14th February 2022, 9:24 PM
(This post was last modified: 14th February 2022, 9:28 PM by A Black Falcon.)
(1st February 2022, 7:19 AM)Dark Jaguar Wrote: I'd put Black Isle over them... well MS bought that company too. Overwatch is just really um... tween? I just can't get behind that weird overly smooth "cereal box mascot" aesthetic they seem to be going for. A look that seems to say every one of them was designed by committee and scrubbed sterile in a lab before churning out to the public. Without any sort of single player campaign I guess I'm just expected to know the background of all these weirdos by way of promotional ads for each one? Like I'm sure the cowboy one has a tortured past and the weird mech lady one stays crunch in milk or whatever, but I just don't care, and especially in the face of what Blizzard's become.I like Overwatch's cartoony aesthetic, it's done very well and looks great. As for the story though, yeah, since there is no single player campaign I've never cared about it. I know there technically is a story, and they have done backstory videos for characters and stuff, but I've never watched most of it. If they want me to care about the games' story, put it in the game. But whatever, story isn't really important most of the time in games. What makes Overwatch amazing is how well designed the gameplay is. It's one of the best multiplayer shooters ever, and it's much more approachable than many; between the varied characters and their abilities, it's a game that even I can play and do okay at, with the right character. That is very far from a given in the FPS genre...
Quote:Now let's look at their remasters lately. Starcraft Remastered has preorder exclusive DLC. Warcraft III Reforged changes the terms of their map creation so they legally own anything you make, supposedly in an attempt to make sure DOTA doesn't "slip through their fingers" again. Diablo II Re... damned took away LAN play to force everyone to play on their network or not at all. They've become VERY anti-consumer as of late and even their remasters show it. They are not now, and I think never really were, "the best PC developer". The scales have fallen off my eyes. I don't idolize them a bit now. The world we're in is burning ABF. Clinging to the old ways won't save us.Uh, SC Remaster has preorder-exclusive DLC? I don't remember what that is, but whatever, I highly doubt it's anything worth caring about. SC Remaster was my favorite game of 2017, no surprise given how it's an extremely good remaster of the best game ever made, and I do stoill play it sometimes. Starcrataft is a brutally hard game and I'm no good at the micro, but I love it anyway...
As for Diablo II, taking away LAN support is lame, but I never used LAN in Diablo anyway so, oh well. It's a really nice remaster with a fantastic visual overhaul. I love the controller support, they implemented it very well and finally being able to have more than two skills equipped is really nice. The many-tabbed storage box is also pretty incredibly nice compared to the tiny amount of storage you got in the original game!
For Warcaraft III, after hearing about how badly the messed up the game, I didn't buy that one. And I still haven't bought it. I hope that they fix the games' worst flaws, WC3 was my favorite multiplayer game ever and I want that back...
Blizzard most certainly was not only my favorite PC developer, but for a while (later '90s to early '00s) almost certainly my favorite developer period. IU agree that they've had a steep downhill slide since their peak, and I blame a lot of that on the massive success of World of Warcraft (a game which, remember, I have never liked) messing up the company, but the SC and DII remasters, along with Overwatch, are still among the best PC games ever. There is no other developer all that close, for me, really, for best PC game developer; it's Blizzard by a lot. (And their 4th-gen console games were good too, as Blizzard Classic Arcade shows.)
Now, whether that will hold true for FUTURE games, we have no idea; Blizzard has lost so much talent that it'd be hard to imagine them making games as amazing as their past efforts. I would absolutely love to see Warcraft 1 and 2 remakes or remasters, but other than that they've covered their best games. I don't have all that much confidence in Blizz's future titles. But who knows, they could be great. I hope they make an RTS again, though with how badly they messed up Starcraft's story in SC2 and Warcraft's story in WoW, I'd have very very low expectations for the plot in any such game... but hopefully their usually-exceptional gameplay can make up for that. Bungling the WC3 remaster so badly does not inspire too much confidence in that regard though, so I'm still hoping that at some point they fix it.
Quote:And then there's Nintendo. Slowly, VERY VERY slowly but surely, they are embracing the bad things in DLC. I doubt they'll ever get involved in NFTs, but only because they wouldn't want to invest in the basic infrastructure to run a block chain all by themselves. I don't doubt their investors are heavily pressuring them to get involved even as we speak though. I'd be a fool not to assume the worst at this point. But, I will say that Nintendo USED to be very much a fan-friendly company. In the past, they loved the fan projects we'd create which usually amounted to legos or artwork drawn on fan mail. They bent over backwards to win us over, and it worked. Now that they're as big as they are, they've forgotten what put them there.
Ughh, Nintendo better not get into NFTs... I think they're sane enough to not do that, but I guess you never know. As for Nintendo and fan projects though, they seem to usually allow free stuff, to a point. It's once money becomes involved that they crack down, as with that guy running a big-money Switch modding group who's getting prison time. I think that is a reasonable line to draw; they don't go after romhackers and such after all, only people trying to profit off of their IPs.
I agree that Nintendo has gotten into putting somewhat exploitative microtransactions in some of their games, but ... didn't that start early? I mean, they did some 3DS games with pretty bad microtransaction elements! And then there are their mobile games... so yeah, Nintendo has been doing this stuff for a while now. I'm not sure if it's getting worse or not but it certainly isn't getting any better.