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Penny Arcade - Comic - Survivor’s Guilt
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Survivor’s Guilt
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I think you're massively reading into this comic way deeper than you are meant to.
The concept here is super simple. Bungie got out. Blizzard is still trapped inside. That's all there is to it. There's no secret information, there's no hidden agenda or anything like that.
The headline last week was that Bungie gained their independence from Activision, and they ran with that as a joke.
Anything with NetEase's involvement or anything else for that matter is entirely irrelevant here. It's a simple joke. The fire is Activision, and Bungie got free to safety, and Blizzard is still trapped inside.
Whatever state Blizzard is in now probably would've happened regardless of Activision. Then again, I don't play WoW, so I don't really have any kind of beef with them other than wanting Diablo 4 (which is on the way)
Immortal looks sweet to me as well, so I'm optimistic about that one until it proves to be the offensive kind of mobile game.
Yeah blizzard is now very much the “this is fine” meme.
With Bungie, well at least the old Bungie, it seemed like Activision was trying to milk the cow on a more than reasonable basis.
I have doubts that's necessarily true with Blizzard. Been sitting on their laurels with WoW for much longer than it was reasonable, and haven't made much of note besides since then...Not to say they were necessarily a *bad* thing, I'd prefer occasional but good games over yearly asset flips like we're seeing elsewhere in the industry, but even MMORPGs need to eventually evolve.
Oh you're certainly right, it's a great joke to make on the news and it's not meant to be read too deep. But overanalyzing subtext is a rich literary tradition, and I'm trying to do my part.
And since we're here anyway why not have the conversation at the very least? Bungie is effectively taking on a new job as a self-publisher which is, to be frank, rather a lot. They still need capital. Given the proximity of the news of their departure with the news they had a source of investor funding, they made the move in the full knowledge of having a different support network.
I'm just curious how much of this story we'll get to see now and how much is going to come out in five years in the Adam McKay comedic docu-drama.
???
Blizzard has released numerous games since WoW in 2004, and all of them are the games others desperately try to emulate.
Hearthstone is the online CCG
Overwatch is the hero-shooter behemoth that all the online games want to be. Well that and Fortnite, both games the previous FPS titan Call of Duty have emulated in the newest game.
HotS was a bit of a dud I guess, but it's the only MOBA I personally find to be enjoyable.
Also Diablo 3, despite it's poor PC launch, has become one of the greatest arpg's ever
Even WoW has apparently been updated and evolved through expansions that have generally been well received until this most recent one (I think)
According to wikipedia, Bungie published its own games before Halo. Granted, that would have been at a much different level than they were at with Halo and have been at the last 18 years.
Me too. This is an instant favorite.
Yeah for sure, I guess what I meant to say was that it is "rather a lot for the scale and complexity of modern triple-A product releases."
I think we can all agree blizzard hasn't brought their A game since Rock'n'Roll Racing.
If there do go the white hat route, I certainly believe they can do it. Hellblade was a perfect example of the fact that AA is possible and that studios who have some games under their belt can put out a product without a massive publisher.
EDIT: Upon reflection, I shouldn't have intimated that BlizzActiBungee don't have creativity. That's the one good thing the company does still seem to have retained. Blizzard and Bungee games at least (not so much CoD, imo) are still good games buried under the aggressive monetezation. Still, I don't think you could extract Blizzard-That-Was from what we know as Blizzard today.
I get the basic premise of the comic, but I think people are giving Bungie way too much credit here. Without Activision mandating regular releases, we will hopefully see the end of half-baked garbage DLC like Curse of Osiris and Warmind. But, I suspect that Activision has been less of a driving force behind some of Bungie's more controversial moves than people think. And it does feel like the deal with Netease is being down played. Netease is not the kind of company you get into bed with if your goal is improving the customer experience.
That was the original arrangement. Activision has altered the deal, pray they don't alter it further.
Yeah, that's kind of what I said. Wanting all the pros and none of the cons that come with maturity.
A wise man once said that everything in the universe has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That goes for relationships, companies, and company relationships too, one must imagine. Trying to pretend otherwise, that something with observable characteristics might be made immortal, is a fairly common human delusion.
WoW has indeed evolved quite a bit. If you had stopped playing after Wrath, for example, and jumped back in now it would be almost unrecognizable. Xpacs have been all over the place in overall reception. IMO it would go like this.
1. Burning Crusade - really good, kind of the foundation of the whole game.
2. Wrath of the Lich King - Excellent, best xpac by a mile.
3. Cataclysm - Forgettable
4. Mists of Pandaria - Pretty good, depends a lot on whether you like the Pandaran race or not.
5. Warlords of Draenor - Ugh, just, no. Quite bad.
6. Legion - Reasonably good. Maybe just lowered expectations at this point, but I enjoyed it.
7. Battle for Azeroth - The content itself is ok, but many new mechanics and features are not working well. Very buggy, even now.
Every change they make is bitched about endlessly of course, but there are still plenty of players. Other MMOs are happy to have a 200k or so players, and many in that range are still profitable. WoW peaked in Wrath with 12 million players. They stopped reporting numbers a while back, but even the most pessimistic estimates put them at 2 - 3 million right now. Even in decline WoW is still in a totally different league.
That said, as a long time player I can definitely see Activision's influence. Personally I think WoW will go F2P in the near future. It's almost there now. They changed how the free trial worked slowly over time, and without fanfare. But now there is no purchase to make up front, you can simply download the client, pay $15 for a month of access, and you can play everything except the current xpac. That's up to level 110, and 6 expansions worth of content. If you took your time, exploring each xpac fully, that is a LOT of content. Play the auction house a bit, make enough gold and you can pay for your sub with in game gold.
Anyway, I don't know how much of Blizzard's current troubles are due to Activision meddling, but they are definitely in trouble. Unfortunately a lot of the people that built the company and drove much of their success are now gone.