BlizzCon

BlizzCon 2023 Thoughts

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Good Morning Folks! I have to be honest… I had every intention of writing a post on BlizzCon this past Friday as the event was going on but that never quite came to fruition. For those who do not follow such things, this past Friday and Saturday was the first in-person BlizzCon since 2019. I know a ton of friends who were very happy about the return of the event and made plans to travel to Anaheim for it. I’ve always wanted to go, but tend to have a fairly fraught relationship with Blizzard games in general. I feel like it is probably a good idea to get this out of the way, but I have not actively played World of Warcraft since December 2020, though I have followed from afar and did some alpha testing for the latest expansion Dragonflight. I’ve grown apart from the fandom and Diablo was really the last vestige that I clung to.

If you are so inclined, you can watch the full uncut presentation for Blizzcon 2023 here.

All of that said… I am shocked to say that I thought this year’s BlizzCon was almost universally positive. I found it extremely interesting that within 10 minutes of the event starting, we had a speech from Microsoft’s Phil Spencer. He said all of the right things, but I find myself wanting to believe them. As someone who has been a Windows programmer for most of my career… I have a fraught relationship with Microsoft as a whole. That said… I can’t see that Microsoft has done wrong by any of the companies they have acquired. They have most definitely been a steadying force for Mojang and Minecraft. The one strike that I could throw against them was Redfall, but who knows precisely how that mess unfolded because it was a game so far out of the comfort zone of that studio. As compared to the reign of Bobby Kotick… I have to imagine that Microsoft will be a positive force for Blizzard as a whole.

Another thing that I have to admit is that there is a lot of presentation that I just did not care about at all. Overwatch is a setting that seems interesting, but I am not going to engage unless they shift gears and turn it into a looter shooter. Hearthstone is something that I did care about for a while… but now that Magic that Gathering Arena exists and is relatively enjoyable… I have a good representation of the game I actually care about and don’t really need the Blizzard clone. Rumble is outside of my wheelhouse especially now that my aging phone seems to have trouble running any modern games that are not the most simplistic of 2D graphics. So essentially for me… BlizzCon was a show about World of Warcraft and Diablo, both of which got some interesting announcements.

Based on the schedules that came out ahead of the show, I fully expected that we would not get a Diablo IV announcement this year. I am pleasantly surprised that we did and it is going to be set in the area of the world from Diablo 2 Act 3 the Torajon Jungles. This should in theory be southwest of Kehjistan in the current Diablo IV areas. They were pretty limited on their information but did drop that we are going to be seeing a new class that has not existed in the Diablo franchise before. Data mining leaks ahead of the show indicated that this was some sort of nature-based class. More important than all of this however is that they released some information about more endgame content going into Diablo IV starting this week and continuing into Season 3 in January. There is also going to be a winter holiday event which might be interesting for a bit. Unfortunately, the new endgame content starting this week is going to be gated behind the season’s journey, which means it is really only for folks who are languishing at level 100 and doesn’t do much to solve the problem of running out of an interesting reason to grind further after about level 80.

In the realm of “why does this exist” we get to World of Warcraft and more specifically “Classic WoW”. Apparently, the classic servers are updating to Cataclysm… which seems really weird to me given that the sweeping changes to the old world that came with Cataclysm were the impetus for many of the unofficial emulator servers that eventually coalesced into the official “Classic” product. Does anyone actually want this? I am hoping that they maintain some Wrath servers for the folks who did not want to move forward into Cataclysm. Maybe there is someone out there who missed out on the first decade of World of Warcraft and is now interested in reliving it at a rapidly increased pace. It is however spawning a number of memes around this having to happen so that they could launch World of Warcraft Classic Classic. I have specific negative feelings towards Cataclysm as this is when I first broke from the game as a whole.

The other classic project however seemed really interesting. “Season of Discovery” is sort of a re-imagining of World of Warcraft with unique talent trees and class changes designed to make playing it wildly different. They specifically name-dropped Tanking Warlocks and Mage Healers as mutations available during this game mode. The irony here is that we absolutely had a Warlock Tank in Ahn’qiraj, and I myself tanked as a PVP geared Boomkin…. so this might be something that interests me in the long run. One of my favorite eras of World of Warcraft is Gladiator Stance and being able to dps with a sword and shield as a Warrior. If they bring this back… then they probably have me at least for a bit.

