Diablo Immortal: Just let it die quietly

So recently Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal and fans are PISSED.  In case you saw that banner and got excited because you didn't catch the story yet, don't get your hopes up too high because it's only a mobile game.  Here's a trailer

If you view it on YouTube instead of in the blog, HOO BOY that dislike bar.

Now I get it, oh boy do I understand your rage.  A series with such a long and respected pedigree being reduced to yet another cash grab, probably gatcha in some way, premium currency pay to win mobile dogshit.  The fact that it's not just some little extra thing that Blizzard developed on the side but a thing that was shoved in your face at fucking Blizzcon like it's something you should be excited for.  The condescending attitude when an audience member asked "will we get it on PC?" and the guy, when booed for saying no, replied with "What, don't you all have phones?!".  You have every right to be boiling mad but just stop and think for a second.

There are tons of generic shitty hack and slash games on mobile already.  I hate to admit it but I sunk quite a lot of time into a hack and slash RPG on mobile called HIT for a pretty significant amount of time about a year ago.  All that time ended up being wasted though since it's just another deleted free game on my app store account now.  At the very least, we know that Diablo Immortal will have a degree of polish to it, so if you're going to play a shitty mobile hack and slash game at least a Diablo flavored one might be worth keeping on your phone for the occasional fiddle with on a bus or while you're dropping a fat shit.

Plus it's not like Blizzard are dropping everything to focus on this one mobile game.  Diablo 3 just got a Switch release so if Immortal really disgusts you that much but you want portable Diablo anyway, just go play that.  You don't see Final Fantasy fans losing their shit over Record Keeper or Brave Exvius, you can at least be happy that Blizzard are still giving D3 the love it needs to keep going for another console generation at the very least.  If you hate the look of it that much, it really is as easy just not downloading it from the app store.

Booing, disliking videos on raging online won't really do anything.  If no one downloads it though, if that game is dead from day 1, THEN Blizzard will know they cocked up.  I get that your mad but calm down and let it die quietly instead of giving it publicity so that all the know-nothings and curious children with a tablet don't end up keeping the game alive for years to come.

I personally will never play it because it'll never stack up to Dragalia Lost.

Overwatch First Impressions

Very recently someone gave me a free copy of Overwatch for PS4 and I've been playing it quite a lot over the last few days.  It's been a game I've been kind of avoiding for a long long time, not because I thought it would suck or anything but because I've got a huge backlog so playing online games like this was something I was trying to keep away from.  However I couldn't say no to a free copy and now I'm fucking hooked.

If you've been living under a rock and somehow don't know what Overwatch is, it's a team based first person shooter akin to Team Fortress.  Each player picks a character and then you fight to take an objective on each map which can vary from pushing a big car to the end of a stage or capturing points or sometimes even doing both at the same time.  There's some kind of story but I'm not really paying attention to it but each character seems to have a backstory you can get into if that's your thing but there's no single player campaign to speak of, it's all online.

The game itself is actually really fun, there's a lot of style and polish to it and even though I'm playing on a console rather than PC the controls are tight and each character has a nice varied play style which prevents things getting stale.  Aside from that I find it hard to think of things to say about this game.  Nothing about it is particularly new, we've been seeing this exact kind of game since 1999 but what the game does do it does extremely well.

At time of writing I've only played the quick play mode so there's still a lot for me to explore.  There's an "arcade" mode that has players competing in other sort of mini game type affairs and they seem kind of fun and there's also a competitive mode but you can't access that until you're level 25 and I'm only about 14 right now.  I'll come back and do a followup post once I've explored much more of the game.

The one thing that might turn people off is the loot crate thing.  I'm sure there's a lot of people who would be wary of the term "loot box" after the whole Star Wars thing but I can promise you there is absolutely nothing game breaking in these boxes.  There's a mode where you can customize the skins of each character or change their victory poses along with other things.  The loot boxes ONLY contain this cosmetic stuff so you don't have to worry about another player having better gear or anything like that.  The loadouts and skills of each character is set an cannot be changed so everyone is playing with the same set of tools.

I'm looking forward to playing much more of this game and I'll update once I've explored more of it's content but right off the bat it's a solid class based shooter that I could recommend for any fan of the genre.

Regret Not Trying a WoW RP Server

Every so often I'll be talking with a friend and the topic of WoW will come up.  It usually goes the same way every time too with us talking fondly of memories playing with friends and shit back in Vanilla or Burning Crusade days and then getting pissed off with it some time shortly after that and begrudgingly giving up on it.

