Good Morning Folks! I have to be honest… I had every intention of writing a post on BlizzCon this past Friday as the event was going on but that never quite came to fruition. For those who do not follow such things, this past Friday and Saturday was the first in-person BlizzCon since 2019. I know a ton of friends who were very happy about the return of the event and made plans to travel to Anaheim for it. I’ve always wanted to go, but tend to have a fairly fraught relationship with Blizzard games in general. I feel like it is probably a good idea to get this out of the way, but I have not actively played World of Warcraft since December 2020, though I have followed from afar and did some alpha testing for the latest expansion Dragonflight. I’ve grown apart from the fandom and Diablo was really the last vestige that I clung to.
If you are so inclined, you can watch the full uncut presentation for Blizzcon 2023 here.
All of that said… I am shocked to say that I thought this year’s BlizzCon was almost universally positive. I found it extremely interesting that within 10 minutes of the event starting, we had a speech from Microsoft’s Phil Spencer. He said all of the right things, but I find myself wanting to believe them. As someone who has been a Windows programmer for most of my career… I have a fraught relationship with Microsoft as a whole. That said… I can’t see that Microsoft has done wrong by any of the companies they have acquired. They have most definitely been a steadying force for Mojang and Minecraft. The one strike that I could throw against them was Redfall, but who knows precisely how that mess unfolded because it was a game so far out of the comfort zone of that studio. As compared to the reign of Bobby Kotick… I have to imagine that Microsoft will be a positive force for Blizzard as a whole.
Another thing that I have to admit is that there is a lot of presentation that I just did not care about at all. Overwatch is a setting that seems interesting, but I am not going to engage unless they shift gears and turn it into a looter shooter. Hearthstone is something that I did care about for a while… but now that Magic that Gathering Arena exists and is relatively enjoyable… I have a good representation of the game I actually care about and don’t really need the Blizzard clone. Rumble is outside of my wheelhouse especially now that my aging phone seems to have trouble running any modern games that are not the most simplistic of 2D graphics. So essentially for me… BlizzCon was a show about World of Warcraft and Diablo, both of which got some interesting announcements.
Based on the schedules that came out ahead of the show, I fully expected that we would not get a Diablo IV announcement this year. I am pleasantly surprised that we did and it is going to be set in the area of the world from Diablo 2 Act 3 the Torajon Jungles. This should in theory be southwest of Kehjistan in the current Diablo IV areas. They were pretty limited on their information but did drop that we are going to be seeing a new class that has not existed in the Diablo franchise before. Data mining leaks ahead of the show indicated that this was some sort of nature-based class. More important than all of this however is that they released some information about more endgame content going into Diablo IV starting this week and continuing into Season 3 in January. There is also going to be a winter holiday event which might be interesting for a bit. Unfortunately, the new endgame content starting this week is going to be gated behind the season’s journey, which means it is really only for folks who are languishing at level 100 and doesn’t do much to solve the problem of running out of an interesting reason to grind further after about level 80.
In the realm of “why does this exist” we get to World of Warcraft and more specifically “Classic WoW”. Apparently, the classic servers are updating to Cataclysm… which seems really weird to me given that the sweeping changes to the old world that came with Cataclysm were the impetus for many of the unofficial emulator servers that eventually coalesced into the official “Classic” product. Does anyone actually want this? I am hoping that they maintain some Wrath servers for the folks who did not want to move forward into Cataclysm. Maybe there is someone out there who missed out on the first decade of World of Warcraft and is now interested in reliving it at a rapidly increased pace. It is however spawning a number of memes around this having to happen so that they could launch World of Warcraft Classic Classic. I have specific negative feelings towards Cataclysm as this is when I first broke from the game as a whole.
The other classic project however seemed really interesting. “Season of Discovery” is sort of a re-imagining of World of Warcraft with unique talent trees and class changes designed to make playing it wildly different. They specifically name-dropped Tanking Warlocks and Mage Healers as mutations available during this game mode. The irony here is that we absolutely had a Warlock Tank in Ahn’qiraj, and I myself tanked as a PVP geared Boomkin…. so this might be something that interests me in the long run. One of my favorite eras of World of Warcraft is Gladiator Stance and being able to dps with a sword and shield as a Warrior. If they bring this back… then they probably have me at least for a bit.
