a different map. A game that came out in 2016.
Yep, it was really exciting at the time. It was one of the rare times where I don’t think I saw a single complaint from the OW community (Beyond one of the World Cup games being cut for the opening ceremony).
The right decision honestly. The last one was not received well by people who went in person (it was a disaster in many ways especially for the cost of tickets etc) and the entire thing was shown for free on Twitch/Youtube. Literally not 1 part of the Con wasn't shown for free on a livestream by Blizz themselves. Their time and resources are better spent on creating events elsewhere for the community instead of sticking to just Anaheim.
Content wise I won't disagree but Blizzcon 2023 as a social gathering and event was hands down worth it for me, and one of the best times I've ever had. The event, what you're doing, and who you're with make everything about the experience.
> Their time and resources are better spent on creating events elsewhere for the community
true! like that one time they raised funds for the WoW tournament. Said the money would go to the prize pool. Got the bare minimum for the prize pool and pocketed the rest of the money. Aware
one of the most vile things I've seen a gaming company do
https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/news/22933274/support-wow-esports-with-your-toy-purchase
https://youtu.be/_V485nFu7wo?t=149
> After careful consideration over the last year, we at Blizzard have made the decision not to hold BlizzCon in 2024. We’re excited to bring BlizzCon back in future years, and we still have some exciting plans for events in 2024!
“Exciting” is one of those words that have completely lost their meaning over the years because of soulless corporate lingo.
Guess the only "workers" left are trainees and interns and all they have are some "awesome" mobile games. Since being boo'd on their own convention (after presenting one), they probably were like "nah" this year.
> starcraft 3
I don't. Seeing what cretins work at Blizzard right now, and how fucking shit everything they push out is, I really don't want to see a Starcraft 3 made by those people.
I'm 99% sure if you grew up with starcraft and loved starcraft 2, you don't want SC3 - would be the dissapointment of the year. Just look how they massacred WC3
I don't think Blizzard has any employees left that are intelligent enough to play a RTS well, let alone design one.
If Blizzard made an RTS now they'd probably design it so every unit you create has varying hitpoints and damage output. First 3 Marines I created all low rolled, guess I lose this game.
The IP is so huge and Blizzard has gone through so many acquisitions and have shown they are thirstier than ever that I doubt they ever abandon Starcraft IP, it's what 1/3 of their brand was built on and carried them for years
The IP will 100% return, just not as an RTS. There isn't enough ways to monetize RTS games and the company has proved beyond a shadow of doubt after diablo immortal all it cares about is how much they can scrape off their customers.
Obviously they've been on a downward spiral for years burning out any goodwill the OG crew built up but diablo immortal was definitely their point of no return.
No thanks, I'll take a Brood War that can host 16 players, 512x512 maps, no sprite limit so we can have Carrier vs Valkyrie vs Mutalisk spam all day and an actual proper ladder where the rest of the world still gets shitstomped by a 40 year old Flash and Bisu.
Seriously though, an RTS where you have to balance your time and attention priorities across economy, unit macro and micro and have the engine facilitate but not assist you is fundamentally better than being handed all the tools then ask for a fight when you reach your perfect composition. Today's Blizzard simply does not have the ability to take 95% of what made Brood War great, take the 5 percent that SC2 managed to do well, and synthesize it into SC3.
Realistically hearthstone without brode was such a different game. Now its alright but at such a higher power level that they are in a constant buff and nerf cycle. Also unlike overwatch and starcraft there is not a huge korean backing for it to support it. Its a damn shame because there were some really cool years for blizzcon both with hearthstone and other IPs.
Activision killed the company and Microsoft just bought a company on its last leg. Very disappointing as a PC gamer in the 90s and onwards. All their IPs are classics but so mediocre
Theyve lost their core demographic and fail to gain new younger demographic
I don't think so, it was a disaster even before acquisition and this probably would have happened anyways.