The big news however was the announcement of a change in practice towards expansions in World of Warcraft and while they did not elaborate on this… a shorter time frame between them. Not only did they announce The War Within which comes out next year, but also Midnight and The Last Titan as a trilogy of expansions with shared themes. We’ve learned that they always worked on multiple expansions at once from the fallout of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands… but I do feel like this would probably improve the narrative experiences of the Warcraft universe. Final Fantasy XIV was only as good as it was because it was a cohesive narrative that evolved over a decade rather than what felt like a serialized villain of the week type gameplay that we have had in Warcraft. My hope is however that they can be nimble with the mechanical side of the game because having the narrative be something that is building over time is good… you need to be able to adjust to changes on the ground when the player base is not reacting well to something like the “borrowed power” systems.

I think this is going to be the World of Warcraft expansion that wins me back. Almost everything about it seems to specifically cater to my interests. I love underground areas and this seems to be an entire expansion where we are diving deeper below the surface. I am very much dwarven-influenced, and I am all about tunneling through the earth to find interesting things. When I plan Minecraft I almost always start by digging a giant shaft to bedrock and see what I find along that path. I am also super interested in the Warband system as I have always wanted to be able to share more benefits from my Alts, given that I tend to be an Altaholic by nature. Almost everything that they announced seemed universally good and I am super interested in the Delve system which seems to be a dungeon-like experience that scales between 1 and 5 players.

I think more than anything… there was just a different energy in the air for this show. Gone was the “we know better ” attitude that surrounded a lot of the discussions from past BlizzCons and it was replaced by what seemed like a genuine unbridled excitement over what they were showing off. The vibe was just better than it has been in probably a decade or maybe even longer. Blizzard felt like a different company, and while we had the return of Metzen… he didn’t necessarily overshadow the other folks who were presenting things to the players. I want to see Blizzard thrive under Microsoft not in small part because I still know more than a handful of folks who work there. I want to play these games without having a bad taste in my mouth and feel like I am betraying my core principles.

This is the first time in a very long time that I have had hope for World of Warcraft as a franchise, and Blizzard as a company. I watched Diablo IV evolve from a complete shit show at launch to being a rather enjoyable if not somewhat temporary game with Season 2. Blizzard seems to be saying the right things and I just hope that they can back up those words with actions over the next few years. In the new year, I am probably even going to poke my head into the Dragonflight expansion and see what it has to offer. This is the best I have felt coming out of BlizzCon weekend in a very long time. Good job all… now keep that momentum going into the next few major launches.

Overwatch and Losing Hope for Blizzard

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Hey Folks! I am doing one of my fairly rare Saturday posts in part because I made something resembling a legitimate YouTube video. Also, the situation has changed slightly since I made that video and I wanted to talk through some of it. I am not exactly going to rehash my thoughts from the video, because I figure if you are curious it is only like 5 minutes and you can just watch the damned thing.

Essentially this is all spun from the announcement earlier this week that Overwatch 2 would be canceling its PVE-focused Hero Mode. This somewhat started my thoughts percolating because I had largely been waiting to pay attention to Overwatch when this fully fleshed-out PVE mode was released. When Loading Ready Run… admittedly one of my favorite YouTube channels… released a segment on Checkpoint adding their own thoughts, this essentially caused my feelings to tip over and the above YouTube video is the result. Essentially my feelings are that Overwatch 2 was relaunched in large part because the first game was not monetized anywhere near as much as ActiBlizz in their current configuration would have liked. Relaunching the game under the guise of improvements gave them the opportunity to add a bunch of new hooks to drain the coffers of their player base.

So yesterday the game director Aaron Keller released a public blog post explaining the reasons why they cancelled Hero Mode. There is also a fair bit of gaslighting going on that “no really everything is going as planned, we are just removing this level-up system”. This admittedly made me wonder if I simply misremembered what was originally pitched at BlizzCon in 2019. That year… seems simultaneously “last year” and “a decade ago” at the same time. So much has changed over the last four years… so that caused me to go digging for the original announcement. Thankfully there are channels out there that rip every announcement and upload it under their own banner. So I only had to go as far as GameSpot to find a full rip of the entire 22-minute-plus presentation from 2019.