While thinking about WoW I realized that while I don't have much urge to ever return to it, I do sort of regret never playing on the games RP servers.  I always played on a PVP server and admittedly at the time I didn't "get" RP servers like that.  I just wanted to play the game, kill shit and get sick epic gear and that kind of thing was reserved for the kind of fat acne ridden, basement dwelling nerd with no real friends.  (I was a horribly judgemental teen, sorry)

Once I got to university though I started playing Dungeons and Dragons and I came to the realization that role playing was actually really fun ESPECIALLY if you've got a good group of friends and a few drinks to help things get a little silly.  It made me think though that I sort of regret not giving the RP servers a chance back when I was at the height of my WoW playing time.

In case you're not familiar with what this entails, an RP server is a place where you don't just play the game but you actually have to play your character as if it was a real person in the world of Azeroth and not just a loot collecting machine.  This of course includes stuff about the way you talk to other players but also how you move around the world and things like that.  I have friends who have tried RP servers before and they said the one of the best things about it was that the main town chats actually had conversations going on in them rather than just people spamming for groups or to sell items.

I would never go back to WoW now, my backlog is so huge that playing an MMO is probably a bad idea but I'll always kind of regret not giving that side of the game a go.  Then again, if I had done it I probably would have been all grimdark and shit so for my own sake maybe it was a good thing I didn't.

Punishing Players for Glitches

So maybe about a week ago I came across some news about Overwatch.  Usually I ignore stuff about Overwatch because I don't play it but this particular story caught my eye.  Apparently, if you use a certain character on a certain stage then you can glitch out of bounds, make your way to the enemy half of the map and just go to town.  Sort of cool but in a multiplayer game like Overwatch I can see why people would be upset with others using it.

However of course the fact that a glitch exists in a game isn't enough to pique my interest on its own, every game has its glitches.  What really made me raise an eyebrow was the fact that, according to a number of websites, Blizzard have issued a statement saying that it's going to punish players who used the glitch, probably meaning a ban.

Are you fucking kidding me?  I know it's annoying and I can see why the community would start alerting Blizzard to the problem so that they can fix it but banning players that used it, or punishing them in any way for that matter, is complete fucking dog shit.  The glitch is Blizzard's fucking fault, they are the ones who missed the detail and players used their oversight in order to get ahead.  Fix it, sure, but don't punish the players because of your fuck up, that makes you just look like a shitty baby throwing your toys out of the pram because people won't play the game YOUR way.  The glitch doesn't even look hard to pull off, the kind of thing that any Tom, Dick or Harry could pull off so how the fuck did you miss something that?

This isn't the first time I've heard something like this though.  I remember a while back reading a thing about World of Warcraft, way after I had stopped playing about a guild getting banned from the game for clearing a raid in a slightly unorthodox manner.  The boss for the raid had a gimmick of vanishing platforms that would kill you if you were stood on them when they came out from under your feet, except some smart players found out that throwing Rogue bombs at the floor stopped them from going away.  Blizzard caught on and fixed the floor but also banned the guild that discovered the glitch.  Once again, complete bullshit.  They managed to get some good loot by finding a flaw within the game, they aren't cheating, hacking or using mods, they are just exploiting a programmer fuck up.  Fixing it so that every guild can't just easy mode farm the dungeon is fine but banning people because your play testers are bad at play testing is just not fair. 

One more example of this was the famous GTA Online thing where people found out how to duplicate cars or something in order to sell them for tons of in game cash.  This, once again, resulted in a bunch of people being banned despite the fact that the error was the fault of Rockstar and not the players.  If players having so much money was a problem then they could have just rolled shit back rather than just kicking people off the game for using a bit of ingenuity. 

Glitches are going to happen, I'm not saying that a game having glitches is some kind of indication that programmers suck at their jobs, there's a lot going on and some shit is going to slip through the cracks.  That said, don't be a fucking angry baby when smart players start taking advantage of YOUR mistakes to get ahead.  In all three of these cases, the glitches are easy mode bullshit that anyone can perform even if they are drunk, high and have broken fingers.  We aren't exactly talking Queen Gohma Wrong Warp here.

Ban hackers, modders and all that jazz sure because in the case of multiplayer games those guys are just being dicks.  But glitching?  That shit is on you, fix it and move on and maybe you should even be thanking the people that discovered it because if they didn't then your shitty game would just stay broken, wouldn't it?

Hooked on Hearthstone

I remember when I first saw Hearthstone, I laughed a hearty laughed and said that the idea of a World of Warcraft trading game game was stupid.  Now look at me, sat in front of my computer logging onto Hearthstone daily for a quick round before work every morning like a big fat chump.