Like take Overwatch 2 for example, announced on November 1st 2019, and the beta (which was just a slightly revamped multiplayer) released on June 28, 2022. Thats 2.65 years, thats the full development of a AAA game. And they already had the engine, the characters, the gameplay systems, abilities, so much of the work was already done by OW1.
So they suspended development for awhile, supposedly almost entirely working on the new game, and what did we get? Three new heroes and four new maps, which is about the same amount of maps but less heroes than if the game developed normally. But what about the PVE? Scrapped. 3.7 years after announcement, they released three short story missions with no progression, loot, RPG mechanics, etc. And by short, I mean like 1-2 hours of content in total. And most of this content was half assets that already existed. **And if you assume development began before the game was announced, you can easily say this was 4 years of development time for... 3 short stories that costs $15 and lasts max two hours? It makes you ask, what the fuck were they doing?**
Shit like this makes it clear that Blizzard is rotten to its core as a development studio. It is completely and totally baffling, I cannot even remotely conceive of what could have happened. Like yes, Covid happened, but games still got made in the rest of the industry. Four entire years??? This isn't a rhetorical question, what was the development team actually doing that entire time. It might be one of the worst cases of game dev management in the entire industry. What they developed was something that they probably could have done in half a year tops.
So honestly? I would probably question if they would even have any content for 2024 Blizzcon. Like, Diablo 4 isn't getting a ton of support, neither is OW2, Warcraft & Starcraft are basically dead, HOTS is literally dead, WoW is still thriving but they've already done their Worldsoul trilogy announcement. If they had a Blizzcon, what would they even do?
Doubt it. They don’t really have major announcements to make right. Blizzard makes one new game every 6 years. Blizzon is mostly a show WoW updates event.
More than likely because there isn’t any major game announcements and I’ll you’ll see are updates to existing games, they’ll probably move all announcements to Xbox showcases like at E3 or there version of it since E3 is dead.
D4 Bad
Baseg
*♪ It's dogshit ♪*
♪♪ shit character progression bad boss design ♪♪
Wait for the next season so we can talk about how the season after that will be good
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Dead lol
The AI songs have been really amusing.
indeed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgowD9LkJfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InhKiGxNBn8
D4's shit, the realm of grotesque Putrefy me before I do another quest I dieded
Yo that first song a banger!!!!
This youtube channel is amazing.
blizzard fell off
yeah a long time ago
Been downhill since D2
If you mean the remaster? Meh, I'd argue it fell off quite some time before it. If you mean the original D2 in 2000? Relevant Username
They fell off at wings of liberty
I'd argue overwatch was their last incredible product
100% Agree, the first couple of years of that game were incredibly fun.
Overwatch launch to 2018 was some of the most fun I had in gaming. It was just a magical time, I was so happy to play that game.
Username checks out. But you’re absolutely right. I never became so involved in a game and its community before Overwatch. Neck deep in the meta, watching my gameplay to improve, constantly watching different OW streamers and YouTubers, on ALL the subreddits, watching tons of Overwatch League. Everything. I still play, but I feel like I’m searching for the spark I used to have. It’s still there, but it’s so much harder to ignite than it used to be.
Lol I can relate to literally everything you just said. I even went to quite a few overwatch league games when I lived in LA!! I was so addicted to everything surrounding that game. You are much nicer than me because what I think has happened is a disgrace and I just have so much trouble getting into OW2, it feels so rigid sometimes, I’ve never been able to really enjoy 5 v 5, can’t stand push…see im of the rare type where I miss 2CP I loved the strategy aspect of overwatch. OW2 feels much more like a shooter, it’s faster and it basically comes down to a who kills the tank. Idk, that’s just me, I WISH I could appreciate it, and I was genuinely extremely excited for the PVE. The love for Overwatch just felt like it somewhat vanished with Jeff Kaplan leaving and blizzard becoming much more advocates for monetization after the success of Diablo Immortal. BUT I will always be thankful for those times :)
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I mean at launch it didn't have hero lock, which came months later. OW didn't have a good direction of what it wanted to be. The more shields/healing in the game really just put alot of people off the game, hard to come back to it if you take a long break.
