Blizzard had plans to announce Diablo 4, but pulled it last minute - Sensationalist Headlines

Oh of course, their IPs are just a reflection of that. Look at Hearthstone, its designed top down to squeeze every dollar possible. I put at least $300 into that game when it came out and I wouldn't really have a chance in hell being competitive if I came back to it these days.

At least the HotS dev team listens to its community for the most part. There have been a few downs, such as the Garden of Terror remake, odd balancing choices, and an odd obsession with hyper mobile heroes, but everything overall has been positive. I do enjoy HoTS mostly because it caters to a very specific audience of MOBA players; people who don't want to invest all their time and effort learning how DoTA 2 and LoL work with items and shit and would much rather spend their time playing with unique mechanics with friends in a less toxic environment.

Tbh, I still like new GoT way better than old.

https://twitter.com/_KeanuReaves/status/1058490080967516161 Based. Good to see Keanu is a Diablo fan.

heh i had tainted hope for overwatch's after TRYING to play diablo III for 3 years, between ridiculous balance issues, non-existant stash space, non-existent dev communication and a baked-in random dungeon generator that forever forced the game into "Play the hardest nightmare/torment/fuckme difficulty that you can't possibly enjoy. Great, you did it in under 10 minutes! Your rift number is now 43 instead of 42, do the exact same thing except it's 10% harder, once you beat that, great, your rift number is now 44!". There comes a point of fatigue. Mortick's brace on console creating an arms race, classes being buffed by adding "+4000%" damage to a set bonus, on a set you were forced to craft away last week because you needed stash space for the last set they gave "+4000%" damage to, all the storylines and plot and small interaction and map design made meaningless by rng rift dungeons, number bloat upon number bloat upon number bloat until the average mob dude has 3.8 trillion health and you're dealing 45 trillion per second. The stash space issue was eventually addressed after I quit the game, if you're willing to reset your entire progress for a season, regrind the entire game for 3 months for achievements, then do that 5 times. In a year and a half, you'll have 10 tabs instead of 5! Blizzard forgot how to make a game long ago. Mobile makes perfect obvious sense from a marketing, funding, consumer tech trending, future-proofing perspective. The format of an ARPG should work well in mobile, considering how good it was for console/controllers (no joke). But anyone who's played diablo knows that it can't work, the reasons they fell in love with the genre aren't transferable to short-stint commute gaming sessions. Trying to chain 4-5 skills together in a cadence of 2,3,3,4,2,2,5,1,2,3,3 etc to freeze then group then meteor hordes of enemies while clicking 4-5 times a second to dodge projectiles? Shooting the shit with mates about how to divide loot after a 3-4 hour session? The entire masochism of the Hardcore community? I don't feel these things can work on mobile. so meh

Or it's good if you're want to play a MOBA but struggle with some of the archaic mechanics of LOL and Dota 2 that are holdovers from the original Defense of the Ancients. (Seriously though, of all the Blizzard games, Heroes of the Storm is one of the most consistently supported. It's absolutely thriving right now compared to Diablo and Starcraft, at the very least.)

They had the ability to not completely fuck up the opening ceremony of Blizzcon. They had the perfect. Reasonable. Logical way of closing the opening ceremony. And chose not to.

HotS is really good for casual play, if you don't really care about winning the matches and just have fun. but HotS is really bad in competitive play, it feels like every of their objective is a chore

So far Classic is looking like it's going to be really good, so that's at least one thing to look forward to. The Classic panel where they went over what they were deciding to add or remove from the game made me a lot more confident that Classic will be a very good vanilla experience.

I just want to interject that Blizzard is giving out Destiny 2 and now that I played it for... 3 days straight, I don't get the hate it's received. It's FUCKING beautiful and really fun. It even runs well on my super outdated pc.

It might be better now but it was pretty shit at launch, that coupled with the lootboxes put a lot of people off myself included.

Eh, as a long time Dota player the idea of a MOBA without items made HotS pretty boring for me personally.

last hitting isn't an archaic mechanic, its a great display of skill (league does it poorly because of no denying pressure) hots does have some nice ideas though, it isn't nearly as barebones as when it was released, and is much better for the player who doesn't want to play several hundred hours in before they really know a lot about it, outside of that dota is better imo

For those whom are out of the loop. The latest WoW expansion, Battle for Azeroth, removed quite a number of Legion's (previous expansion) key features, which provided some progression from levels 100 to 110. In this expansion, there are no new talents, no new abilities (in fact, many abilities were removed), and the return of the global cooldown (GCD) timer (1.5 second baseline cooldown between all abilities, lowered with higher haste). The only key new feature that was brought in was Azerite armour, which is largely a significantly worse version of the previous expansion's artifact weapons. In fact, because artifact weapons were effectively removed, from levels 100 to 120, which spans over two expansions (1 old, 1 new), a player gains almost nothing that helps them feel that their class has changed in any meaningful way. The GCD changes alongside many classes losing their artifact weapons led to every class being a greatly different gameplay wise from the previous expansion. A class that worked phenomenally with its previous artifact weapon suddenly barely works properly. For example, Protection Warrior relied heavily on the skill Ignore Pain during Legion, they were very strong. When BFA launched and even after a few buffs, Prot warrior went from being an incredibly strong tank to the most punishing tank to play in the game. Since the barrier for entry to this one class is suddenly significantly higher, the average player sees a prot warrior eating paste and immediately assumes the class is garbage. Shadow priests and shamans are receiving significant changes in a coming patch that is intended to bring the classes more in line with other similar classes. The issue is though, these changes are coming during the next major content patch, 8.1, which is four months after the expansion has released, after the first raid tier has ended.