So I spent a chunk of this morning watching the video, and specifically paying attention to the wording. Admittedly this was a simpler time when it comes to Blizzard and our feelings about them as a company. This is before the bulk of the sexual assault allegations came out in the media, before the public failure of Warcraft III Reforged, before the failed state of World of Warcraft, and before the absolute depravity that is Diablo Immortal monetization. There is an interesting article from 2021 on PC Gamer tracking how Blizzard’s reputation has collapsed that covers sixteen different topics… and fails to include anything that happened in most of the last three years. Suffice it to say in 2019 we viewed Blizzard significantly differently than we do today… or at least I know I did. That said even going back and watching this video… stirred up feelings I had for this franchise that had gone dormant.

Watching through the video and the subsequent talk from Jeff Kaplan, I feel pretty certain that no… I did not misremember things. In this chat after the moving cinematic that still managed to invoke some tear-jerking all these years later… Kaplan does what he always did best and chats with the audience. During this speech he promised a “complete story experience” and that Hero Mode would be the equivalent of “Adventure Mode from Diablo” but for Overwatch. Specifically that they were doing this because the audience had been asking for a PVE Overwatch game and that they would be delivering “A Ton of PVE Content”. When Overwatch 2 launched without any of the PVE-focused Story Mode of the game, a lot of players like myself adopted a “wait and see” stance. Even after reading through the carefully shaped statement… I still feel like there just isn’t any reason for me to pay attention to Overwatch 2 from this point forward. They dropped the parts of the 2019 Vision for the game, that I cared about.

I chose this picture of Mei for my final image in the video I released yesterday morning, and it feels fitting to end this blog post with it as well. She is a precious cinnamon roll that we do not deserve. Anyways this is also probably the end of my talking about Overwatch given that it is clear that the trajectory for the game is going in a direction that I just don’t care about. Admittedly a large part of why I bought the first version of the game was to get Mercy’s Wings for my Diablo III characters. Honestly… I consider that money well spent because I have used the heck out of them. As far as the game… I still really like the characters and the universe it is set in, but have no interest in whatever is going on with that franchise at this point.

As far as Blizzard as a company, I feel like I have been laboring under the false assumption that maybe just maybe Microsoft could ride in and set things right for that company. The debacle that has happened with Redfall however makes me deeply question if that is ever going to be the case. Also in reading up on ALL of this today before sitting down to write this blog post… I was presented with just how far Blizzard has fallen over the last four years. Looking at BlizzCon from 2019… it feels like it was this happier time when I was ignorant of what was going to play out both in the world and more specifically in that company. I never thought I would feel nostalgic about 2019… but god I do at this point. I would love to go back to feeling positive about most things, and the future of Blizzard entertainment and a lot of these characters and franchises that I’ve loved over the years.

However, we are here now, and understand the reality of the situation, and as much as it pains me… I am just not sure if there is any hope for the company at this point. I say that knowing there are many friends who still work for the company, I really wanted to keep that torch of hope burning. However, at the moment I am feeling pretty damned snuffed out.

Patch 9.1.5 Thoughts

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Good morning friends. There is a topic that has been bouncing around in my skull for a few weeks now, and I have never really gotten around to speaking my mind about it. The thing is I am not even sure what I want to say. Patch 9.1.5 is sticking in my craw for a bunch of reasons, and I am not entirely certain what I want to say about it because I am afraid most of my thought processes are poisoned by built-up bile. There are so many changes going into the game that are needed. For example, maybe the love rocket icon should not have looked like a big cartoon penis for the first twelve years it was in the game. I am also all for the painting changes because quite frankly the artwork looked like shit, and the versions that are replacing it are rather nice.

However, 9.1.5 is shaping up to be this make-or-break moment for the game, with the devs seemingly dumping everything that players said they wanted into the game. Legion Timewalking is this giant fanservice event that brings back a bunch of things that folks had been pining for like the Mage Tower and an ability to collect a whole new set of alternate recolors. The problem is… this is an event… a limited time moment in the game where it is going to feel extremely good for players to come back and play but ultimately has an expiration date associated with it. This feels in so many ways like a lover in a toxic relationship asking you what they can do to keep you from leaving them. Players DID leave and the problem is… a single data point does not make a trend.

Then there is another part of me that is frustrated that if this could have been pulled together so quickly… why didn’t they do this years ago? The changes that are going into the game break so many of the things that I have long considered just the World of Warcraft design ethic. Previously it seemed like we could never get something just universally good for the players, without it also being horrible in some way. Like Transmog has gone through this cycle for years, with you being able to collect item appearances… but only for the armor class that can be equipped by the person looting the items. There is part of me that wants to believe that this is a shift in the direction of the game, but the cynic feels like this is an attempt to make players temporarily forget about the bad times.