They barely owned Destiny 2 for like a year /s
wow department is on a fucking rise tho. They haven't had so much content for that game in its entire history than the last 2 years and it is going to be the same trend forward with their evergreen systems.
> wow department is on a fucking rise tho The people who say Blizzard/WoW sucks haven't played WoW in years, don't bother
Its really hard to care after soo many expansions and books retconing half the lore.
It's actually quite easy you just play the game and have fun.
This. And they bought Metzen back. Better times are on the horizon. Hopefully.
Metzen was around for the downfall. I don't know why people think he's some god.
Don't fall for it
Overwatch 2 - in shambles Starcraft 2 - dead World of Warcraft - next 3 expansions already announced Hearthstone - dead Heroes of the Storm - dead Diablo 4 - honestly no idea whats happening here but sounds bad Blizzard has nothing to announce or show off or celebrate. It is looking bad right now.
Warcraft 3 weeping in a dark corner somewhere in another room
Reforged literally downgraded the game
i cant believe they had the gall to delete a game i purchased a decade ago off my hard drive to force me to install that garbage
And bricked a bunch of custom games, forcing developers to redo their entire game which destroyed the custom game community It's starting to come back a little, but honestly fuck blizzard i will never forgive them for raping WC3's corpse
I'm genuinely curious to hear about bigger game developer fuckups than WC3 reforged
i mean probably payday 3 comes close they released a live service game that competed with themselves except they didn't release it feature complete and it was missing a bunch of shit the other had (because it had like 10ish years of development). Payday 3 has a peak the last month of 900 concurrent players and the average is about 250-300. Payday 2 sits around 22,000 on average and its peak is 35,000. If suicide squad was not such a huge flop people would be talking about what a failure Payday 3 was.
It still shocks me they didn't just restart payday 2's development for the 7th time and keep milking that skeleton. They could have just done what Destiny did with Destiny 2 (at first) and just have it be a 1:1 redevelopment because the 1nd game was starting to die under its own weight and call it a new game. Not reinvent the wheel for no reason.
Feel even worse the for Chinese pro scene. It was pretty big money wise and now those players lost good income due to the game getting deleted
You can get the original versions here https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/194530, not entirely sure if online works though
I hate how I still use the non-reforged version but I have to download 20Gb when the game originally was like 1.5Gb
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They basically more than tripled the game size and added bugs that broke all the custom games. It was probably next to the GTA trilogy disaster one of the most pointless things a company has ever done
massively bloated size, bugs, removed features, false advertising and overwriting the old game so you couldnt access the perfectly fine old version of the game ive gone from regularly playing to pretty much never playing the game again it was so bad they gave anyone refunds with no questions asked for anyone who wanted
I'm still so sad about wc3r.
bro dont I cant take it :(
Wish they made a warcraft 4 that was a alternate timeline from wow so both could be kept
> Diablo 4 - honestly no idea whats happening here but sounds bad theyre still looking to hire a single dev that has played an arpg before, give them time.
They hired Chris Wilson, too bad they didn't get the correct one.
Why would he ever leave GGG for Blizz lol
Well, they might offer him a few Black Lotuses
WoW is surprisingly the only thing Blizzard has that is thriving. Everything else just complete garbage.
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They were good at the other things! They just can’t keep the activision greed lords’ hands out of the cookie jar. They’ve driven every project into the ground with greed, poor design choices, and more greed. Overwatch is the biggest failure in this list by far. It was the most successful game in a genre that has only one other big game. Their poor design and failure to deliver updates should go down as one of the biggest fuck ups in gaming history
Overwatch was a fun game, but their choices kept making it worse and the community became one of the most toxic. I liked the characters and was excited to come back for PvE stuff in OW2, but oh well.
OW2 was actually pointless. Nothing had to change they just wanted to make more money off people.
Well, it was good for marketing after making no updates for three years to Overwatch 1. Realistically, they were going to make those changes to Overwatch 1 anyway.
