Bliss con.

[Fry]

So, despite all the outrage and protests about the Hong Kong stuff Blizzard held their annual video game convention. Graciously giving people the opportunity to part with a few hundred quid to watch some gameplay videos and opening cinematics projected on a big screen from 80 metres away a whole hour before they're released on the internet.

So the big hitters are Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4.

Overwatch 2 seems... confusing. It's apparently a co-op action campaign against hordes of robots, I guess a series of Destiny-like raids with the characters that they're clearly aching to become a cultural phenomenon (or at the very least a meme) but are all a bit too 'first-draft' to be actually memorable or interesting. It looks as boring as pretty much everything else they release to be honest. The gunplay is never what appealed to me in Overwatch. It falls into the trap that those character based multiplayer shooters always fall into - only about a third of the character's unique weapons are actually any fun to use (mainly the shotguns and rifles - the only guns anyone likes in a multiplayer FPS), everyone else's are too floaty and have such specific situational uses that they don't feel like they require any skill. The fun in Overwatch comes from the abilities, and the interplay between them on your team opposing the other team. Genuinely can't imagine that mechanic being interesting in a battle against hordes of AI robots that do the same thing every match. On top of that apparently:

Jeff Kaplan: "For all original players of Overwatch, you will get to play on all of the same maps as Overwatch 2 players, including all of the brand new maps. And you will get to play with all of the same heroes. It will be a shared multiplayer environment where no one gets left behind."

Which means the PVP is going to be essentially unchanged from Overwatch 1, making Overwatch 2 seem like little more than an expansion pack? I suppose it's down to how much they charge for it. It's all just dog eggs innit.

Diablo looks like...more of the same Diablo really.

Blizzard games are just fundamentally uninteresting to me, from top to bottom. They've never* had a game with an interesting new take on a genre, or even with an interesting new gameplay mechanic. As far as I can tell their entire output is a take on things other companies have been doing for years but with a degree tightness and polish that's supposed to represent these genres at their zenith. That's just never come off for me, perhaps due to the fact all of their world building and character design is so cliché and uninspired that every defining aspect of their properties just slip from your mind. It becomes a blur in the vague colour palette of the game within your mind. The music from the Diablo 1 being possibly the only exception. I mean, Overwatch at least attempts something and only fails due to an extreme lack of competence or insight, but fucking Diablo man. Anyone who looks at that mid-tier 70s metal band album cover aesthetic and doesn't feel their soul slowly calcifying is a stronger person than me.

Even World of Warcraft. That really was a cultural phenomenon for a few years, a household name in gaming. But I, someone who admittedly only played it for about 20 hours but has always been incredibly interested in wider gaming culture, couldn't tell you anything about the actual World of Warcraft other than the fact it has (generic looking) orcs and is called Azeroth (I think). I doubt most people who were never really deep into the game could do much better. I reckon that speaks to some paucity of imagination in the entire franchise, or at least its failure to make a serious impact.

All of their stuff just feels like it's made by an algorithm. Which it probably is.

*Add "since about 2005" to this if you want.

[Fry]

Oh and I forgot to even mention that the gameplay in most of their games is a big basket of poo too. Diablo is boring repetitive numbers-go-up nonsense. So is WoW most of the time. Destiny was a revelation in the fact it's a repetitive mmo style game but was actually fun to play to a moment to moment basis. Blizzard have literally never managed this, not even in their single player games.

[druss]

Diablo 4 looks amazing to me, more like the Diablo 3 everyone was hoping for rather than the one that was actually released. That's the most fucked up cinematic they've released for about 20 years and the game looks to have a similar feel to it.

I get what you're saying about the Blizzard of recent years but glad you added the caveat of post 2005. From 1994-2004 they released Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. Not necessarily the most innovative list of games but within that time period you could make a case for any of them being the best game of their genre at time of release (or at least right up there).