Then there is the developer in me that realizes that a lot of this is unfair to the team working on the game. Even in my own job there is a long list of things that are relatively quick to wrap up, but never quite get done because there is a prioritized by management list of things that take precedence. This part of me thinks that what we are seeing is probably a combination of two things. Firstly the management is caught off balance and desperately grasping and universally good things that they can pump out quickly, and a lot of these things were probably side-projects of the devs and are now given leave to finally finish them up and get them out into the game. Everyone has a list of items that they know would be really good… but that they can never quite find the time to finish up, and I think folks are being allowed to finally work on these things.

Then there is the other part that is frustrating me right now. I see folks making their way back to Blizzard titles, when in the end… nothing has really changed yet. There have been some high visibility exits from the company, but none of the demands that the Blizzard employees have made have actually been met. To make things worse there is talk of fears over retaliatory firings, which may or may not be a thing but the rumors are there. I am just not personally ready to forgive and forget yet, and I am thankful that I had already made my break from being a “Blizzard Gamer” back in 2011 during Cataclysm. There are folks who were hurting when they were not playing the game, and there are good employees that potentially suffer as subscribership goes down… so I get that this is an extremely complicated issue. However I am just not personally ready to jump back and pretend that everything is okay.

I am frustrated that gamers have extremely short memories. Patch 9.1.5 seems poised to be the gaming equivalent of Calgon, and is fixing to take away all of the memories of bad times… at least temporarily. I guess on one hand I am happy that the folks who are capable of making good with Blizzard and returning are going to have some excellent new toys to play with, but frustrated that I can’t look the other way this time. I miss the hell out of Diablo 3, but I am not ready to come back yet.

Lowered Pitchfork

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BlizzCon was this weekend, and I admit that I stayed home on Friday to watch what was about to happen. I was not sure if it would be a weekend full of protests, or a weekend where Blizzard finally quelled the rising storm. The truth is… it seemingly was a little of column A and a little of column B. They opened the show with a statement by Blizzard President J. Allen Brack or JAB as people have taken to calling him. During the comment he said a lot of words that sounded pretty close to apologizing without actually ever apologizing. It was effectively the corporate version of reflexively saying you are sorry when you don’t quite know what you just did.

A real apology includes three components. First admitting that you realize what you did and being able to explain it. Second giving a heartfelt apology that relays an understanding of the harm that was caused. Third an explanation of how you are going to make the changes necessary to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The statement did none of the above, however it is likely the closest we are ever going to get on this situation. I give them credit for making an attempt however and for now I am going to lower my pitchfork, because quite frankly I am tired of having to be upset at Blizzard. I stand by my statement that in the Video Game and Entertainment industry, no one has clean hands and the only way to do so is to simply stop doing business with China in any form.

We are addicted to Chinese products, be it the cheap phone charger that you picked up to have a spare, the clothing that we wear, or literally every inch of your mobile phone. Blizzard is attempting to walk the line between our Western sensibilities and the Great Firewall that will lock them out completely from competing in the single largest market on the planet. There is a long list that Mashable compiled of companies that have bowed to the whims of China, and Blizzard is right up there with all of them. What I did see that I found interesting however were a bunch of subtle moments during the stream. There were times that the cameras focused in on “Free Hong Kong” t-shirts or the extremely long time that one focused on a shirt that read “Fire Bobby Kotick”. What I saw was a company trying to walk a very delicate path and coming off super awkward and frustrating in the process.

So I left a big thread about my feelings in regards to BlizzCon 2019. Something felt off the entire weekend and I think I realized what it was on Sunday. Because of the events leading up to the show I found myself in a state where I wasn’t quite willing to surrender myself to what I have called the “BlizzCon” spirit. In past years I let the hype flow over me and allowed myself to fall into the loving embrace of the big blue community. This year… I saw the imperfections and the seams. I saw the people straining under the yoke of not quite knowing how any comment was going to be received. I mean there was good reason for this because of the “Don’t You Have Phones” comment from last year and the controversy surrounding Blizzard this year. It was a show filled with anxiety and folks who looked tangibly like their jobs were on the line. However I could wallow in this awkwardness all morning long but lets get into some of the things that were announced.