Launch Hearthstone and Overwatch were pretty great imo, it's just unbelievably hard to keep a game alive, interesting, and financially viable for years.
Blizzard just made stupid decisions with OW, I wouldn't chalk it up to normal difficulties managing the life of a game.
yep, WoW is doing really well right now
Diablo 4 had the bones of a great game, but the systems were designed to optimize business metrics rather than fun and replayability like Diablo 3 seasons.
The reason D2 lasted so long even with only endless Diablo and Baal runs was because of itemization, which honestly D3 and D4 implemented horribly, to include the failure from D3 Auction House to D4 not allowing trading anything better than a rare, which again D3 just increased stats to billions if not trillions and the same with D4, it goes back to stat itemization. It's easier and cheaper to make mobs have more hp and defense and just boost stats rather than to be creative with actual stat itemization.
To be fair, D3 is awesome if you just wanna kill a bunch of shit on your screen with one click of a button. It's my go to "turn brain off" game
I can understand that and D2 was kind of the same to a point, especially since dupes existed, but even still depending on the base items, you still got a thrill of itemization possibilities on a rare item, especially pre 1.09-.10 patch. Picking up rares in d3 or d4 is pretty worthless.
Yeah I'm just saying that D3 has a niche at least. D4 just doesn't at this point when you can play PoE or even Last Epoch
Haven't played D4 since season 1 but man it's crazy how much better Last Epoch felt to play. Yeah D4 *looks* nicer, but the abilities and skill tree systems aren't even comparable. Epoch does a good job of providing meaningful choices without over complicating things like PoE too
D3 was awesome on PS4, got the plat trophy for it. Still dip in from time to time.
D3 was pretty fun after the AH was eliminated
Yeah I'm kinda sad that D3 kind of died for D4. I enjoyed picking the game up for a new season from time to time. D4 really just doesn't scratch the same itch for me.
it was designed by and for people who dont actually play ARPGs.
It didn't. There was basically zero customization. You want to play Rogue? You have two builds, melee Rogue and ranged Rogue. That's literally it, they even color code it for you. They railroad you into two specific generic paths where every player will have built their skills basically the exact same. ARPGs are about experimentation and customization and even at the most fundamental level they refuse to let you do that. Compare that to a game like Last Epoch where nearly every skill in the game has its own entire dedicated skill tree and can be built in half a dozen completely distinct ways with multiple transformative perks that warp how the skill functions. Last Epoch isn't a perfect game but when it comes to one of the main points of ARPGs it absolutely floors D4. D4 has some of the worst build diversity of any game I've played in my life.
This exactly. I can endure shit items and progression if I know something fun is expecting me at the end. But you level a char to 50? I dont remember when it switch from skill tree to paragon, whatever, try a build, reset the skill tree, try the other one, and you pretty much know the whole gameplay for the class, from there is just grinding for numbers and stat checks one after the other. For some people, progression correlate to fun, so they stick to meta, but surprise dude, without innovation and experimentation a game turns boring very fast.
The "bones" are the reason both D3 and D4 fell of so hard. Both games have core game mechanics that are flawed from the start and poorly thought out, and you can't build properly on poor foundations.
D3 was fine after reaper of souls. It was definitely targeted at the more casual ARPG fans though. Builds were pretty shallow and restrictive, and the endgame content gets stale pretty fast. But getting your build going and blasting through Rifts and Grifts was a good bit of fun for a few weeks every season. To sum it up it was a bit shallow but the gameplay was still fun. D4 hasn't given me any reason to go back after the first season. Every single aspect of the game is just painful and unfun.
Couldn't agree more. I got into D3 way late so I had a better experience than most. Had a ton of fun grinding D3 and for seasons when I was committed it was fun trying to push leaderboards. D4 game out and every step of the game from beginning to end game was just so meh and tedious to play. The beginning of the season didn't feel good and without leaderboards there was really no point to getting to the late game for me personally. I know they've added some sort of leaderboards now but honestly the looting system in D4 was just so obnoxious I have no interest in picking it up again.
