I was under the impression that they had fully shelved PvE for OW2. They basically lied and released the same game with a few tweaks to the match format. Was there actually any hope for even a pared-down co-op mode?
There was hope initially, but as a huge overwatch fan, when Jeff Kaplan, the former game director of Overwatch, left Blizzard, I could see the bullshit that lay ahead. It took too long for others to realize.
Apparently, he and some ex Blizzard people created a new studio. But itl be a few years before they have any games to unveil. And honestly, that’s fine. I mean he could announce he’s retiring and it’d be fine. He earned it as far as I’m concerned.
Did they sell it though? Everyone who bought it got the game they paid for (and now sort of don’t have anymore, lol) but wasn’t the promise of PvE an add-on to the now free game?
they probably got a lot of people to buy the first couple battlepasses. a success for that quarter, maybe, but probably not the long tail they were hoping to get from transforming it into the GaaS model. they probably made more money from OW1 lootboxes, overall
they probably made more money from OW1 lootboxes, overall
I really doubt it considering how many boxes you got thrown after you, with coins for dups with which you can just buy skins. Was a great system for the player, but probably terrible monitarily.
Burned all of my rope with the battle.net “2.0” complete with Facebook integration, rmah, “get the game for free with a years subscription to world of Warcraft” and killing deckard Cain in act 2 of D3 (along with ACT 1 being the only ACT with any love put into it, and that being the entirety of the demo, also pretty clear that’s when Activision bought blizzard)
Never played any of the sc2 expansions, never watched another blizzard tournament, never bought a wow expansion (after TBC), I lost a lot of really great memory associations, but the nostalgia isn’t worth supporting the corpse-puppet of blizzard.
Unpopular opinion but I think the game is in it’s best state currently. I spent $40 on 2016 and haven’t had to pay a dime since and I’m not playing this PVP game for it’s PVE so this stuff doesn’t matter to me. Blizzard is a husk of its former self and I’m still bitter about HOTS but am actually having a lot of fun playing comp this season.
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They took away access to a game we payed for and replaced it with an inferior product with the hopes and dreams to one day have single player content… which you would have to pay for anyway. Thats all i have to say on the matter of overwatch. Fuck blizzard.
I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.
So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro… And fair enough – they’ve shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they’ll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.
BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don’t sell as well – before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner’s front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.
Same. It bugs me that people think larian only existed when making BG3. When DoS2 released on steam that game hit overwhelmingly positive in no time and I bought it day one with no idea what it was because the reviews were so good. Larian will be fine because they stick to what they’re great at and they’ve been around a long time.
I feel like this was part of their plan though. Get the limelight with dnd and show the kind of games that they make to people that wouldn’t have known beforehand. Now their next fully owned game is going to make them absolute bank in both money and good faith I think.
This. If you like the mechanics of bg3, go play Divinity Original Sin 2. It has a lot of the same enhancements that Larian added to dnd for BG3. Including more comprehensive elemental fields and height mechanics.
And it has a great modding community.
The sad part about Larian and BG3 is I was hoping for a definitive edition that gave Karlach her good ending.
Nah, that's her kinda bad ending. They cut the good good ending.
There is another ending for her involving the upper city(cut at the last minute due to performance issues) and I suspect the purified metal you get at the factory that involves her staying.
I don't think we're going to get the dos2 level of tools, simply because it would become a competitor to wotc's fabulous virtual tabletop microtransaction simulator.
DOS2’s fatal flaw for me is that you really can’t have an optimal mixed-damage party because you have spell shield and armor, which each block one of two kinds of damage. If you go all physical, you can just blast through armor and then kill people that way. All magical and you can do the same thing for people with shield. Mixed damage parties just kinda suck by comparison because you’re effectively splitting your damage output.
It’s true, you should go either full magic, or full physical within a specific character, however a 2magic/2physical party is great as well since almost all the combat encounters will have a mix of heavy physical armor guys and heavy magic armor guys.
But really once you learn how the action economy works, as long as you don’t gimp your characters by putting dex on a mage or whatever, you can blow up most encounters regardless of the magic/physical make up of the party.
And of course you can also go lone-wolf archer and single handedly win all encounters on your own ;)
Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer
This is probably true, but how can executives be so stupid? Every review I read praised Larian specifically and how the made a huge game with no microtransactions and tons of little loving touches. You have to be willfully ignorant to think it was the IP and not the developer and their work that people were responding to.
Jack Welch is seen as MBA-Jesus and they all strive for similar stockholder returns as to what happened under him with GE. If you want a good read, GE under Welch is the OG enshitification story. He took a juggernaut of a company and completely destroyed it for short term shareholder gain.
Now it’s just a shell of its former self, but those guys at the top sure made alot of money.
Screw Hitler. If I invent a time machine, Jack Welch will get a tommy gun to the back of the head before he can lay off one worker, or gut a single workers protection.
I think it’s probably more a situation where they are not a good fit for each other anymore. The D&D license has value and Hasbro rightly wants to capitalize on that. Larian is a hot commodity right now and they don’t need to borrow the credibility that comes with a big license like D&D. There’s also a timing issue. BG4 is unnecessary when BG3 will continue to sell for years to come. Larian will put out at least a couple more games before BG4 makes sense.
Larian is in a position where they can make whatever game they want and it will sell like hotcakes. Why the hell would they want to pay enormous royalties again when they can bring the writing in house? Sure, Hasbro could reduce their fee, but they can’t reduce it to the point where it’s worthwhile for both them and Larian.
If I’m running Larian, there’s no way I’m making another D&D game. The lore is great, but the rule set sucks. There are better systems in the tabletop space and there’s no reason to even be limited to that after you’ve already made the decision to not make D&D. Wizards isn’t exactly a paragon of reliability and stability either so there’s risk there. Not to mention, it was Larian who helped pull Hasbro’s asses out of the fire. They were facing massive backlash from their core customers until a kick ass movie and BG3 made everyone forget about it.
In short, Larian is riding high and Hasbro is not. There’s a lot more money for Larian doing something else and probably good money for Hasbro licensing to another developer.
I think it’s more that executives think the average consumer is stupid and cares too much about IP branding. And I feel they are not completelly wrong. Though I think the OGL fiasco showed the D&D fanbase might be smarter than that …hopefully.
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