I don’t know what’s going on with this headline; it’s not an awards show, just a showcase. Although I understand how events like The Game Awards blur the line between the two.
Makes me feel like Game News Season (or whatever we’re calling it post-E3) is coming up quick.
Yeah, I didn’t comment on the quality of the expansion itself because I’m actually the lowest on the game I’ve been in years. I’m in full tourist mode and have been since Legion. I’ll come in for a month or two for expansion launch (three for Legion, I really liked that one), and then again in the last patch for one more month, and that’s it. Now that I’ve been playing different games over the past few years, WoW is really starting to show its age and I’m less willing to let its flaws slide, such as the extremely toxic community you mentioned. There’s a global community called WoW Made Easy that started up at Dragonflight launch with a mission statement of being patient in pick-up groups. Considering how massive it got, clearly the playerbase is fed up with the traditional PUG experience.
What’s really soured me on the game is Blizzard’s continuing divestment in customer service. Toxicity itself is a customer service problem and it takes actual eyeballs to fix it. And they aren’t hiring. Meanwhile, enjoy your 30-day ticket times when major issues develop. Just as bad is their newest approach to overcrowding, especially on Classic. Last I checked, their solution to crowded servers is “nothing we can do about it, it’ll sort itself out when enough of you give up. no refunds btw.”
I’m going to need some convincing to pickup The War Within.
Ah, that kind of price churn has been the norm in (lower case “l”) legacy formats for as long as I’ve been playing the game (25+ years now). It’d be reprints, bans, or just plain old power creep. Those formats have been too expensive/volatile for me for a very long time now.
I think this says just as much about the relatively poor release sales of Dragonflight as it does their successes with retention and attracting former (and possibly new) players.
Dragonflight’s generally positive word-of-mouth and what they’ve done with Classic has also contributed, I’m sure.
This is why I bailed out of Standard, finally. I’ve moved entirely into Limited.
I’ll still do pay-to-play with drafts of new sets here and there, but proxy Cube is where it’s at. My fun-to-price ratio with the game has never been better.
The rate of bans has dramatically increased since 2020. They even had to errata an entire new mechanic in the Ikoria set because some of the companion cards were crazy broken with the original design.
An extra wrinkle to this is that they are making bans due to how cards perform in online play, as best-of-one is a widely played format now.
Aside from FTL (which I’m glad to see is well-represented here), my top ones would probably be Papers, Please and Disco Elysium. Papers, Please manages to pair a good narrative leading to many endings with oddly fun gameplay. Disco Elysium simply has some of the best writing ever in a video game and world lore that I can’t get enough of.
I also really liked The Binding of Isaac (Rebirth and later), Don’t Starve, Shovel Knight, and Hollow Knight.
It’s a common fan translation technique, and–as far as the criticism sourced in good faith goes–I wonder if it’s the genesis of a lot of the grumbling. Back when fans had to rely on independent, amateur translating to have access to more material.
Maybe some of them would just prefer the “literal with footnotes” approach.
The complaints are largely, as she says, “sacrificed accuracy for flowery prose.” Japanese games in this setting still often follow in the footsteps of early Dragon Quest and the Final Fantasy games set in Ivalice by not strictly using contemporary English.
I think it’s an interesting conversation when it can be divorced from “removing insensitive language is censorship” crowd.