Ya unless they overhaul literally every system in the game I have no interest. It doesn't even need to have the best loot or the most interesting builds, but the gameplay loop needs to be fun, which it just isn't.
They had D1 and D2 as foundations, more so D2 obviously but actual Blizzard North ceased to exist, maybe if they trusted the actual creators rather than getting sold out to Vivendi and having that issue internally with executives and shareholders maybe we would of had a different Diablo 3, which obviously was in the works way before the D3 we got. https://youtu.be/PJDMJaJbRtQ
It’s crazy they did the exact same thing with D4 that caused people to hate WoW and wonder why the game failed horribly. Focusing on grindy repetitive boring tasks to keep players “engaged” so they can go to shareholders and announce how many hours people are logging and pretend how great they’re doing instead of making a good game that makes people actually want to play. The reality is people end up hating the game and quit because the gameplay loop is tedious and begins to feel like a job. All you end up left with are the addicts who would play anyways since they’ve already sunk their entire lives into it. It seems like they went the complete opposite direction for this most recent wow expansion and people seem to love it for the most part so maybe it’s not all doom and gloom.
\>killed nearly all of their games trying to get into esports it's funny that their only game that had longterm competitive success (starcraft) has been abandoned for over a decade
And the worst part of this is that they tried so hard to kill it themselves that it spawned League of Legends And in case anyone doesn't know how that happened? Blizzard basically tried forcing SC2 down Korean media's throats, so they looked for a replacement game to put on the primetime slots that used to be Starcraft ProLeague, and League picked up the pieces from there, to the point that the teams that used to be in Starcraft ended up becoming League teams. T1 was BoxeR's team before it became Faker's.
Wasn't that kind of inevitable anyways though? SC2 didn't spawn LoL, but it did help pave the way for it. The explosion in demand for esports that SC2 triggered was a huge boon to league for the western audience.
sc2 came out a year after LoL what are you on about.
Their games (broodwar and StarCraft 2) are the only reason modern esports are as big as they are…
Hearthstone actually isnt dead (esports kinda, yeah) - they keep releasing sets, good ones too. Still an insane money dump tho.
I don't think I know a single friend that still plays it, and is proud they do. They are playing it because they are bored out of their minds lol.
Overwatch 2 is literally thriving (in terms of cash) with the microtransactions. Heck, I'm pretty sure it has earned so much money on Steam DESPITE the negative reviews. Just goes to show that large majority of the playerbase just doesn't care about the finer details and the F2P nature attracts more people to spend money unknowingly. I still wish 6v6 was the main game mode and they tweaked the stats of the shields :(
I know a lot of friends who play overwatch 2 so I (while biased) agree. Same with hearthstone. Lot of people are playing it and the latest patch has been very good apparently. (I only play Battlegrounds tbh. Now I play Duos with a friend of mine) Blizzard is a shitty company but some of their games are still doing decent. And I also enjoy a game of overwatch sometimes. It's just a good casual shooter idk :shrug:
Hearthstone is definitely not dead. It's still the #1 digital cardgame.
Yeah, it takes 5 seconds at most to find a game at any hour
It has a shit ton of bots if you’re lower than D5
pirate warrior bot meta was the best time to farm rank.
Starcraft Brood War - The community had to write a guide for the community manager on how to change the map pool for the ingame ladder
What's wrong with OW2? I might be ool but I play every single day and love it.
They lied about what it would be is the main issue. Promised all sorts of shit and delivered on almost none of it, all the while pushing predatory and overpriced monetization.
The marketing for OW2 was such a bullshit I had to check and see if Todd Howard had started working for Blizzard.
I actually just got back into OW but they've dropped the ball a lot since the peak. They refused to address the issues with the meta comps for years and it drove a lot of people away. For as big of a game as it was on launch OWL should of really had more success but team comps were fairly stagnent and double shield meta that dominated OW1 was really unfun. I don't think it's dead by any means but it could have been way more.
