I feel like games from alternate launchers that launch on steam do so as a last ditch effort.
I think it's more just getting ready the MS deal to finalise as MS have commited to make sure all their stuff is available on Steam. Wouldn't surprise me if we see Diablo 4 soon too.
Unlikely. Microsoft is now first and foremost a cloud provider and has been putting a lot of time and effort into their own Linux offerings, and desktop Windows just isn't the hypercritical lynchpin for their bottom line that it used to be.
Yeah, it was a disaster, but to be fair to them, they were trying to bring in stone stuff that's now standard like PC/Console crossplay and play anywhere on one purchase.
set in an optimistic future
Can anyone here up to date on their Overwatch lore explain what that means? I’m not being snarky about the game being bad, I just haven’t played it and genuinely curious what they mean by that. From my understanding, the game is about killing each other lol
Last I heard Overwatch basically didn't have lore. For the entirety of the lifespan of "Overwatch 1" (though overwatch 2 isn't even actually a sequel) the timeline never advanced past the trailer cinematic from launch. All of the "lore" was just character backstory comics and backstory hints from their interactions in the spawn area of each match.
The gameplay really has nothing to do with the lore, but the lore never struck me as very optimistic. The premise of Overwatch is that once upon a time there was a team of superheroes who went around being superheroes and protecting people from the evil supervillains and stuff like that. But anyway, their superhero team collapsed and for a while it's just been a shitty world where the supervillains do whatever they want. Now the superhero team is reforming with some new members. The end.
Idk how that could possibly be seen as optimistic personally lol
It's just standard cape shit. Liberal optimism is a hero saves the world so I don't have to care!
A virus caused killbot factories to start printing omnicidal killbots. Each country's military was getting owned by the killbots so Overwatch was formed by soldiers from every military and some randos to shut down the factories. They suceeded, then became the world police. Robots were made to live beneath the cities and subject to "Detroit:Become Human" level discrimination. 10 years later, Overwatch was disbanded after a group betrayed them and bad press. 10 years later, some of the members came back to reform Overwatch.
I don't know if that ever comes up. The whole thing started with "There's a huge expansive world we wrote, this is just a tiny portion of it", and then it turned out no, they were just generating characters to appeal to the largest audience possible and then inventing the world/backstory from that.
they were just generating characters to appeal to the largest audience possible and then inventing the world/backstory from that
When corporate calls for a copy-paste damaged goods femme fatale waifu with an exotic skin color and a corrupted backstory again.
Overwatch was promised to have
EPIC BLIZZARD STORYTELLING(tm) 
coming any moment now and for years a lot of credulous fans waited for more that... didn't happen.The porn flood that followed after (inevitable, because so many of the characters were committee-designed waifus) had more story packed in than the actual product.
(which is a lot more optimistic than the cinematic one lmao)
Nolan and Snyder saw to that.
critically acclaimed
How long before launch did those critics acclaim it?
about 6 years before, when the actual good version of the game first launched
about 6 years before, when the actual good version of the game first launched
That was about the last time it seemed somewhat believable outside of the credulous fandom that there might be more story incoming past the hype trailers, too.
It's incredible how out of touch the /r/overwatch community is with the general feeling and attitude that exists towards the game and company outside of it.
Is the game playable and can you have an alright time with it? Sure. Will you feel slightly dirty about it? Yes. Is the problem "lack of communication from the company" - fuck no it's not. It's all the other shit. Redditors think communication can smooth over being absolute dicks to the community and that's just not correct. You can communicate all you want but it won't resolve destroying Overwatch 1 to force people to play 2, and it won't resolve the changes people dislike that they'd rather be playing the first game, and it won't resolve the monetisation being shit, and it won't resolve the way the company treats employees, and it won't resolve the terrible reporting system that ignores actual slurs but permabans people for nonsense, etc etc etc. The list goes on.
But over on /r/overwatch they pretend it's all just meaningless and a problem with communication. It's not. They're fundamentally out of touch with reality.
ActiBlizz fans that are still there and still paying are about as deeply invested as Star Citizen backers at this point.
I agree.
Also, "better communication" in videogame communities is like pizza parties are to employees.
"better communication" in videogame communities is like pizza parties are to employees.
At least those have fucking pizza instead of just "we're still doing the corporate skullduggery thing we did before but we're going to phrase it in a less incendiary way" communication without pizza.
"We hear you."
And then you get the fans saying "The company needs to do a better job saying 'we hear you'."
