overwatch

Be Nice to the People

November 20, 2015 by Belghast

Bad Luck

Be Nice to the People — This looks totally legit right?

Traditionally I do this Friday thing where I talk about one of the many “MMOs Worth Playing” but honestly…. today I am just not feeling it. I am feeling more annoyed and frustrated about MMOs than I am feeling the love right now, and in this current mindset it is probably best that I simply don’t talk about a game. The purpose of the column is to highlight a game and talk about the things I love about it, in the hopes that it might nudge people into giving it a try. In order to really do that I have to be feeling happy and enjoying the world around me… and right now I am kinda grumpy. Granted I am grumpy over a stupid reason. Right now I feel like I am one of a handful of people who didn’t get into the Overwatch beta weekend. I am largely annoyed by this, because I am in fact one of the people who went ahead and pre-ordered the game knowing eventually that I would want to play it. You would think… that if you have a bit single weekend only stress test that you might want to include the people who are already signed up to spend money on your game.

Maybe that is screwed up in my logic, but it seems to me that they should have pulled from the pool of sign ups first for this one in particular. I am not saying that about the normal always on Beta process… that one is completely luck of the draw. This one however… when you are testing a game for a short period of time… it might be cool to thank the folks who have already pressed that button and said “Yes, I want your game”. Frustrations aside, I am hoping all of my friends who are going to be playing it this weekend will enjoy themselves and have lots of things to talk about. Honestly this test will give me a better feeling of how I am going to like the game, since a lot of the AggroChat folks seemed to have gotten in. This is the hardest part about Betas is standing on the outside watching your friends have fun… and then trying really damned hard to be happy for them… and not sad that you got left out.

People Behind The Thing

It's okay to be sad/frustrated/upset with a thing, but never okay to attack the human being who's job is to represent that thing

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) November 19, 2015

So even though I am frustrated, I am directing my frustrations at an entity… the game Overwatch and or the company Blizzard behind it. I realize that that company is made up of people, and it has to be super tiring to hear people raging at them constantly. I realize over the years I have said some pretty caustic and even pyroclastic things about video games and or the companies behind them. At no point however did I aim that criticism at the people themselves. I never joined the chorus of “I Hate Ghostcrawler” nor will I join any other personally targeted witch hunt in the future. I can dislike a thing… but still have the utmost respect for the people for whom it is their job. Much of this week has felt like I have been attempting to give lessons in how to treat people with simple human dignity… and yesterday continued that trend. These companies have people working there, that go to work every single day hoping to do something cool… and often times get met with this constant wall of negativity. It is no wonder when someone reads one too many “fuck you” posts targeted at them that occasionally community staff snaps. Ultimately how good of a job, and how much satisfaction in it… would you have if someone stood over your desk heckling you the entire day?

Now you can take the path of “they willfully accepted the job”, but that too is utter bullshit. They probably took the job for the same reason that any one of us who are gaming addicts would jump at the chance to do the same thing. The folks that work at games companies do so because they love games with every fiber of their being, so much so that they are willing to sacrifice basic things like stability, and normal working hours… for the chance of being part of something they at least once felt was awesome. So if this week I happen to be complaining about Overwatch… I know that behind the scenes there is a crew of people who are working insane hours right now, and trying their damnedest to please as many people as they can… while at the same time desperately fighting to roll out the best possible product that they can make. I’ve been lucky to know enough people that work at enough companies to know that all of these fine people are grinding themselves into the ground all in the hopes of making each of us happy. So the next time you level an attack at a thing… please make sure it is targeted at the thing… and not the voice of the person hanging out in front of it for whom it is their job to represent said thing. I most definitely don’t believe that games should be above criticism… but I do believe that we shouldn’t be targeting our bile at a human being.

