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Penny Arcade - Comic - Atomic Side-Eye
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Atomic Side-Eye
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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It's a classic clue, evidence, smoking gun joke with a twist. The twist is that even when presented with the smoking gun Gabe is still in the contemplation phase.
I would imagine the userbase is much larger than that.
WHAT
Exactly my point. Overwatch clearly has more than 3000 active players. Battleborn's entire userbase is literally a rounding error on Overwatch's player count.
I wouldn't say petty, but Blizzard is well known to "play to win" in terms of marketing. It's no coincidence that many of their releases, events, and patches line up with those of other games. If they can ensure people will stick to their games, they will.
Oh, I'd believe they timed their launch to spike Battleborn, but I don't think anything they're doing now has to do with it. They could run an event where you got zero XP for a week called "Go Play Battleborn, we'll see you in 7" and it wouldn't change anything.
I need to fire it up sometime to check out the new patch. Unlike OW, it's still installed.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
Not to be confused with Randy Pinkwood, esteemed journalist.
They are launching the next major content patch and raid in WoW the very same week that Final Fantasy XIV is launching its next expansion pack. Not coincidence.
Brink.
It was supposed to be the next big arena shooter in a vein similar to TF2.
Had a slew of problems. Crashed and burned almost instantly. The only DLC they ever released was made free when originally it was going to cost money. Saw it in a store for about 2 bucks before the servers got taken offline.
pleasepaypreacher.net
It's conveniently also exactly the week where if I have to run NightHold one more time ill scream.
"The saddest thing is when a Gearbox staffer created a Battleborn porn subreddit posing as a fan and posted one picture in it and then Randy Pitchford pretended to stumble upon it as if it was some crazy fan thing, and nobody posted in it because nobody fetishizes the Battleborn characters because nobody cares about them, and everyone found out it was the saddest publicity stunt and everyone laughed."
Seriously? God damn that's like selling your mom as your girlfriend from Canada at prom sad.
pleasepaypreacher.net
...oh my
I really like the Borderlands series, but... Battleborn just does not appeal to me at all. I mean, let's set aside Overwatch or TF2 and just compare it to other MOBA-shooters; I look at the heroes for Gigantic or Paladins, and (other than the fact they both seem to be designed by Blizzard expats; Paladins style in particular reminds me a lot of Torchlight and Wildstar) the characters look visually appealing and have neat ability profiles. I want to play as them. I just went to the Battleborn official site and browsed the hero section to refresh my memory and... nope. If I wasn't sick and tired of steampunk clichés the gentleman robot Mordecai wanna-be would be fun (he even practices falconry like our favorite sniper). I like the elegant lady-knight archetype so maybe Phoebe, I guess? I dunno, but as with fighting games, when the cast of characters is a central selling point they need to be appealing.
Battleborn is to Overwatch as Mortal Kombat is to Street Fighter imho.
*Edit: Thanks Preacher, I got mixed up.
No. It was his aunt.
Everquest 2 launched around the same time as WoW did.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Ooooh, thanks. This really reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend recently, where we discussed the number of times we've had miscommunications online, over the lack of a tone of voice. I didn't really latch onto the fact that Tycho was responding to the initial question (from panel one) in the last panel, and thought he was replying to the comment immediately above, where I now understand that Gabe is just still thinking about it, and trailing off. This strip suffers a little for lack of verbal tones, IMO.
I got that part, it was just... well, read comment above.
Derp, you're right. I was thinking of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, made by Brad McQuaid, one of the creators of Everquest, after he left Verant/SOE to pursue his 'vision' of what an MMORPG should be. While WoW & EQ2 launching in the same month might seem conspicuous, it was November (holiday shopping season), whereas Blizzard timing a release to stomp on a dark horse like V:SoH is probably more relevant to the example in the comic.
I don't get what you mean. I thought the whole thing was Overwatch is better.
Oh god. That is one of the worst things I've ever read.
On the off chance you're not being sarcastic; I am a big fan of Street Fighter, particularly because I enjoy playing a lot of the different characters they've had over the years, whereas Mortal Kombat's characters always seemed pretty lame to me, and the few times I played MK 1 or 2 were really underwhelming given all the hype.
Exactly.
Having played WoW for nearly 8 years, I can confirm this.
It happens way too often for it to be coincidence.
What really rubs me the wrong way is that Blizzard denies it.