It’s a shame, I liked OW1, even with the tired meta and 6v6 more than I liked OW2.
The loot boxes weren’t predatory, allowing unlocking of skins and content without spending anything extra was a nice balance in my opinion that I wish more games did.
They took OW1 and bastardized it, it deserves the rating it has. It used to be that new versions of games were better.
It really is a shame. I played so much OW1, and then suddenly it changed to be like all the other modern games with sleazy monetization that I avoid.
The loot boxes weren’t predatory
Ehhh, they were basically the same thing as a slot machine. The battlepass is certainly worse, as it just encourages rampant (not so) microtransactions, but just because the current battlepass system is really predatory, doesn’t mean the old loot box system wasn’t predatory at all. It was just less predatory.
Well I guess what I mean by that is that loot boxes were free to obtain AND open through leveling and weren’t exclusive to forking over money.
No lootboxes at all is the ultimate goal, but I’d take OW1 lootbox style over nearly any others.
It’s a cultural issue.
People at Larian had one objective the entire time - making a genuinely good D&D based game. If the money comes, that’s incredible. And it did come.
People at blizzard make games with the goal of making money. The era of making something fun has been long over in this studio
It seems that publicly traded game companies simply can’t help themselves from becoming this (e.g. Activision/Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA).
It’s very sad, but at least there are still a few private AAA companies and indies who seem to make fun games for the sake of fun games.
Once you go public, you’ve practically forced yourself into aiming for infinite growth. “Just enough” revenue is not in the vocabulary of these people
It’s an ownership issue.
Larian is privately owned by Swen Vincke. They can concentrate on making good games because they don’t answer to anyone but Swen.
Blizzard is publicly owned. It has to answer to greedy and short-sighted shareholders.
I don’t buy or play their trash any more. It ain’t the 90s or 00s any more. Blizzard is ass.
Ea, ubisoft, Blizzard. The games aren’t even that good
Yeah, pretty much. A lot of their games appear on a 80% sale half the time, and even then it’s still not worth it. It’s not even about the money, it’s about being disrespected by the dogshit they continue to release.
I would rather give my time to a passionate indie studio, where the people put together a genuinely unique experience
Blizzard is dead. At the time they were Activision. Now they are Microsoft. The blizzard that existed to make StarCraft, warcraft and diablo only exists in name.
I don’t know, the World of Warcraft dev team recently unionized and got Chris Metzen to return as creative director. And, personally, as a current WoW player (War Within is great so far btw) the whole feel of the studio is so much better than during Shadowlands when things were bad and I quit the game. I think that Warcraft at least is having a bit of a comeback now.
Overwatch 2 is awful tho
I miss the Warcraft II and StarCraft days. You could tell they were serious by their cutscenes, but also knew they were having fun, and wanted the player to as well, by the gameplay and Easter eggs. “Line must go up” took over, now it’s all cash grabs. I will not buy a game from them at full price again.
Their cutscenes still go hard honestly
Meh, they are what I expect from a company that is that profit centric. Looking good is top priority for selling, after all.
If you think that’s bad, wait 'till you hear about the working conditions.
In their defense their just keeping up with the standard in other publicity owned companies. Don’t wanna rock the boat you know.
(This is a joke, please join a union in your field. Union strong motherfuckers!)
CDPR? admittedly they’re really good at gaining it back again, kinda homer simpsons vibes where they repeatedly fuck up but then make an honest attempt to make things right only to repeat the cycle all over again.
Hopefully their transition to unreal engine 5 gets away with a lot of their launch issues I genuinely love all of their games but their release dates being “game launch +1-2 years” hurts me.
CDPR mistakes can be corrected, but blizzard games are designed from the ground up, with purpose, to be fuckup games in order to milk as much money as possible from it players. There is no correcting the boat for blizzard because for the managers of blizzard the boat IS correct
CDPR is still on my “probably pass” list after cyber punk. I read the launch news, stayed faraway. I picked it up this year, after all the patches and work and… yeah it’s still fundamentally broken.
Not in terms of balance or bugs, but it didn’t have the magic. To start, I really don’t like fantasy games. They’re just not my thing. Witcher 3 had bad combat mechanics, could be terribly grindy and YET is one of my top five games. The story telling, from the plot itself the tiny immersive details in the world, hooked you. They nailed the big things, but it was the little things like sometimes you’d free someone, and realize they murdered a bunch of dudes who were minding their own business, and none of this was mentioned in or affected any other plot line, it was just a random detail in the universe.
Cyberpunk has a semblance of the big stuff, but exactly none of the soul. I cared about some of the main characters (emphasis on “some”) but exactly none about the world. It never felt like more than a backdrop.
A loss and misstep is ok, particularly given a growing studio, the problem with CDPR is they think they fixed cyberpunk. With that mentality I’m giving their next game a huge berth.
And if you liked cyberpunk, enjoy. There are parts to be enjoyed. There are some neat plot threads, some nifty side quests, if you enjoy it don’t let people ruin it for you.
They lied about Cyberpunk. They knew it was bad on release and maliciously made decisions so that people would still buy it. That’s not some minor thing, that’s a crime. “We leave greed to others”, yeah, right. And this problem was never addressed by CDPR, like it’s a normal thing to do, they think it’s okay.