The big news however was the announcement of a change in practice towards expansions in World of Warcraft and while they did not elaborate on this… a shorter time frame between them. Not only did they announce The War Within which comes out next year, but also Midnight and The Last Titan as a trilogy of expansions with shared themes. We’ve learned that they always worked on multiple expansions at once from the fallout of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands… but I do feel like this would probably improve the narrative experiences of the Warcraft universe. Final Fantasy XIV was only as good as it was because it was a cohesive narrative that evolved over a decade rather than what felt like a serialized villain of the week type gameplay that we have had in Warcraft. My hope is however that they can be nimble with the mechanical side of the game because having the narrative be something that is building over time is good… you need to be able to adjust to changes on the ground when the player base is not reacting well to something like the “borrowed power” systems.
I think this is going to be the World of Warcraft expansion that wins me back. Almost everything about it seems to specifically cater to my interests. I love underground areas and this seems to be an entire expansion where we are diving deeper below the surface. I am very much dwarven-influenced, and I am all about tunneling through the earth to find interesting things. When I plan Minecraft I almost always start by digging a giant shaft to bedrock and see what I find along that path. I am also super interested in the Warband system as I have always wanted to be able to share more benefits from my Alts, given that I tend to be an Altaholic by nature. Almost everything that they announced seemed universally good and I am super interested in the Delve system which seems to be a dungeon-like experience that scales between 1 and 5 players.
I think more than anything… there was just a different energy in the air for this show. Gone was the “we know better ” attitude that surrounded a lot of the discussions from past BlizzCons and it was replaced by what seemed like a genuine unbridled excitement over what they were showing off. The vibe was just better than it has been in probably a decade or maybe even longer. Blizzard felt like a different company, and while we had the return of Metzen… he didn’t necessarily overshadow the other folks who were presenting things to the players. I want to see Blizzard thrive under Microsoft not in small part because I still know more than a handful of folks who work there. I want to play these games without having a bad taste in my mouth and feel like I am betraying my core principles.
This is the first time in a very long time that I have had hope for World of Warcraft as a franchise, and Blizzard as a company. I watched Diablo IV evolve from a complete shit show at launch to being a rather enjoyable if not somewhat temporary game with Season 2. Blizzard seems to be saying the right things and I just hope that they can back up those words with actions over the next few years. In the new year, I am probably even going to poke my head into the Dragonflight expansion and see what it has to offer. This is the best I have felt coming out of BlizzCon weekend in a very long time. Good job all… now keep that momentum going into the next few major launches.
The post BlizzCon 2023 Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I am doing one of my fairly rare Saturday posts in part because I made something resembling a legitimate YouTube video. Also, the situation has changed slightly since I made that video and I wanted to talk through some of it. I am not exactly going to rehash my thoughts from the video, because I figure if you are curious it is only like 5 minutes and you can just watch the damned thing.
Essentially this is all spun from the announcement earlier this week that Overwatch 2 would be canceling its PVE-focused Hero Mode. This somewhat started my thoughts percolating because I had largely been waiting to pay attention to Overwatch when this fully fleshed-out PVE mode was released. When Loading Ready Run… admittedly one of my favorite YouTube channels… released a segment on Checkpoint adding their own thoughts, this essentially caused my feelings to tip over and the above YouTube video is the result. Essentially my feelings are that Overwatch 2 was relaunched in large part because the first game was not monetized anywhere near as much as ActiBlizz in their current configuration would have liked. Relaunching the game under the guise of improvements gave them the opportunity to add a bunch of new hooks to drain the coffers of their player base.