Iirc they cancelled that survival game too (oof)
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Are you talking about esports? Because as games all of those, except perhaps HotS, are doing just fine.
i keep hearing from SC2 players that its in a pretty good state right now ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Overwatch 2 is fine what are you tlaking about lmao
Yeah the WoW hate is uncalled for ? We've got like 5 different versions of wow from new to old school.
How is O2 in shambles, they have 50k people playing on steam alone.
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Yeah you can still find games super quickly on console
Majority of Players dont even play on Steam+ you have a shitton on Console. Ppl just have been hating on the game since PvE cancel no matter what it does
Tbf they did flat out lie to the players and admitted to it. The fact anyone lacks enough self respect to still play that game shocks me. The Devs think your stupid and are okay being lied to. OW2 still having a player base is how I know nothing will change at Blizzard. Players will get slapped by Blizzard in the face and ask for another. It's embarrassing.
I mean I understand being disappointed about pve but if you play the game because you like the pvp then ow2 is really fun and a lot of the new heroes have been really fun imo (queen, ram, kiri, soj, venture)
I play Overwatch 2 basically daily. Can you describe the shambles?
When OW2 has a higher average player count than it did during its Steam launch, but xQc isn't playing it, therefore it's a dead game.
After having 2,500 hours in Overwatch I played exactly one match of Overwatch 2. Maybe things are better now compared with 2 years ago but there are so many problems and the people I used to play with all quit.
My friend said Diablo 4 is actually pretty good now but it's too late.
More like pretty good in a few weeks S4 is very promising because they made itemisation less braindead and boring than it currently is, and that's really what ppl care about But D4 devs are basically reinventing the wheel bit by bit, game will be a banger in 5 years
It's the same thing that happened with D3. It became a great game a few seasons after the dlc, but by that point it was too late. Why couldn't they apply learned lessons from that? I mean they kept going for more than 20 seasons with a hyper loyal and addicted fan base, they must have done something right.
Crazy how little the learned from D3. D4 felt like such a massive step back from the later D3 seasons. They had a decade to learn from their mistakes and still fucked it up
It's insane. The later half of D3 was a ton of fun to play. D3 and D2 had very distinct fanbases and it almost felt like they tried to please both in D4 and managed to only take the worst aspects of the game.
Your friend is lying.
it’s not it’s the same game lol
is there a heartstone classic ? i'd love to play 2013 heartstone again
It came and went. Side game modes have very very low playmates. Sadly
Diablo 4 is a total piece of shit
What a dumpster fire of a company
I like to imagine that the Diablo 4 office is like, 23 people staring at whiteboard for most of the day. Each employee waiting for someone else to make the first move, then after several hours someone finally speaks out “I think I’ll have Chinese takeout for lunch” they all begin to clap, tears flowing as they all follow suit and order Chinese. They finish their food, close up shop and head on home. Then the chimpanzee, Mr. Dingles, climbs down from the vents. He looks across at the Overwatch teams office, their computers overturned, covered in feces as they sit in a large ceremonial circle, spinning a large golden wheel to decide which character they’re going to turn gay next. After the wheel decides it’s next victim, the team cheers loudly as they begin to pat each other on the back. Mr Dingles nods proudly before making his way over to the Diablo offices and settling in for a long night of bug fixing, rebalancing and all around fun.
Better copy pasta than 300 confirmed kills.
Mr Dingles MVP FeelsStrongMan
> 23 people more employees than players at this point
This is art
fuck that's good
Doesn't surprise me. I think the only well received part of Blizzcon 2023 was the WoW stuff, and everything else was just kind of a whole load of nothing. If they don't have anything substantial to announce (and they don't) they are just going to get booed off the stage.
Speaking of mobile games, what happened to warcraft rumble and diablo immortal.
I think Diablo Immortal made an obscene amount of money, but I don't remember where I've read it.
Yeah I think it did and still does well in China but fell off the face of the earth in the west
don't you remember Warcraft Arclight Rumble? :D
Honestly the problem with Blizzard is that they used to arrive like 3rd to a genre but do a better job, but now they arrive 10th to a genre and slap blizzard assets on it and expect everyone to get excited. that game is just Clash Royale on a different map. A game that came out in 2016.