Review bombs are stupid and pointless. Especially in this case since most players are going through bnet and not steam.
24M active players.
Ever since they banned that StarCraft II pro for protesting china in Hong Kong, I’ve uninstalled battle.net and didn’t look back.
I rather buy a game from EA.
Sometimes Blizzard says things but it just sounds like Winnie the Pooh’s jizz gurgling out their mouth.
Same, down with the CCP
Yeah but they’ll never learn because tons off people keep shoveling money at them.
I think Activision might be on the way out, they’ve had playercounts decline pretty much every quarter and even though their SEC filings show an increase in revenue thats only because they get filed alongside the rest of Activision, now.
Blizzard died quite a while ago. Even if the same dudes are still making decisions at the head of the studio after the Activision buyout, clearly they have dementia or some other cognitive defects.
I think the execs were always somewhat shit, even when they were making good games. It’s just their creative team miraculously managed to make good games despite the shitty execs.
Yeah, they used to have a Caste System in Blizzard HQ where badge color decided your importance. And get this, their tech guys, security guys, and hardware guys (not firmware) were all the lower caste lmao.
Firing Nethaera was a bullet in their brain.
I’m pretty sure is right there with them
Hulu was really good a decade ago. Then they put ads in and created a higher tier. Nobody was surprised when it happened again some years later.
In Ukraine starlink was being hailed as a hero before Elon decided to turn off Internet access in areas he deemed Ukraine to be “too aggressive”.
Goodwill doesn’t deserve it’s reputation. It uses minimum wage exemptions for disabled people to pay it’s staff below minimum wage.
Edit to add - Destiny 2 was the other one I was thinking of and couldn’t quite place. Great PvE shooter with great story, and they killed it to force people to buy DLC.
D2’s problem is different. To succeed critically they needed to produce The Taken King or The Witch Queen every content cycle, but there’s no way to do that except release only once a year — but they wanted to release every 3 months, so they made shitty DLCs that everyone mildly disliked and hyped them up so people actively disliked them on release.
Then the shitty mini DLCs began cannibalizing the dev, time and monetary budget from the main DLCs and it fell into a downward spiral.
Yeah that wasn’t great but I think it was the part where they literally deleted a bunch of the story so you either bought the DLC or wandered the maps aimlessly killing stuff that really broke any good will left.
It’s amazing how people still get things wrong ages after it’s been corrected by the author and spread misinformation and the hate involved with it.
Elon didn’t turn starlink off. It was always off. It was never ON to be turned OFF.
Further, allowing ukraine to use starlink as a weapon in an offensive attack was against the terms of service and would put spacex in a very difficult position with regulations. That’s why the DoD took it over, and it’s okay now.
If it was always off then why did they lose Internet? And why was Ukraine’s counter offensive bad but Russia’s offensive okay?
They lost internet because they went out of range of where it was on. They assumed it was on everywhere.
They strapped them onto boats where the internet was on, and drove them to where the internet was off. Then they begged SpaceX to turn them on, and they refused.
Not turning it on to allow the attack was in line with the terms of service and weapons export rules. SpaceX doesn’t want their consuner service to be considered a weapon.
Russia was getting satellites from 3rd parties and using them in ukraine because they work in ukraine.
Edit: and just to clarify, now that the DoD is managing this for ukraine through a contract with SpaceX, the DoD is allowing its use as a weapon AFAIK.
A. That’s not how satellites work
B. The US considers Crimea to be Ukrainian territory.
C. These uplinks were already purchased by the DoD, who was very vocal about Elon fucking with the signal.
I know it sucks that your idol turned out to be the vain villain instead of Tony Stark but we were all here. We all remember.
Lol, service absolutely can be turned on and off based on regions. SpaceX doesn’t turn it on in a region until the local government had an agreement with them. Just because the US gov sees Crimea as Ukraine does not mean SpaceX is obliged to turn it on there.
And no, there was no DoD contract in place at the time. SpaceX was providing services for free out of their own goodwill.
The DoD had a formal contact in place in June 2023, the incident falsely commented on by OP was in 2022.
Edit below
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
You can go read it all in the wiki yourself but the relevant part
In June 2023, the Department of Defense officialized a contract with Shotwell’s SpaceX to buy Starlink satellite services for Ukraine.[10] The deal includes the Pentagon buying 400-500 Starlink terminals for Ukraine, giving the Pentagon control of where Starlink works inside the country without fear of interruption.[79] The terms of services of the final contract were undisclosed for security issues.[10] Following the contract, The Pentagon stated Starlink was a “vital layer in Ukraine’s overall communications network” amidst “a range of global partners to ensure Ukraine has the capabilities they need.”[10]
Edit: oh, you’re OP. LOL
I’m not going to read the wiki on an active war with a cult of personality involved. It’s not going to be unbiased.
News reports from the period make the situation very clear. As well as whistle blowers straight up telling us Elon personally shut down their Internet.
Get fucked.
Okay dude, continue to have your raging hard on for hating Elon
I’ll wait for a verified source that shows spacex had a formal contract to supply starlink services to Ukraine with the DoD prior to this. I imagine I’ll die before you can do that since you can’t.
Edit: specifically before the event in question.
