B2P “sequel” existing alongside OW1 - > F2P OW2 with no way to play OW1 anymore

From the get-go it was basically an expansion - a bigger content drop. It wasn’t drawing a clear enough line differentiating itself from OW1 (especially with the planned cross-play between the two) in the way that most sequels do. It felt more like oldschool expansion packs a la WC3 Frozen Throne or SC Brood Wars - a…

Fair, I’d honestly forgotten most of the rest of the cast which is quite excellent. The rest of the cast is largely fantastic - at least in terms of cool/likeable people who can act - but Chris Pratt as the star is just...ugh.

Because Blizzard has pivoted away from “OW1 and OW2 will coexist for folks that like each respective game.” to “Remember how we deleted the old WCIII and replaced it with WCIII: Reforged? We’re doing that again, but at least the game will probably be pretty good this time.”

Man...the behind-the-scenes sounds like an absolute disaster given the pretty big pivots they’ve made vs. what they said at announce. I don’t envy the bad position the team was probably placed in.

Italian-American here: I don’t give a shit if Chris Pratt is Italian or not, nor if he offends Italians. Who I honestly don’t think give a shit about Mario that much one way or the other, unless my relatives have been keeping this a secret.

“The numbers these days have gotten so big—Diablo Immortal raked in $24 million in its first two weeks”

It wasn’t my bag, but I’m glad they left HZ in even if they’re abandoning support for it. I wish they’d done the same for 128p Breakthrough at least : (

TLDR: Genshin is a gacha game, so based on lots of RNG pulls to get the actual character/stars you want. Usually bad, but they both have “bad luck protection” built into it (i.e. after X pulls you’re guaranteed a 4-star character or something) plus multiple ways to earn currency to buy the gacha boxes in-game. So…

TLDR: Multiple character-specific subscriptions that are done in fucky ways (i.e. rewards for cumulative days logged in...so if you miss a few days of your 30 day sub you miss out on the 30-day login rewards), every aspect of progress monetized, heavy use of invisible walls that considerably reduce drops/XP/rewards as…

Yeah, and their “reasoning” about it “not being tactical” was so lame. It really felt like a BS excuse for them to remove the mode that was causing persistent performance issues they didn’t want to address.

Sure, but even for Netease games (of which I’ve played many, they make a lot and some have been pretty fun) this feels fairly extreme and well beyond what I’ve experienced.

I’d say it’s still got a ways to go for “par”, but the update is the first genuinely positive news for the game since launch, without any real qualifications. Everything else came with qualifications - “Scoreboard!...5 months after launch.”, but this - outside of initial server issues, has largely just been fairly…

And IIRC all three are character bound, so you’d need multiple instances of each subscription if you wanted to play more than one character : 3

Blizzard now holds the bottom two worst rated community games on Metacritic.

Hilariously, even Genshin’s monetization is LIGHTYEARS less awful/exploitative than D:I, and Genshin is a bloody gacha game. D:I is far more exploitative than Farmville or Clash of Clans and all the other games, too. In that it hides many of the transactions and obscures what you get vs. what you CAN get and offering…

Netease developed it, yes, but that in no way, shape, or form frees Blizzard from responsibility. It’s their IP, they’re the publishers, and they clearly worked closely with Netease on integrating Diablo lore and themes/visuals into the game.

The implicit shade being thrown at the D:I team from the D4 team and even Blizzard “lone lead” now is wild.

Everything is serious and if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem. Apparently.

Huh, so all I know of Quin is him ripping hilariously in PoE so I’ve just assumed people watch him for being bad at games and freaking out. Guess it pays well.