Hoping For a Great Friday

My hope is that I can go into this Friday and not see anything else that makes me sad about humanity. For those of you in the Overwatch beta weekend… have a blast, take lots of screenshots, record lots of video… because I expect some really amazing content as a result. For those of us watching from the sidelines… there are dozens of other things we should be doing. I personally am now 55 hours into Fallout 4… and have yet to make it to Diamond City. I’m also in a strange place when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV where I am logging in each day to do Beast Tribe dailies, but not finding much drive to do anything else. I am in that strange place where I took a long enough break from the game to where I am completely out of touch with what I was doing before I left, but have not been away long enough to make me super nostalgic enough to dive back in with vigor. I am also still fighting the urge to play World of Warcraft, and I am scared that sooner or later I will be giving into it… if for no reason other than to get it out of my system again. I am in a place where I want into the Legion beta more than any other beta in a long while, mostly because I hope beyond hope that Deathknights are fun again. The fact that I had to switch back to my warrior during Warlords honestly was a bit of bummer, and I would love to be a Worgen DK once more. Anyways… that was a long “outro” but hopefully you have a great weekend, and stay safe and happy and warm.

AggroChat #82 – Junk Food Gaming

May 21, 2019November 8, 2015 by AggroChat

This week we have Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tamrielo with Thalen once again travelling. Over the course of the week we had a discussion about an Extra Credits video calling Destiny the Law and Order of gaming. This spawned a further discussion about what ended up getting termed as “Junk Food Gaming”, aka those gaming experiences that you play because they are enjoyable but also don’t require much thought for you to consume. This week we spawn a continuance of this discussion, and we find out why Tam is not on board with this concept. Additionally we have a lengthy discussion about all of the latest announcements from BlizzCon and several other subjects. Things we talked about…

Junk Food Gaming
Destiny
Diablo 3
BlizzCon
Heroes of the Storm
Overwatch
Warcraft Movie
World of Warcraft
Downwell
Progress to 100
Evoland 1 and 2
Tales of Zestiria

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Media Consumption – Blizzcon 2015 Edition

November 7, 2015 by Belghast

Interesting Day

Last week I had this grand plan of hanging out at home and watching BlizzCon 2015, so I took the day off work. Then as we got closer to the day, it suddenly filled up with other things I needed to do. Our house looked like madness yesterday with three vehicles of the contractors working on the siding and minor renovations, and another truck for the heating and air company. All of this while my wife and I were being forced to park in the next door neighbors driveway. Thankfully they were not here the last few days, otherwise I have no clue what we would be doing for parking. I am sure the neighbors are wondering what manner of insanity we are up to… as at one point yesterday we had a guy stop and gawk for a few minutes without asking anything. I guess that is the benefit of not actually knowing half of your neighbors is that you don’t have to make the same small talk over and over when something like this happens. This morning in honor of BlizzCon however I am going to talk about the things that interested me.

Diablo 3

I am leading off what was I originally thought going to be the big disappointment of the day. Blizzard did what they always do and rolled out everything that was new and shiny in their opening ceremony. The problem being… they said absolutely nothing about Diablo 3 which has turned out to be probably the game in their lineup that I care the most about. I had hoped they would announce another expansion this year, but alas that didn’t happen. However I am completely fine with this because the Diablo 3 panel later in the evening pretty much showed me that the team is quietly doing awesome stuff, in spite of apparently being ignored by Blizzard as a whole. The presentation was essentially a rapid fire series of announcements of new features. The one nearest and dearest to my heart surrounds the season play functionality. They have essentially sorted out that they are going to make seasons three months long, meaning at the end of that three months there will be new content leading into the next season. They said this gives players enough time to really deeply experience it… and also fits players like myself that swoop in… play enough to get the easy rewards and stop playing for a bit.

The biggest announcement as far as I am concerned is the “Rebirth” feature, which will allow you to essentially reboot a previous character and turn it into a new seasonal character. All of the gear that was on the character gets mailed to the account, and that character gets dialed back to level 1… but keeps achievements, hours played etc. It sounded like maybe there would be a special set of achievements for reboots, but essentially it solves the problem I always have of feeling like I have to create something brand new to be able to play along in the season again. They are also adding additional stash space… and the ability to earn slots by completing the seasonal journey on a character, up to 10 slots total. This all honestly would have been enough for me, but they are revising the buff system, changing the way damage is shown… adding a whole item set dungeon functionality where specific dungeons will require you have an item set equipped and then have challenges based on the strength of that set. On top of all of this… new zone and some expanded areas which makes 2.4 pretty damned awesome and it apparently goes up on the PTR next week.

