Tag Archives: blizzard

Thoughts: World of Warcraft – Legion

legion_bounty

Little spotty on here recently due to me playing fewer games, also I went on holiday. Things should pick up at the end of the month since there’s something like ten interesting games coming out in the space of about three weeks.

I’ve resisted talking about World of Warcraft on here so far, except in passing. It’s twelve years old now, and my assumption is that by this point you’ve either played it already, or you are absolutely uninterested in hearing anything about it. Everyone’s going to have formed an opinion on it one way or the other and there’s little that’s useful that I can add to that conversation, especially since WoW’s pace of change has historically been somewhat glacial. New mechanics are added in so gradually that you barely notice how the game changes over time; even though a decade of cumulative additions means it’s a completely different game to what it was on launch, there has historically been very little new to be said about the it. This is precisely why I’m making an exception for the recently-released expansion Legion, though, since it goes against the grain of everything I just said by making changes to the endgame that are downright revolutionary when considered in the context of WoW. I can’t remember another expansion that changed the tenor of the game quite to the extent that Legion does — and certainly not in such a positive fashion.

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Thoughts: Overwatch

overwatch_tojbjorn

With over 10 million copies sold (and counting) Overwatch might just be the most successful game launch Blizzard have had in the last decade. Strange, then, that from all of Blizzard’s output during this period Overwatch is probably the Blizzard title I like the least.

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Thoughts: Legacy Of The Void

legacy_temporal

The saga of Starcraft 2 has been quite a ride. If you look at the three “episodes” of SC2 as a single entity it’s something that’s been in development for nigh on a decade; when Blizzard announced they were splitting the game out into three race-specific releases I don’t think anyone anticipated it would take them five years from the release of Wings of Liberty to get this last installment out the door. Even for Blizzard, that’s slow. As it transpired, what they put in each box was easily worthy of the status of a full-fat game, which is probably why it took so long; however it also meant that the gaming landscape shifted dangerously under Blizzard’s feet while they were locked into their development process. When they first announced SC2 in 2007 the real-time strategy genre was showing serious signs of senescence, but there was still a huge appetite for it that afforded plenty of room for an old classic like SC2 to come roaring back onto the scene.

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Thoughts: Heroes of the Storm

heroes_tower

Heroes of the Storm represents something of a departure from Blizzard’s usual M.O for releasing new products. For the last twenty years their strategy has been the same: identify a market that is suitably zeitgeist-y but which is not yet saturated; do a crapload of market research and design experimentation to figure out what makes it so popular; and then make their own entry into the genre which is far from revolutionary, but which is so accessible and refined in terms of mechanics and highly polished in terms of production values that they establish dominance over the market, or at least a significant share of that market. It’s been that way ever since Warcraft II, and the most recent example — Hearthstone — is doing just as well as you’d expect by carving out a huge portion of the virtual CCG market on both PC and mobile. Blizzard like to operate from a position of strength; they’ve always been pretty good at design (even if they do occasionally make fucking stupid decisions like the Diablo 3 auction house) but if there’s one thing that makes them so good at what they do, it’s that they have the time and the resources to do it properly where other developers might feel pressured by financial constraints or publisher deadlines.

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Thoughts: Reaper of Souls.

Shifting this week’s post to Wednesday, probably, Thursday, definitely, since I need a little more time to digest Age of Wonders.

diablo

Like I said in the Diablo 3 review two years ago: this is going to be complicated.

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Thoughts: Hearthstone.

cleave

I wrote this just before Christmas but held off posting it until Hearthstone hit open beta, which it did just last week. Aside from some card tweaks the game has not changed at all between now and then.

Let’s talk about Hearthstone.

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Thoughts: Heart of the Swarm.

Personal update: The good news is that I’ve finally found somewhere to live up here. The bad news is that I can’t move in until the start of April, and while I can bang together a game review in three hours on a train I can’t do science posts without sitting down and doing research — which is kind of impossible when you have no fixed abode. This basically means no posts aside from Monday reviews until after April 1st. Sorry!

zap

This is very disappointing.

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