They usually phrase it like "CONSUMER FRIENDLY" which is such a roll-over-and-show-belly way of begging toward the ruling class.
ActiBlizz fans that are still there and still paying are about as deeply invested as Star Citizen backers at this point.
Indeed. bought SC in 2014. I think I accepted I got scammed and moved on around 2015.
It's insane to me there's still some people to this day that don't realize it's a pure scam.
As an OW1 enjoyer (yes it had alot of flaws too) and around 300~ hrs in OW1, OW2 was not nearly as fun, even all the way up to them shutting down OW1
-matchmaking sucks, you either rolled or get rolled no inbetween (i felt ow1 had better games overall) -Tanks, which i main became such a chore, or just completely rolled due to skill differences -Healers became too easy to pick off/couldnt do much to protect themselfs And controversial opinion: -The change from 6v6 to 5v5 was one of the worst changes for me, it made it rely on individual performance way too much... one pick and your teams fucked, with a 6v5 i felt that you had somewhat of a chance of not being rolled as bad, or at least not being completely wiped and regrouping
It sucks seeing one of my fave games feom that peroid go down the shitter; at least TF2 has my back as always
Seems about right.
Thing is, I actually like OW2's core gameplay more than OW1. I can't say it's necessarily better than OW1 would have been if they hadn't abandoned it for years to (fail to) build OW2's PVE, but so it goes.
But I reinstalled just to see if I'd want to try with the new Invasion content, and here's the thing:
I played about 5 rounds of QP. They were all horribly mismatched in terms of skill level, and I enjoyed 0 of them. So the idea of grinding through a new battle pass, although liking the RoboAna mythic skin, was a nonstarter even before talking about how crowded a launch season this is. Like even if I wanted to, I don't have time for this battle pass.
And then the new PvE content? I mean maybe it's good, but nothing about any of the PvE they've released in the past would support that. It's been consistently mediocre IMO, so I dunno why I'd suddenly want to pay for the privilege.
I'm annoyed that I have about 2000 coins I'm never going to use (love that I can't use them to buy the invasion bundle just to screw around with the new stuff), but I think it's time to give up and move on.
Apparently it is right now the only game on Steam that is elegible to be classified as "Overwhelmingly Negative" to have less than 10% of reviewers to recommend the game. Is this a new world record?
Eventually people will need to accept that the Blizzard we all loved died long ago, and stop rewarding the ghoul that now inhabits its corpse.
It died many years ago, and it should have been a signed death certificate moment to see one of the main people behind the original two Diablo games, one that had gotten vocally critical of the bullshit at Blizzard and had left to start the Torchlight series, received a "fuck that loser"
Twitter remark from one of the corporate failsons wriggling around in Blizzard's corporate corpse.EDIT: The early company wasn't that wholesome chungus either; the systemic sexism was there basically from the start, especially with the "listing the only female employee as the dog roaming the office"
This is one of the reasons why I don't really want to buy the new Diablo game even though my friends are playing it and it sounds like it's gotten good reviews. checks metacritic, critics score 86, user score currently at 2.0 Yeah figures lol
Im embarrassed it took me until Diablo 4's 1.1.0 patch to finally figure this out, but here we are.
The PVE bundle for a few missions costing about the same of what I paid for the entire ow1 is just insulting. For what I understand they'll release multiples PVE bundles for 15$. The entire ow2 is only a money grab machine.
I should be mad at the market for this practice but I'm already so pissed off that I'll direct all my hatred towards a single stupidity: Fuck all mobile consumers who made this kinda of shit the norm in the gaming market, fuck all candy crush players who gave infinite money to Activision Blizzard.
If I had to guess it's the microtransactions designed to squeeze every cent from their players. This game has an insane cost and it's not just cosmetics. They lock characters behind microtransactions. I bought overwatch one, they ended it, and have me Overwatch 2: athe Money Grab!
oh yeah they also abandoned the first game that was already good to make a campaign then cancelled the campaign at the last second and nobody can play the first one anymore.
They were going to do some pve bullshit and that was literally the only justification they had for making overwatch 2 to begin with instead of just expanding on overwatch 1 and then they were like "yeah we're not doing that pve thing" so yea
No context out of character arena pvp between ostensibly "heroic" characters that are mostly supposed to be on the same team forever and ever. EPIC BLIZZARD STORYTELLING is more exciting when it's hyped and waited for than actually delivered.