Heroes of the Storm

The highlight of the Heroes discussion is the fact that we are getting Genn Greymane as a playable champion. This is absolutely hands down my favorite Alliance leader… that isn’t given the respect of having his own damned town to govern. I am still a little sore that Gilneas never became someplace we could actually use as a capitol city. I would seriously bank in that town all of the damned time if they allowed me to. All the same however it is awesome to have him as a champion and it looks like the gameplay is going to be based around changing in and out of Worgen form. The other interesting tidbit is that it seems like they are introducing ARAM for Heroes of the Storm. The details were pretty scant and I have not watched any of the panels for Heroes yet… but from the sounds of it, the mode seemed to put a random group of champions against another random group of champions just like “All Random All Middle” mode in League of Legends.

I am honestly all about that because ARAM is probably my favorite mode to play in League. Mostly because it takes all of the pressure off in that if you are getting randomly assigned a champion… no one can complain too much about you not being able to play it terribly well. I’ve found it a great way to get my feet wet and get used to how a champion performs under actual combat situations. The other interesting thing from the show was the introduction of Cho’Gall the two headed ogre. This is a champion that is literally played by two different players. I am assuming that one controls the movement and the other controls the combat at least to some extent. Everyone with a BlizzCon virtual ticket will be getting it added to their account… and then they can play matches with other players to pass the character on. After two matches a player will earn their own copy of Cho’gall and after I think they said four matches the original player gets a sack of gold for spreading the madness. It sounds cool and it is awesome to see this game thriving.

Hearthstone

The highlight of this announcement was awesome new Brann Bronzebeard artwork. Hearthstone is one of those games that I like, but rarely actually boot up to play. I am not sure what it is about the game, but essentially I keep playing the same deck over and over without changing it up much. It is like this game requires too much of me to actually get in and sort out the decks I might want to build. I am happy that it seems to be doing well, and I am happy that it has a meta that is very much alive. That said I felt generally meh when listening to them talk about the gameplay. I feel like maybe if it ran for shit on my iPad I would play it more, but I struggle with this game in the same way that I struggle with so many mobile games. It requires too much of me to pop into it while waiting on something… but it just isn’t sticky enough to make me choose to play it over literally any other game I have installed on my computer or consoles. There just is rarely ever a situation where I am going to pick this over an MMO or a single player game experience. I have so many other games to play… and honestly most of the time too damned many. The hearthstone fans seemed to be really happy, so I am never going to rain on their parade with my own “meh”.

I won’t lie the highlight of the Overwatch presentation for me was seeing just how awesome the Mercy Wings are in Diablo 3. Other than that I loved the Mei reveal, because she was freaking adorable… and also looked like a really fun zone control champion to play. Similarly I thought D.Va was a pretty cool concept, but I doubt I could ever see myself playing her. The boot up sequence of her HUD was awesome, in that it showed a cute bunny icon while it was loading. I really don’t care for the design of her Mech, which is my main problem with her as a champion. There is just something wrong looking about it… I get they were going for a jet with legs after the reboot that allows her to fly… but a Guardian Mode Veritech is a better version of what they were trying to accomplish. Though I think the design they came up with was largely a compromise to save space on the screen.

I have to admit I was largely tempted when they announced this would be coming to PS4. The problem there is that the Xbox and PS4 Blizard games are disconnected from Battle.net. That is my biggest problem with playing Diablo 3 on the PS4 is that I am stuck with only having access to my PSN friends… which are in no way as long of a list of Blizzard fans as the Battle.net account. So even though I am going through a bit of a renaissance of console gaming… I am ultimately going to go with the mouse and keyboard of the PC and essentially have to reacquaint myself with that sort of game play. I agree with Kodra in his belief that playing with a controller on a PC is a trap when it comes to a competitive FPS. There are times I have even considered picking up a XIM4 for my PS4 so I have the option of playing with a keyboard and mouse there as well. The PS4 natively supports USB and Bluetooth keyboards and mice… but very few games actually support that. Mostly right now I just want to get into the Overwatch beta… and I am hoping that will be a thing that happens soon.