Seriously though, I like trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh but the idea of having to drop large amounts of money on little bits of paper really turns me off.  That's why this kind of thing in video game format is so appealing; I get to play the game but don't have to drop as much money on it.  However Yu-Gi-Oh games tend to be full of stupid crap and I find the Magic: The Gathering games to be extremely limiting.

Then Hearthstone comes along, which to most TCG snobs may be rather simplistic but it's fast, fun and best of all completely free.  All you have to do is download some Battle.net thing and you're pretty much good to go from there, just log in and get playing.

The game of Hearthstone is rather simple.  You pick a character based on a class from World of Warcraft and use your deck of minions and spells to drain their health from 30 to 0.  Each card has a mana cost from 1 to 10 and each hero has a special skill that costs 2 mana to perform.  For example the Mage can cast a fireball that will deal 1 damage which is great for a little DPS boost if you have some spare mana at the end of your turn.

Every single card available in the game is available for free, there is no jumping through pay gates to get more cards in Hearthstone.  For 150 in game gold you can buy a booster pack that contains 5 cards.  If you want to buy more packs at the same time it costs money, but the game doesn't limit you to how many packs you can buy.  It's a little annoying that you can't stack gold purchases but it's a small inconvenience.  You earn this gold by just playing the game, there is no way to buy gold from the in game store.  Every 3 wins in normal play mode, ranked or not, nets you 10 gold.  This sounds like getting a booster is a slow process but the game gets around this by providing the player with "daily quests".  A daily quest may be something like "win 2 games with X class" or "Kill X Minions" and each completed quest nets you 40 gold.

On top of that you can spend 150 gold to enter The Arena to get even better prizes such as more gold, boosters or dust for crafting.  You keep playing games until you hit either 12 wins or 3 losses, whichever comes first and you have to do it with a deck built out of randomly selected cards.  Even if you don't own the card you can use it in arena mode if you get lucky with the drafting, so really it's up to luck but your rank or anything like that is unaffected and the prizes are really good so it's worth doing.

Finally you can craft cards using some weird crafting system that I've not really used much since I started.  Basically you can disenchant cards you don't want into dust and then use that dust to craft new cards that you do want.  I've not yet played the game long enough to know what specific cards I want for my deck but I imagine this system will become very useful to me later.

So if you like card games I'd absolutely recommend Hearthstone.  Even if you don't like Warcraft, the game itself is fun to play so if you can get over the theme there's a good game here.  Best of all, you have absolutely nothing to lose.  You can play the game for hours and hours and spend 0 money like I have or you can drop a few bucks and get a nice handful of extra cards, but don't be disappointed if those cards don't give you much of an advantage.

Easily one of my favourite games of the year so far.

Paying to NOT Play with World of Warcraft

Well I didn't think I'd ever be talking about this game again.  I still remember back when I was in high school, just after I finished my GCSE exams, coming home and loading up WoW for the first time.  I remember back during Burning Crusade, when I said "fuck it" to study during my A Level study leave and just whittled away the hours on this game.

Now, World of Warcraft is a completely different beast.  From what people who still do play have told me and from what I've read, it's been dumbed down a great deal and it's only a mere shell of that game that I once had rather fond memories of.

I suppose this post is a kind of extension of the money grubbing rant I made a while ago, so before I even start talking about this stuff, if you want to know how I feel about cash shops and microtransactions, then you can get a general idea from this video.

Now, World of Warcraft isn't exactly new to the idea of nickle and diming its customers.  I remember just after I stopped playing Blizzard released some kind of mount that looked like a bunch of stars in the shape of a horse or something.  People were laughing at it and calling it a piece of shit because there wasn't any way to earn it in game, you had to BUY it from a cash shop.

The reason it was met with such negativity from the player base is because the whole reason you play subscription based MMOs is so that you don't have to deal with this cash shop dog shit.  You buy the game and pay £7/month or something and you get access to everything for that.  In a genre like this where the developer is CONSTANTLY expected to create new content for an ever expanding world, then I won't begrudge them for a subscription fee, but a cash shop is taking the piss.

But times have changed and by the looks of things it seems like all the smart players have fucked off to other games because recently THIS happened.

That picture is from the in game cash shop and is giving players the option to BUY a max level character for $60!  Why would anyone do this, really?  You could buy a NEW game for that much money but Blizzard expect (and people will) people to shell out $60 for a max level character, I mean Jesus Christ.

