When you understand the mechanics are designed to enhance a player’s power fantasy, essentially, the reason for the mechanics become somewhat clear. They’re effectively not concerned with every match being a completely even playing field as much as moments where a player can occasionally feel powerful—because the…

Man, Garrison’s. So many people were excited for them, and they ended up being one of the worst things about the game.

I get the logic behind them: They were an incentive to log in for a short while every day (and thus make a habit of playing, keeping you subbing longer), but the net result of Garrison’s ended up…

There’s also the fact that combo’s typically have another series of odd things the brain has to track—timings between LP and then F MK for example (often with different frame timings, meaning you have to also learn the ‘rhythm’ of buttons and mentions). You have to learn when to ‘start’ the combo based on hit…

Zarya and Reinhardt’s shields will take the entirety of one-shot kill ults as long as it has some health. They arguably fall flatter against constant DPS ults like Reaper/76 whatever. It’s also limited by the ‘cone’ (so incoming shots to her will always block, but she can’t protect if you say, Reaper ult the rest of…

I really want the game to be good, but something is going pretty wrong here with all the weirdness. I hope it is, but I have doubts.

Lucioball has every sign of it being a test of how players react to playing an alternate mode that heavily changes the rules of the game, in this case turning 6 v 6 team deathmatch to 3 v 3 Rocket League. To be blunt, Brawls as they stand now are barely worth noticing. I think one mode—support only, was cute, and the…

That’s where the disconnect is. TF2's version of 2-fort is notoriously bad and didn’t translate well to the updated mechanics at all.

The distance you have to travel to the spawn vs. the extremely close spawn points to the ‘flag’ (briefcase, whatever) make every single game an absolute nightmare slog. Getting there…

Ult’s catching you a little out of position and causing a pretty immediate death is the entire point of ults. They’re designed around big swings. I don’t ever see a D.va consistently wiping out a team every time she presses Q—in fact I see a fair share of complete whiffs even now. It’s ‘low risk’ to her (unless a…

Games Workshop is basically licensing it for beans.

“The problem I find is the poor tend to spend money on things they want rather then what they need.”

Yeah, that shit has nothing to do with being poor. That’s not being taught. Rich people have that problem all the time (I have met so many trust-fund kids who’s stupidity with money goes so far beyond ‘bought rims with…

I more meant individual console. Particularly with Android phones become so popular that you can buy from a bunch of different manufacturers all running a similar OS. MS own UWS is becoming more platform agnostic as well—they don’t care if you’re playing on an Xbox or PC.

I hope there’s a really killer book to be made out there about the development leading up to the WiiU, because it would be fascinating to know the decisions and challenges that lead to the followup to a frankly insane console (The amount of Wiis sold is still pretty staggering) lead to a pretty tepid Wiiu launch must…

What do you think people misunderstand most about your job? Or of reporting on games in general?

I wonder how much balance issues like this are going to ‘matter’. There’s going to be a huge informational advantage here as the game develops and players organize their knowledge, but the larger ‘meta’ is going to only matter to a player’s local area, which is going to be dependent on how many people in the local…

Mcree disappeared almost entirely competitive before the change.

He needed a buff, it was just a question of how much. This might be too much—hard to say. He still fills an extremely weird niche as a low-mobility anti-flanker (note he’s an ‘anti flanker’ only once every 8 seconds). Comparisons to Widowmaker spring to…

So... are the Stormtroopers actually shooting at the lightsaber? Is this like the Star Wars equivalent of a dad teaching his kid how to bat at baseball? I think you actually hear them kind of feeling sorry for you halfway through.

Also, the future, for the low low price of $900. Huh...

Really, the answer these game companies are looking for is ultimately going to be the one they don’t like; constant review and corrective behavior that they want. There is no magic algorithim, or game design, or any kind of fix that’s going to automate this process—honestly, a big part of the problem with some game…

So, in terms of Niche, Ana is probably going to end up as a backup support at best. The ability to drop a burst heal on a beefy target (she can heal almost 150 health on a single target inside of two seconds, or can throw her ‘nade as an AOE heal for 100 to several targets). She’ll probably hang out at around soldier…

Blizzard actually tweeted a response to someone inquiring about Ana being Sombra with ‘Who is Sombra?’ in Spanish. It’s entirely possible she’s a new hero, as the name is actually a *separate* teaser item then the one that teased Ana (people were just conflating the two as talking about the same character).

She does not. The handgun is her ‘sleepy gun’.