Warcraft Movie

I have to admit on this one that before this trailer I had not really given much of a shit about the Warcraft movie. But man… those feels while I watched this. I have just been burned in the past when a franchise that I love was turned into a movie… at least from the gaming side of things. Does anyone remember how horrible the Dungeons and Dragons movie was? or Doom? This however…. looks like it is going to be a really good movie and revitalize the Warcraft franchise for a whole new generation. Maybe it is just the hype I am feeling about Star Wars spilling over into Warcraft… but I am feeling like now is the time to set aside old grudges and just embrace any fandom wholeheartedly. Both Durotar and Lothar were awesome in the trailer, and I think they were probably right to make this a Warcraft movie… and not a World of Warcraft movie. My hope is that along with this we maybe see a rebooted version of the original Warcraft RTS franchise. In any case regardless I know what I will be doing next June… sitting in the theater and watching this movie.

Legion Expansion

Now we finally get to the low point of Blizzcon… which I guess tells you how far my tastes have changed. I was completely amped about most of the above announcements other than maybe Hearthstone. I wholeheartedly love Blizzard games… but I have just reached the point where World of Warcraft is my least favorite of them. The cinematic trailer was nice… but I honestly had hoped that maybe we would have seen Varian die during it… or at least I thought that was what we were going to see for a bit. For years Varian was supposed to be “our thrall” but he has always been this paper thin super one dimensional character. His son on the other hand… Anduin has gone through some actually interesting changes especially during Pandaria. So my hope was that we would see Varian dying during this siege and passing the banner to his son who is more than likely far more capable a leader. The trailer also gave me hope that maybe just maybe they would finally be retiring the tired old shtick of Alliance versus Horde and giving us the ability to play with friends from both factions. Look… it is a dream that I am not going to let go of ever… I hate faction bullshit.

For the most part there is a lot of interesting things at work here… but I lack the faith that they are going to be carried out in a fashion I am going to like. It is my honest hope that I get into the beta testing process so I can see if I like it or not. I big nail in the coffin for Warlords was how badly they made the Deathknights feel… so I guess there are a lot of things that sound good on paper but never quite work right when you put them into practice. I am absolutely willing to give this game a shot, but I want to know that I will actually like it before I plunk down that pre-order. The new zones do look absoultely amazing however. They are pushing this aging engine for every ounce of oomph that it can muster, and I love that. The way WoW looks right now, reminds me of the way late in a generation console games look… when they have really figured out how to make the most of the resources they have to work with. This expansion is a bunch of really good ideas, that just don’t seem to be connected by enough tissue to hold them together. My disappointment largely was that the game didn’t really give me that moment of “fuck yeah!” that I have had in previous expansions. It did however give me a lot of moments of “that sounds cool”, especially when it comes to the non-linear leveling process for the new content. Unfortunately that same level scaling won’t apply to the rest of the world… so we are again creating this walled garden of “good” content and everything older will feel like crap as a result.

Instant Relevance

November 4, 2015 by Belghast

King of Match Three

Yesterday morning was the Activision Blizzard earnings call for investors, and much of the focus has been on one particular tidbit of information. They announced that they are acquiring Candy Crush maker King Digital for the sum of $5.9 Billion dollars. The reaction to this announcement has been pretty varied, because in truth… many “core” gamers loath the concept of games like Candy Crush. First off there is some confusion to clear up. Activision Blizzard is not the same thing as Blizzard Entertainment, so early reports I saw talked about Blizzard buying King Digital… which caused some outrage. Activision Blizzard is the big parent company that pulls all the strings of the various products from Call of Duty to Skylanders to of course the Blizzard franchises. At first I have to admit I was taken by surprise by the announcement but that pretty much went away immediately when I thought about it. In doing this deal ActiBlizz is essentially buying instant relevance in the traditional mobile gaming market.