But I'm not mad about this, why would I be? I don't even play the game anymore.  I'm genuinely confused as to why this is even a thing though.  Part of the fun of playing an MMO is the journey to the end game.  Levelling with your buddies, doing quests and learning the lore of the land as you go, it's great fun.  But instead Blizzard are expecting people to just cut ALL of that shit out and just jump straight into level 90.

I get that people want to PVP and stuff, but what's the point of playing an MMO if you're just going to skip the levelling?  Especially when your skipping out on this much content, it's like your paying to not play the game, I'm genuinely confused as to why anyone would want to skip it when they are already paying a pretty sizable amount of money just to play.

Maybe one day someone will explain what the appeal is, but until that day I'm just going to blanket label you all as nut jobs with more money than sense.

Mainstream Gaming and Being "Offended"

OK here we go again, more failings of video game "journalism"

The above picture is from something on Rock Paper Shotgun where some guy has an interview with a member of Blizzard staff, and instead of talking about the actual video game, he decide to whine about their choice of costume designs.  The staff member in question though gives a disinterested response and gets him to leave, which is the correct way to deal with social justice morons like that.

Then said social justice moron takes to RPS to go and write an overlong, silly article about why it's offensive, why you should be offended and why the guy from Blizzard that was interviewed is a unfeeling monster.

I'm not going to link to the article because I don't want to give morons like the RPS staff clicks and therefore money, but if you really care I'm sure you can do some googling around.

Anyway, I'm not going to write (ANOTHER) article on why these social justice types of people who rant on about how women look in games are fucking stupid, I've done that enough, what I am going to say is that people need to get over the fact that maybe just some games aren't made for them.

Yes, this is a problem that has come with gaming going into the mainstream.  Now everyone thinks that they have a right to experience every game the same way everyone else does.  This is really what's at the core of his overlong rant about the Blizzard interview.  He's suggesting that people design not sexy women because it may make a certain section of players uncomfortable or whatever. 

Well newsflash for you Mr Grayson and your SJW crowd, maybe not all games are made for you and people like you.  Maybe you don't factor into that little thing called a target demographic so what right do you and people like you have for parading around making artists change their work?  The writer of that interview is very lucky I don't work for Blizzard or I would have told him to fuck off for wasting my time and have him forcibly removed from the building and getting a swift boot up the arse on the way out.

What I'm not saying however, is "don't be offended by things".  Being offended is fine, if you are thin skinned to the point where a lady in the thong in a video game makes you upset, then fine, so be it, but shut the fuck up about it.  There are a great deal of people who don't care and there are also a great deal of people who just see it and don't think anything about gender politics or whatever, because it's just a hot woman in a video game, nothing wrong with that.

If you want to make these arguments about gender politics then fine but keep it restritced to your own personal blogs or whatever and stop throwing bitch fits when people don't want to hear it.  Even if you consider gaming as an art form your arguments still don't hold up because 100% of art isn't there to make just YOU happy, you selfish sack of arse.

In terms of actual arguments about this issue, this post is a bit lacking because I'm TRYING to keep it short.  So the too long; didn't read version of this post would be.

Yes, we get it, you're upset about women being attractive, please fuck off to a different game if you don't like this one.  Maybe stupid non-games that pander to your "needs" like Gone Home are more appropriate.

Always On DRM is Arse

The new Sim City game came out recently and before I even start this post I want to have a little rage about the name.  This is what?  Sim City 5? so why the FUCK is it called Sim City?!  I hate when games do this and it's been a thing for far too long.  Even recently we've had Tomb Raider and Devil May Cry despite not being the first one.  Stop doing this shit, it's needlessly confusing.

Anyway, I felt bad for people who bought Diablo 3 at launch.  Not because I think the game isn't all that great, that's just my opinion but because that people weren't able to fucking play the damn thing because the servers were being overrun with people trying to log in.

So we have a case of history repeating itself, and now there are shit tons of people who can't play their new copy of Sim City because there are too many people trying to log in at the same time, and they are shoved into never ending queues.

What makes the whole thing really bad about both Diablo 3 and Sim City is that these are single player games, and people who paid top price for these games are being fucked over because EA are worried about a few pirates.

They really need to find another way to deal with piracy because at the end of the day, the pirates will still find a way to acquire the game for free and the only people that are being affected by this shit are the people who actually paid for the damn thing.

There is more to the Sim City story than just people not being able to log in, but the big point here is that always on DRM needs to fuck right off.  Find away to protect your games without hurting the paying customer or just don't fucking do it.