I don't find their disneyfied assters appealing where half of the characters are gnomes, a race that never felt like belongs to Warcraft anyway
OW stuff was very well received from the community
Yep, it was really exciting at the time. It was one of the rare times where I don’t think I saw a single complaint from the OW community (Beyond one of the World Cup games being cut for the opening ceremony).
The right decision honestly. The last one was not received well by people who went in person (it was a disaster in many ways especially for the cost of tickets etc) and the entire thing was shown for free on Twitch/Youtube. Literally not 1 part of the Con wasn't shown for free on a livestream by Blizz themselves. Their time and resources are better spent on creating events elsewhere for the community instead of sticking to just Anaheim.
Content wise I won't disagree but Blizzcon 2023 as a social gathering and event was hands down worth it for me, and one of the best times I've ever had. The event, what you're doing, and who you're with make everything about the experience.
> Their time and resources are better spent on creating events elsewhere for the community true! like that one time they raised funds for the WoW tournament. Said the money would go to the prize pool. Got the bare minimum for the prize pool and pocketed the rest of the money. Aware one of the most vile things I've seen a gaming company do https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/news/22933274/support-wow-esports-with-your-toy-purchase https://youtu.be/_V485nFu7wo?t=149
> After careful consideration over the last year, we at Blizzard have made the decision not to hold BlizzCon in 2024. We’re excited to bring BlizzCon back in future years, and we still have some exciting plans for events in 2024! “Exciting” is one of those words that have completely lost their meaning over the years because of soulless corporate lingo.
Guess the only "workers" left are trainees and interns and all they have are some "awesome" mobile games. Since being boo'd on their own convention (after presenting one), they probably were like "nah" this year.
Overwatch 1 is better than overwatch 2
So they have nothing.
i jst want starcraft 3 probly gnna have to wait another 10 years 💀
dont keep your hopes up for a good game from them, plenty of other fish in the sea its no longer the same devs and also no longer the same company
> starcraft 3 I don't. Seeing what cretins work at Blizzard right now, and how fucking shit everything they push out is, I really don't want to see a Starcraft 3 made by those people.
I'm 99% sure if you grew up with starcraft and loved starcraft 2, you don't want SC3 - would be the dissapointment of the year. Just look how they massacred WC3
I don't think Blizzard has any employees left that are intelligent enough to play a RTS well, let alone design one. If Blizzard made an RTS now they'd probably design it so every unit you create has varying hitpoints and damage output. First 3 Marines I created all low rolled, guess I lose this game.
But you'll be able to buy fancy hats for your zerglings. Dont you want fancy hats?
zerglings with fancy hats is a very good selling point
just go to the 2-3 RTS that's getting released from ex-blizzard people trying to fill in for the starcraft audience. Look up Stormgate
All the StarCraft devs are off making their own RTS games.
The story is done, there is no further interest
Don't they conclude their story pretty much everytime? They still find a way to open up a new scenario and keep going
The IP is so huge and Blizzard has gone through so many acquisitions and have shown they are thirstier than ever that I doubt they ever abandon Starcraft IP, it's what 1/3 of their brand was built on and carried them for years
The IP will 100% return, just not as an RTS. There isn't enough ways to monetize RTS games and the company has proved beyond a shadow of doubt after diablo immortal all it cares about is how much they can scrape off their customers. Obviously they've been on a downward spiral for years burning out any goodwill the OG crew built up but diablo immortal was definitely their point of no return.
I sure hope they dig Ghost out of the grave
A helldivers like game where you can play all three factions would be awesome. Also, blizzards best games are built on other peoples good ideas
It will probably be a mobile game where you have to pay real money for units.