So yesterday the game director Aaron Keller released a public blog post explaining the reasons why they cancelled Hero Mode. There is also a fair bit of gaslighting going on that “no really everything is going as planned, we are just removing this level-up system”. This admittedly made me wonder if I simply misremembered what was originally pitched at BlizzCon in 2019. That year… seems simultaneously “last year” and “a decade ago” at the same time. So much has changed over the last four years… so that caused me to go digging for the original announcement. Thankfully there are channels out there that rip every announcement and upload it under their own banner. So I only had to go as far as GameSpot to find a full rip of the entire 22-minute-plus presentation from 2019.
So I spent a chunk of this morning watching the video, and specifically paying attention to the wording. Admittedly this was a simpler time when it comes to Blizzard and our feelings about them as a company. This is before the bulk of the sexual assault allegations came out in the media, before the public failure of Warcraft III Reforged, before the failed state of World of Warcraft, and before the absolute depravity that is Diablo Immortal monetization. There is an interesting article from 2021 on PC Gamer tracking how Blizzard’s reputation has collapsed that covers sixteen different topics… and fails to include anything that happened in most of the last three years. Suffice it to say in 2019 we viewed Blizzard significantly differently than we do today… or at least I know I did. That said even going back and watching this video… stirred up feelings I had for this franchise that had gone dormant.
Watching through the video and the subsequent talk from Jeff Kaplan, I feel pretty certain that no… I did not misremember things. In this chat after the moving cinematic that still managed to invoke some tear-jerking all these years later… Kaplan does what he always did best and chats with the audience. During this speech he promised a “complete story experience” and that Hero Mode would be the equivalent of “Adventure Mode from Diablo” but for Overwatch. Specifically that they were doing this because the audience had been asking for a PVE Overwatch game and that they would be delivering “A Ton of PVE Content”. When Overwatch 2 launched without any of the PVE-focused Story Mode of the game, a lot of players like myself adopted a “wait and see” stance. Even after reading through the carefully shaped statement… I still feel like there just isn’t any reason for me to pay attention to Overwatch 2 from this point forward. They dropped the parts of the 2019 Vision for the game, that I cared about.
I chose this picture of Mei for my final image in the video I released yesterday morning, and it feels fitting to end this blog post with it as well. She is a precious cinnamon roll that we do not deserve. Anyways this is also probably the end of my talking about Overwatch given that it is clear that the trajectory for the game is going in a direction that I just don’t care about. Admittedly a large part of why I bought the first version of the game was to get Mercy’s Wings for my Diablo III characters. Honestly… I consider that money well spent because I have used the heck out of them. As far as the game… I still really like the characters and the universe it is set in, but have no interest in whatever is going on with that franchise at this point.
As far as Blizzard as a company, I feel like I have been laboring under the false assumption that maybe just maybe Microsoft could ride in and set things right for that company. The debacle that has happened with Redfall however makes me deeply question if that is ever going to be the case. Also in reading up on ALL of this today before sitting down to write this blog post… I was presented with just how far Blizzard has fallen over the last four years. Looking at BlizzCon from 2019… it feels like it was this happier time when I was ignorant of what was going to play out both in the world and more specifically in that company. I never thought I would feel nostalgic about 2019… but god I do at this point. I would love to go back to feeling positive about most things, and the future of Blizzard entertainment and a lot of these characters and franchises that I’ve loved over the years.
However, we are here now, and understand the reality of the situation, and as much as it pains me… I am just not sure if there is any hope for the company at this point. I say that knowing there are many friends who still work for the company, I really wanted to keep that torch of hope burning. However, at the moment I am feeling pretty damned snuffed out.
The post Overwatch and Losing Hope for Blizzard appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning friends. There is a topic that has been bouncing around in my skull for a few weeks now, and I have never really gotten around to speaking my mind about it. The thing is I am not even sure what I want to say. Patch 9.1.5 is sticking in my craw for a bunch of reasons, and I am not entirely certain what I want to say about it because I am afraid most of my thought processes are poisoned by built-up bile. There are so many changes going into the game that are needed. For example, maybe the love rocket icon should not have looked like a big cartoon penis for the first twelve years it was in the game. I am also all for the painting changes because quite frankly the artwork looked like shit, and the versions that are replacing it are rather nice.