Now you might be saying to yourself… But Bel, Activision and Blizzard already doing mobile gaming. Sure they do… but they do it in a way that attempts to appeal to “core” gamers that are wanting something on their phone to play when they don’t have access to their normal gaming platforms. This is a vastly different market than the one that King Digital generally focuses on which are for lack of a better term “casual” and “mobile exclusive” users that would never in a million years… consider themselves gamers. Essentially King Digital targets people like my wife, that spends plenty of time playing games on her iPad but does not in any fashion think of herself as a gamer. So in essence with this one… albeit expensive acquisition, they now cover a market that they did not serve in any fashion. Sure Hearthstone is a great mobile game… but it really only draws in people who already are in the fold of “gamers”. The big thing is all of these “non-gamers” have prove time and time again that they are in fact willing to spend money on micro-transactions.

What This Means

In truth I doubt for the short term it really means anything. Activision will continue releasing big budget shooters like Call of Duty and Destiny… and Blizzard will continue flirting with e-sports while still not quite certain what to do with World of Warcraft. Another big chunk of this earnings report was a note that the WoW subscription numbers have more or less stabilized from their post Warlords of Draenor free fall. I feel like there is some fuzzy math at work here, but according to the official figures they have dropped from 5.6 Million to 5.5 Million. There was a strange little definition that was released to explain what they determined a subscriber.

Subscriber Definition: World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

This makes me think that these subscription numbers are in fact counting WoW Token players… seeing as how that would count as “prepaid” access. So the actual month to month subscription numbers would be a bit lower. To some extent I wish they would have broken those numbers out separately… since a monthly sub is semi-guaranteed income, and a token is a one time purchase. The other big news however is that they plan on this being the last month they actually announce subscription numbers. Instead they have a new sort of engagement number formula that they are working on to determine the health of the game.

At first glance this sounds a bit odd… and maybe like they are trying to hide losses within the cloak of mathematics. However… we are just days away from Blizzcon and it makes me wonder. Will this finally be the year that they announce World of Warcraft going to a free to play model? Cutting the ties of relying on subscriptions to convey the health of the game… would at least be one step in that direction. If I were Blizzard I would be seriously considering it… because honestly Free to Play seems to work. With the recent high publicity relaunch of Wildstar… that game is doing significantly better now than it was, and the same was essentially true with Star Wars the Old Republic went to the model. Free to Play has been the salvation of otherwise dying games… and even though World of Warcraft is far from dying… I still think they would benefit from the switch. It would be a massive shift in methodology and would probably change the way content is delivered, but it would also bring back a bunch of players that want to dip their toes in the game every now and then… but not feel like they are chained to a subscription. Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone are both wildly success as Free to Play experiences… and with Overwatch starting to ramp up and following that same model… it just seems like Blizzard has wrestled with how to make it work.

What I Hope Happens

So while I don’t think anything will change for a bit… my hope is that through this deal there is some cross pollination of skillsets. I would love to see better integration of mobile platforms and traditional games. As you know I have been playing a lot of Destiny… and quite honestly the way that game works is just not as clean as it should. There are a lot of things that you can do through the website… slightly different things that you can do through the mobile app… and even a different set of things through the game itself. The entire process feels cludgy as hell… but an attempt to move in the direction of giving players access to tools outside of the game. Now if you take that basic desire and match it with a company that has proven that they can spin the same old match three schlock into infectious gold… you can maybe create really interesting experiences that span traditional platforms and mobile gaming ones.

What I would love to see is a better mobile app for World of Warcraft. Why can’t we fish on our mobile phones and have it grant skill-ups and materials for our characters in game? Why can’t we do the normally tedious action of Archaeology in a mobile mini-game? Garrisons themselves were essentially the same sort of thing as a tiny tower like mobile game… why didn’t exist on mobile platforms allowing people to do the upkeep and maintenance activities when they couldn’t otherwise play the game? Why can’t we have a significantly better auction house integration system? Essentially… give players a reason to stay in the game by making them feel more connected to it.. on their own terms. A big part of my frustration with Garrisons is that I knew I had a one to two hour ritual waiting on me every time I logged into the game, before I could feel like I was free to do interesting things… like slay internet dragons. If I could do Garrisons while walking to my car at night, or on my lunch break… it would take some of that burden away so that I knew once I got home… I could do the fun stuff without having to worry about the “paperwork”. Essentially we live our lives on our phones… and the games that integrate better with how we live our lives are going to feel more “real” to us.