Diablo IV

The big one for me of course is Diablo IV, aka the announcement I had been waiting years for. Now that I have it… I am not entirely certain what I think of it. It feels like they are leaning heavily into what is traditionally the Path of Exile space in an attempt to win back some of those former fans. It is going to be a juggling act to try and entice the “Diablo II” stalwarts while not losing any of the newer “Diablo III” fans. When we were still doing the Game Club, we picked Diablo II at one point and none of us actually managed to make it through the campaign. It was a sloppy mess from a bygone era and in part thanks to that I have realized just how amazing Diablo III was and still is.

If they can however somehow thread that needle of adding the complexity and depth that was Diablo II without giving up the fast paced gameplay of Diablo III it will be a phenomenal game. I’ve been in a position of “I will wait for it to release” for awhile thanks to a lot of half baked alpha programs… but I really would love to be in this testing program. I would love to help shape this game on the forums with comments and feedback, because I have a feeling if they manage to pull it off this is going to be my main Blizzard game going forward. I would love to transplant our Friday night seasonal starts over to a fresh new game. I have hope but I also have concerns… because again you have to split down the middle of two vastly different demographics. The leaning heavily on the darkness aspect makes me deeply concerned that they are going to make too big of a play for the Path of Exile crowd and leave me out in the cold.

Diablo Immortal

Not surprisingly they shadow dropped this Friday night. To the best of my recollection there was no mention of Diablo Immortal at any point during the Diablo streams. I get why given the extremely negative reaction last year, but I do still think this is going to be an interesting game. I will likely either play it from a Mobile Emulator on my gaming PC or from my Samsung S4 tablet. This feels like the true successor to the Diablo III lineage and I still hope that maybe just maybe it gets some sort of a PC release. This would also potentially be an excellent new Switch game.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands

Several months ago there was a leak floating around the internet that seemed a little far fetched at the time… but turned out to be exactly what the set up for the new expansion has been. Sylvannas was in fact trying to lead both the Horde and Alliance down a path to destruction, in order to create more souls to be trapped and used for some army in the Shadowlands by her master. We don’t quite know who that master is at the moment, but you as the player are going to venture forth into the lands of the dead as some sort of a planeswalker that can freely move between worlds. There you will join with one of four covenents that will shape your experience based on which you choose.

I like that they are leaning into class fantasy again, like they did in Legion. I also like that they are setting up to maybe bring a story that doesn’t rely entirely on the big dumb red versus blue storyline. Unfortunately it doesn’t go far enough for me. I want them to abolish the Horde and the Alliance and create a new tapestry of personal faction choices that ultimately dictate where you can go in the world. I want the faction wall to fall. No better time to make it happen than in an expansion where we are quite literally leaving Azeroth and going to the lands of the dead. The world is fractured enough as it is without adding a painfully artificial choice into the mix.

Overwatch 2

I like the world, setting and characters of Overwatch, but I gotta admit that the game itself is not really my Jam. I never really wanted a Team Fortress 3, but that is seemingly what we got. I would have loved to have seen what they could have done with this setting as an MMORPG, and while I realize there are good reasons Project Titan never got off the ground… I can still pine for what might have been. Overwatch 2 is bringing in the PVE game to the original Overwatch PVP focused game and I am going to largely take a wait and see approach on this. It isn’t a Destiny style game and instead seems to be something more akin to what Marvel Avengers appears to be shaping up to be. If they can give me an experience that feels similar to a Destiny Strike, I might be interested.

Hearthstone

Hearthstone announced another set. If this game is your jam then I assume you are excited, but it is probably hard to garner much excitement given the rapid release cadence of this game. I admit this was my signal to go use the bathroom during the opening ceremony. It isn’t so much that I dislike Hearthstone, it is more of a case that it was a methadone to my Magic the Gathering addiction. I played it for awhile because it gave me the best digital card game fix I had available to me. Then Magic the Gathering Arena released and I have never logged into Hearthstone after that point. If I could somehow gift my cards to someone I probably would. I hate to see them going to waste on an account that doesn’t care about them anymore.

All in all there was a lot of good stuff, but like I said before. Something felt off about all of it. I am going to just assume it was thanks to my mental state going into the event and not because they didn’t actually show off a bunch of interesting things. Like the topic states… for now I am lowering my pitchfork and moving on with my life. Being angry about something exhausts me when all I really want to do is try and find some way of bringing enjoyment into my often frustrating and maddening real life. I play games as an escape to the rigors of reality and when that relief valve is jammed shut… I find myself way less reasonable. Warcraft is back on the menu it seems, but even then I found it super hard to get back into Classic or Retail and will probably still mostly be playing Destiny 2.