However, 9.1.5 is shaping up to be this make-or-break moment for the game, with the devs seemingly dumping everything that players said they wanted into the game. Legion Timewalking is this giant fanservice event that brings back a bunch of things that folks had been pining for like the Mage Tower and an ability to collect a whole new set of alternate recolors. The problem is… this is an event… a limited time moment in the game where it is going to feel extremely good for players to come back and play but ultimately has an expiration date associated with it. This feels in so many ways like a lover in a toxic relationship asking you what they can do to keep you from leaving them. Players DID leave and the problem is… a single data point does not make a trend.
Then there is another part of me that is frustrated that if this could have been pulled together so quickly… why didn’t they do this years ago? The changes that are going into the game break so many of the things that I have long considered just the World of Warcraft design ethic. Previously it seemed like we could never get something just universally good for the players, without it also being horrible in some way. Like Transmog has gone through this cycle for years, with you being able to collect item appearances… but only for the armor class that can be equipped by the person looting the items. There is part of me that wants to believe that this is a shift in the direction of the game, but the cynic feels like this is an attempt to make players temporarily forget about the bad times.
Then there is the developer in me that realizes that a lot of this is unfair to the team working on the game. Even in my own job there is a long list of things that are relatively quick to wrap up, but never quite get done because there is a prioritized by management list of things that take precedence. This part of me thinks that what we are seeing is probably a combination of two things. Firstly the management is caught off balance and desperately grasping and universally good things that they can pump out quickly, and a lot of these things were probably side-projects of the devs and are now given leave to finally finish them up and get them out into the game. Everyone has a list of items that they know would be really good… but that they can never quite find the time to finish up, and I think folks are being allowed to finally work on these things.
Then there is the other part that is frustrating me right now. I see folks making their way back to Blizzard titles, when in the end… nothing has really changed yet. There have been some high visibility exits from the company, but none of the demands that the Blizzard employees have made have actually been met. To make things worse there is talk of fears over retaliatory firings, which may or may not be a thing but the rumors are there. I am just not personally ready to forgive and forget yet, and I am thankful that I had already made my break from being a “Blizzard Gamer” back in 2011 during Cataclysm. There are folks who were hurting when they were not playing the game, and there are good employees that potentially suffer as subscribership goes down… so I get that this is an extremely complicated issue. However I am just not personally ready to jump back and pretend that everything is okay.
I am frustrated that gamers have extremely short memories. Patch 9.1.5 seems poised to be the gaming equivalent of Calgon, and is fixing to take away all of the memories of bad times… at least temporarily. I guess on one hand I am happy that the folks who are capable of making good with Blizzard and returning are going to have some excellent new toys to play with, but frustrated that I can’t look the other way this time. I miss the hell out of Diablo 3, but I am not ready to come back yet.
The post Patch 9.1.5 Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammo, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start off some discussion about the unseasonable weather that has caused a few of us to experience negative 15 fahrenheit days. From there we discuss BlizzConline and how we went into it with extremely lowered expectations. We discuss the things that were announced namely Diablo 4 new class and Burning Crusade Classic. From there we venture forth into a discussion about Valheim a game that Bel has played for awhile but failed to recruit other players into until Tam and Kodra did this thing. The entire AggroChat crew seems to have reached a critical mass and is exploring this norse land of mystery. Finally we briefly talk about WandaVision and how weird the show must be if you don’t at least have a summary understanding of the characters.
Topics Discussed
Thawing Out from Hell Freezing Over
BlizzConline
Anduin is the Arthas?
Diablo 4 Rogue
Diablo 2 Remastered
Burning Crusade Classic
Lost Vikings Returns
Diablo Immortal
Mobile Game Woes
Valheim
Survival Done Better
Low Fidelity but Gorgeous
Building a City
Adventures and Shenanigans
Bel Ruins Everything
WandaVision
Zero Spoilers – What is this like if you don’t already know the characters?
