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Penny Arcade - Comic - Over
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Over
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Posts
Anyway, time for breakfast.
It's a feeling that's hard for me to put into words. But (at least for me) it's virtually impossible these days to play something attached to Blizzard without being reminded every single second of the experience that this is a video game, and it has all the video gamey things, and the entire purpose of the video game is to video game it.
There are plenty of excellent games being made. Yeah, sometimes a beloved series turns into a soulless cash grab. Don't let the hope take root, don't mourn what could have been, live in the now. Play the ones that are good and ignore the bad ones. There are always new idealistic studios making their first big indie or AA game, and even some AAA studios still putting out polished experiences.
Frustrating as it is with so many games being "live service" whale farms, we're living in a golden age of polished single player experiences as well. For every AAA live service bomb like Anthem or Avengers, there's a polished Tears of the Kingdom or an ambitious Shadows of Doubt.
They just don't make RTS's of that type (Dark Colony, Total Annihilation etc) quality any more. It's still a damn shame that Starcraft: Ghost never came out.
That version of Blizzard simply doesn't exist these days.
PSN:Furlion
Yeah, I play almost no AAA titles. They just have this gross feel to them. Tears of the Kingdom is really the one exception since maybe Breath of the Wild. It's the kind of game a AAA studio could make, if they weren't concerned with squeezing every last bit of money from it, with a guarantee of success.
Satisfactory and Hades were more complete in early access than anything EA or Blizzard has released in a decade.
That's where I'm at. I'll buy the new Armored Core, and From Software's next Soulsborne, right at launch. Along with probably GTA6. And if Namco Bandai gives Ace Combat another sortie, I'll plan on picking that up, too.
Most other AAA games I'd pay full retail to get right when they release are deep into hypotheticals. With titles like Titanfall 3, Front Mission 6: The Unjust Peace, NFS: Shift 3 Unbound, DriveClub: The Next Chapter, Sylpheed: Project Ares, or Condemned: Oro Invictus.
By contrast Overwatch 2 has been mired in frustration from the announcement; the original pitch for overwatch was that this was a game that would never charge players for additional content. Players would never have to pay for characters or weapons or maps or modes and in an era where loot boxes were directly impacting gameplay this was a huge change of pace. This promise ultimately ran up against a huge obstacle when the Team had to announce that they were doing overwatch 2 which initially promised players that they'd still be able to play overwatch 1 and that the reason for the new game was that they needed new programming for the PVE modes which a lot of players had looked forward to as events in OW1.
Cracks continued to form in Blizzard's long since tarnished image when the deciison was made to shut down OW1's servers (effectively killing it) but it was ok because blizzard still had PVE coming... right...?
And now it doesn't even have that.
My question to the company is: given what you promised and what you've delivered why should anyone trust blizzard after they swindled everyone over a glorified patch?