I loved WarCraft 2, but it came much earlier so it wouldn’t fit the “peak Blizzard” timeline. For all those years to this day I’ve been humming music from that game.
IDK, I think Diablo 2 was peak Blizzard. We had StarCraft and Warcraft 2, and imo World of Warcraft was kind of the sign of the end, at least when it seemed they would keep doubling down on expansions instead of new games. I thought StarCraft 2 was just alright (bought Wings of Liberty on launch), and I didn’t bother with Diablo 3 due to it being always online.
So for me, peak Blizzard was around 2001. Granted, I never played Warcraft 3 (was just too different from the earlier Warcraft games), nor did I play World of Warcraft (didn’t have stable Internet, stable income, or stable time), so maybe the peak should be pushed out a few years.
Personally I think of StarCraft 2 as Blizzard’s last good game. It was the last time they made something new and didn’t cut it up to sell to you in pieces.
They were the GOAT for SC:BW, D2:LOD, and the first couple years of WoW.
SC2 has done well over the years but I remember being really disappointed when it came out. The original’s campaign was so gritty. Playing each race, you felt like you were in this strange scifi world. It was brilliant.
The SC2 campaign was so bad. Cartoonish, one dimensional characters. They made zerg and protoss more human like and boring. They were already focused on making their games sports, so single player was not their focus at all. I was fine with the esport focus but not at the cost of making it more cartoonish.
I was so excited to play the SC2 campaign when the game came out. Starcraft and Brood War was my life for years.
I was so disappointed by SC2 that, to this day, I haven’t even read the wikipedia summary of the expansion campaigns. Never bought either of them. I stopped playing around the time they introduced paid maps (in 2010 or something). Playing competitive was good, but UMS was botched just as bad as the campaign when the game was new. That was my most anticipated thing after the campaign. Even now people mostly only play the same 3 UMS maps.
The original game still holds up too. We got robbed of a good sequel. And don’t even get me started about diablo 3 lol. RIP blizzard.
Edit: did some googling and it turns out they announced, but did not implement paid maps in 2009. Map micro translation did eventually get implemented though.
I watched SC2 on YouTube on and off over the years. UThermal is worth checking out, he’s a great player and super positive self-conmentator. I’m pretty sure I’ve watched SC2 a lot more than I’ve played it. Which is sort of weird for a game…
With no context, completely in isolation, yeah Overwatch 2 isn’t the worst. But for a lot of players, it’s not just about what Overwatch 2 is, but also about what it did and what it means. That factors into players’ feelings about the game.
Spot on. I dont give a single fuck about shovelware, but I absolutely care about OW and how Blizzard managed to turn me off a game I was pretty much addicted to.
It depends on what metrics do you use. In general, lowest-rated stuff on sites are not the worst by objective terms, but because of propaganda or other stuff that pisses off people.
Lame. There’s no reason you can’t have co-op in an RPG. Wasteland 3 was made 100x better with the addition and allowing me to share the experience with a friend.
I’ve recently played a bit of FarCry 6 since its on PS+ Extra and…honestly, I don’t get who these games are made for these days. There’s a veneer of absurdity and seriousness but it doesn’t fully commit to either, while having the typical overstuffed Ubisoft open-world. Ends up not going into either the military shooter direction or the goofy, zany shooter direction or in any other direction. It just kinda is, like a fatty, filling but ultimately bland fast food.
So yea, a reinvention would be good, but I at this point I believe Ubisoft games are their own genre, for better or for worse.
I would guess they’re made for people who really really like Far Cry 3, because the gameplay loops do not appear to have fundamentally changed since that game came out in 2012.
Unfortunately, no. I used to love Ubi games, played every single one following the formula because they’re fun and get cheap fast.
But in recent memory, all of their games have tried to shove annoying gimmicks in and take away from what made the games enjoyable. Far Cry 6 was one of the least bad ones, but games like New Dawn, Breakpoint, and WD Legion are disasters that have driven me off.
I kinda hope they go back to a more gritty and realistic theme like they had going on with FC2. I wouldn’t mind a Blood Dragon sequel though, I feel like there’s a lot of potential.
As they continue to spend billions buying publishers and developers to shore up their Game Pass offerings, expect prices to go up and the deals to get worse.
The price of Game Pass is still four months for the price of one full priced new release game, like it was before. But now new games cost $70 instead of $60.
Game Pass is still $9.99 a month for PC, unless they upped the priced literally today. So $40 for 4 months, which includes new released games that are otherwise still sold full price, and narrative indie titles that most would only play through once anyways.
That’s how sub services always work. They get a user base via great introduction offers then slowly raise prices up to where they should be and hope enough people are brought into the ecosystem to not leave.
In this case, it’s because it’s a reboot. Calling MW (2019) “MW4” would’ve been arguably more confusing because the new and old games are completely unrelated to each other. Totally different stories, part of a single timeline built off of the Black Ops universe, and a reset of fan favorite characters that have been brought back. There are already a surprising amount of people who don’t understand that, I’ve seen people shocked to find out it’s not just a prequel and that new Ghost is likely to stay alive permanently for those big bucks.
Besides, it’s not like the numbers used to properly correlate, either. Despite Doom 64, there aren’t 63 other Doom games, and Doom 3 is a Doom (1993) prequel. That kind of craziness happened way before DOOM (2016).
I think one of the reasons people don't understand that is because they've pulled the same trick multiple times with far less logical reasoning, so they've kinda done that to themselves.
I tried to play on Vulkan with my Arc A770 (Arch Linux) and it just black screened. With DX11 it played at around 60fps with VRR (dips down to the 50s) at 1440p.
I know everyone thinks I'm a brittle American, but I'm kind of sick of everyone blaming Americans for choices that are made by people who think poorly of Americans.