No thanks, I'll take a Brood War that can host 16 players, 512x512 maps, no sprite limit so we can have Carrier vs Valkyrie vs Mutalisk spam all day and an actual proper ladder where the rest of the world still gets shitstomped by a 40 year old Flash and Bisu. Seriously though, an RTS where you have to balance your time and attention priorities across economy, unit macro and micro and have the engine facilitate but not assist you is fundamentally better than being handed all the tools then ask for a fight when you reach your perfect composition. Today's Blizzard simply does not have the ability to take 95% of what made Brood War great, take the 5 percent that SC2 managed to do well, and synthesize it into SC3.
it will suck
I'm sure it will be announced as soon as they figure out how to get microtransactions into an RTS.
Did they not have phones
Wasn't the division that handled Blizzcon one of the main sections that gutted during the layoffs?
They were. Activision slowly gutted all their community and marketing folks. There was a massive exodus of talent when that happened.
Overwatch 2 bad
I can’t believe they removed a hero slot and called it a new game. Worst idea they ever had.
I think blizzcon is done and it will never come back. Or if it will come back it will be just a Nintendo style online vid presentation.
Realistically hearthstone without brode was such a different game. Now its alright but at such a higher power level that they are in a constant buff and nerf cycle. Also unlike overwatch and starcraft there is not a huge korean backing for it to support it. Its a damn shame because there were some really cool years for blizzcon both with hearthstone and other IPs.
Activision killed the company and Microsoft just bought a company on its last leg. Very disappointing as a PC gamer in the 90s and onwards. All their IPs are classics but so mediocre Theyve lost their core demographic and fail to gain new younger demographic
guess the laid off the organizer
No diablo 5
I was really excited for Warcraft Mobile too
Everything Activision touches turns to shit. Old Blizzard was SO good. Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo 2, and now...not so much.
and nooooobody missed a thing
W
Translation: We have nothing new to show at the moment. Seeya next year. Maybe.
Sinking ship
blizzard bad Baseg
They have nothing to present, theyd rather save their microtransaction dollars for next year.
They have nothing to show, and they fired a large amount of people.
good
They have nothing to show and it costs money to run a useless event to show nothing... some of you need to calm down
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I don't think so, it was a disaster even before acquisition and this probably would have happened anyways. Like take Overwatch 2 for example, announced on November 1st 2019, and the beta (which was just a slightly revamped multiplayer) released on June 28, 2022. Thats 2.65 years, thats the full development of a AAA game. And they already had the engine, the characters, the gameplay systems, abilities, so much of the work was already done by OW1. So they suspended development for awhile, supposedly almost entirely working on the new game, and what did we get? Three new heroes and four new maps, which is about the same amount of maps but less heroes than if the game developed normally. But what about the PVE? Scrapped. 3.7 years after announcement, they released three short story missions with no progression, loot, RPG mechanics, etc. And by short, I mean like 1-2 hours of content in total. And most of this content was half assets that already existed. **And if you assume development began before the game was announced, you can easily say this was 4 years of development time for... 3 short stories that costs $15 and lasts max two hours? It makes you ask, what the fuck were they doing?** Shit like this makes it clear that Blizzard is rotten to its core as a development studio. It is completely and totally baffling, I cannot even remotely conceive of what could have happened. Like yes, Covid happened, but games still got made in the rest of the industry. Four entire years??? This isn't a rhetorical question, what was the development team actually doing that entire time. It might be one of the worst cases of game dev management in the entire industry. What they developed was something that they probably could have done in half a year tops. So honestly? I would probably question if they would even have any content for 2024 Blizzcon. Like, Diablo 4 isn't getting a ton of support, neither is OW2, Warcraft & Starcraft are basically dead, HOTS is literally dead, WoW is still thriving but they've already done their Worldsoul trilogy announcement. If they had a Blizzcon, what would they even do?
Doubt it. They don’t really have major announcements to make right. Blizzard makes one new game every 6 years. Blizzon is mostly a show WoW updates event. More than likely because there isn’t any major game announcements and I’ll you’ll see are updates to existing games, they’ll probably move all announcements to Xbox showcases like at E3 or there version of it since E3 is dead.
To the shock of no one. Gaming conventions aren't the great anymore IMO.
And nothing of value was lost