Really? All I've seen is hype for it.

Prot warrior has been by far the worst tank since the post EN nerf. That isn't really new.

https://m.ign.com/articles/2018/11/06/diablo-4-announcement-reportedly-pulled-from-blizzcon-2018 lmao now he says his report may be off, coward

The devs are allowed to do pretty much whatever they want and it's working really well! Other Blizzard teams could learn from them. I think it's that there's no such pressure to design by committee so they get things done faster and better.

Probably because they're promising a lot, like letting owners of the original WC3 and Reforged play together on the same servers. If that ends up being possible, awesome, but I have no idea how they're actually going to do that. A lot of people have trouble with the visuals. It looks radically different than Warcraft 3, not just a polygon and texture update. Things are way too detailed, as if you're meant to be playing it in third person and not from a top down perspective. This means unit coherency is almost entirely lost in battles as you have no idea what is going on, it's just a big mess. I'd guess FPS is going to chug hard in any sort of intensive custom map as well. Also they've butchered the original Warcraft 3 with some awful balance changes and the updates which have broken a vast majority of custom maps, which will never EVER be playable again unless the map creators themselves fix them. Fat chance on getting someone to fix a custom map for a 16 year old game, if they even have the file at all anymore. That gives me no faith in their claims to further balance Reforged. They might as well have made Warcraft 4 with the effort they've done with new audio and visuals, which they also said they have no plans for. I mean the footman is unrecognizable besides guy with sword and shield. https://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/screenshots/normal/803158.jpg Accurate movement and controls will be crucial though. Most people have said it's very similar if not the same, which is great.

Just like with Valve, the blizzard people knew and loved died a long time ago, people have been clinging to the mental image they had of them even after all the questionable customer unfriendly things they've been doing over the years.

Not at all the impression I got from the HOTS, SC2 or WoW classic teams. Even with BFA being bad, in my mind it's not as bad as WoD was.

Look at the prices of everything sold in HotS, and the very questionable balance changes, reworks and new releases that makes most people as "who asked for this?" that should tell you plenty. It hasn't been long enough for people to forget the whole situation with the latest WoW expansion and the whole heavy sub count drop thing. I can't talk much about SC2 though.

This. The recent changes on war3 have killed my interest in it, combined with (I think 1.24 or 1.26? Can't remember) fixing a jass bug that TONS of maps relied on, leaving a lot of older ones unplayable. New updates have caused their own set of issues, and considering they want to bring in "hundreds" more, I expect more maps to be killed off. This wouldn't be a problem but the map makers aren't here anymore. Any protected map where the maker left/lost the file can get butchered and left to rot forever. Then there's the recent banning of a huge number of CD keys used by ENT bots. Say what you will about bot hosted games, MMH and ENT at least gave working custom game browsers. The fact that blizzard is trying to kill of bots by encrypting traffic without fixing their custom game browsers is abominable. Finally, I'm pissed thaylt they couldn't just leave Warcraft 3 alone. For years it survived on minimal support because of maps, community, and love for an old game. New games can only dream of lasting so long and still seeing a live community, albeit clustered around bot games. And to anyone saying "map makers hsouldnt protect their maps", or "they fixed the tons of empty bot games", your being suckered. Empty bot games wouldn't be a problem if blizzard just added an actual browser with basic filters and embraced dedicated servers. Map makers shouldn't have to open up a map they worked on for years just because blizzard might decide to break it, because they shouldn't be pushing updates to break these old maps. I get it's their ip, but it's so frsutrating that they couldn't just leave reforged it's own thing and will probably kill years of history in the process. The only upside is that battle.net emulators exist for playing on older patches, and the game isn't forcing me to update at launch yet.

God, what the fuck has happened to Blizzard? Activision bought them. Just like EA - anything they touch seems to curl up and die eventually.

I never really looked at the prices in HotS, because I'm sitting on a mountain of skins and currency and never spent a dime.

Where to even start with D2? Vanilla on the whole was back to square one and the entire development of the game has been spent getting back to where D1 was at the end. The first expansion was absolute piss and money gated off parts of the vanilla game, completely shit on people that wanted any story, as did expansion the second. Forsaken was all in all alright but they didn't release it as a bundle with the other two DLC until they'd already made their money from people coming back to the game and having to buy all three separately. Forsaken improved it but PvP previous had been completely ruined, the raids were mediocre at best, hundreds of items were locked behind the Eververse, even the winter events and shit were 90% Eververse bait, constant progression throttling, and pretty much all responses to community have been "whoopsie we fucked up uwu we'll try better in the future" (hint, they won't). Imo we're still behind end of D1 and i've no doubt in my mind they'll do this loop yet again with D3.

I have no evidence to back this up, but I think Overwatch's problem is as such: You stop playing the game for long enough for your skills to fade and you can never get back in. Not only do you have to re-learn how to be a decent player, but you have to learn the mechanics of all these knew characters how they've re-shaped the dynamic of the game. And I'm sure the community is going to be just soooo accepting of poor performance while you get back on your feet. Even if these things aren't all true, its what a lot of us ex-overwatchers are going to think and keep us from playing until something like a sequel happens, a new jumping in point where everyone's new again.

Imagine that, they could have defused this entire thing if at the very end, as they walk off stage, the screen just says "Diablo 4".

Really now? Because hots is infamous for having a horrendous grind, where its literally impossible (as in, it can't be done, the rates just don't work) to unlock every character without spending money.

Infamous to who?? And who says you need to unlock every single character? Between free rotations and loot boxes, I probably have at least half of the roster at any given time. And a Path of Exile player complaining about overpriced MTX is something you just can't make up.