My point is your original comment said you were sick of people blaming Americans for something that is literally being done by Americans.
The bland media algorithm designed to maximize profits, the “MCU formula”, comes straight from the top. People who see media simply in terms of investment vehicles for thier quarterly shareholders reports are the ones who lay down this law, and those “people” are overwhelmingly American business interests.
I know what you meant. There is such a thing as self-hatred, or thinking you're the only exceptional member of a group. And there's also such a thing as don't trash the majority with the actions of a small minority, particularly a small minority that thinks they are better than the majority.
My point is that the reason this was dumbed down is that movie execs THINK Americans need that, not that Americans need that. Movie execs just think the average American is dumber than a movie exec.
@masterspace All right, so I was interested in the statistic so I looked it up and 20% of Americans are at Level 1 literacy or below according to Wikipedia... which means that actually a lower number than that is functionally illiterate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
Being creepy by stalking my past conversations instead of arguing the point at hand, and ironically furthering my point by mistakenly using a study on Canada from 1989.
Stalking your past convos? No. I saw you were from lemmy.ca and therefore Canadian. Then I did a search for the 20 percent statistic and of course Wikipedia came up.
I don't feel bad. I know our school system sucks because of a lot of systemic problems. I do think your education is not as great as you think it is if you simplify the 20% statistic to full illiteracy and if you think a random person on kbin needs to set up a new public school system before she can have an opinion.
That's before we unpack the idea that literacy=intelligence, which is not always the case.
I do feel a bit bad about the stalking accusation. I didn't realize the ability to see your server in the automatic kbin reply setup combined with the esoteric knowledge of how to use Duck Duck Go would frighten you, Mr Better Educated Than Me. We can stop if this is too much for your heart. This weather can be tough on the body and I know you guys aren't well-versed in heat safety.
if you think a random person on kbin needs to set up a new public school system before she can have an opinion.
You’re allowed to have an opinion, if your opinion is that you feel like America is picked on for being too dumb in this context then I would suggest that you need some strong evidence to persuade people that literacy is not a proxy for education, or more specifically, the ability to hold more complicated medieval fantasy plots together.
And I am well aware of our flaws, our literacy rate is 1.25x the OECD average which is shameful. I’m just not false equivalencing that with America’s 6.33x. In fact if you remove America as the outlier dragging the OECD stats down we look even worse.
@masterspace And there we get to why I'm such a brittle American. See, the immense privilege of the powerful in our country, our military prowess, and the export of the my of American exceptionalism have CONVINCED a lot of people across the world that if they bash Americans it is punching up.
It's not. See, we do HAVE a bad public school system and the richest in our country have spent 40 years sabotaging it in some scheme to fund private schooling. Not only that, school funding is partly by federal and state funding--which is sabotaged by those bastards--but MOSTLY by local taxes so the people in the rich areas get the good schooling with arts, extracurricular activities, foreign language studies and a pool while the people in the poor areas get a whiteboard, an untrained Army veteran as a teacher, and the requirement to buy their own school supplies.
As Americans we have to fight constantly against this sabotage, WHILE working full-time jobs with greater hours and fewer benefits than any other Western country just so we can afford to go to a doctor--as we are called by not just the privileged in our country but the entire WORLD lazy, stupid, complacent and undeserving.
So when you make fun of the average American and call them stupid because their public school system which they need to fix before they complain about people making fun of them? You're punching down.
Meanwhile, you accuse me of punching down but I have spent this thread mocking you for living in a country with a vast abundance of natural resources and wildlife, and living in a country where it's common to ACTUALLY learn a second language rather than learn some grammar rules and tick off boxes, which as I say above, is a privilege in the US afforded to the better schooling that you get by virtue of living in a rich area.
Now, if you'd say Americans are stupid because we invaded the wrong country... Well, then you'd be punching up. But instead you're making fun of something that we are actually at a disadvantage in.
Except that I didn’t make fun of anything, I merely pointed out that it’s plausible that Netflix felt like they had to dumb the Witcher down for American audiences.
As Americans we have to fight constantly against this sabotage, WHILE working full-time jobs with greater hours and fewer benefits than any other Western country just so we can afford to go to a doctor–as we are called by not just the privileged in our country but the entire WORLD lazy, stupid, complacent and undeserving.
And yeah, I recognize that sucks, but you don’t have to do that because of external forces, you have to do that because many people in the group called “Americans” repeatedly vote for politicians who put those systems in place. So when people call Americans stupid, there’s a reason for it. Many are stupid and vote for stupid shit that goes directly against their interest. I’m sorry if you don’t like to hear that or be associated with your fellow countrypeople who do, but it’s the reality of the situation when we’re talking about “Americans” as a whole.
You weren’t just making fun, you were saying you’re sick of us being bothered when people made fun of us.
Except that the context in which I was replying was not one where someone felt picked on because they got made fun of, it was one where someone felt picked on because someone said that it’s plausible they dumbed down the Witcher for Americans.
@masterspace Yeah, but YOU are the one who brought public school into it and you did it in a clever little jokey way.
If you had said "Well, that's what you get for attacking the wrong country", it would be one thing. But you went and made fun of the public school system. You punched down. And now, for your sins, you are stuck in this conversation.
Yeah, but YOU are the one who brought public school into it and you did it in a clever little jokey way.
Because the quality of education affects intelligence, or more specifically, the ability to hold more/less complex witcher plotlines together in your head, so it is a rationale thing to bring up when discussing whether or not Americans are actually capable of holding more/less complex witcher plotlines together in their heads.
You punched down
No, I merely held up a mirror and caused you to have a temper tantrum
I'd hate to see how you'd react to an actual temper tantrum.
No, man. You're mocking people who don't have access to a high standard of learning. You're trying to rationalize that away so that you don't have to feel bad about it.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne