nearly 20 years ago, when WoW was just about to launch, my friends and I had been looking for an MMO to get into that would be interesting, fun, and have pvp. and I distinctly remember the vibe being cautiously optimistic with"well, Blizzard is great. I bet they're going to do a great job."
and they did. it was visually stunning, had lots to explore, very polished experience and it engaged us all for years.
it's hard to reconcile those days with today, where if somebody told me blizzard was making some new major game, my first impulse would be to shrug and wonder why anyone still cared.
I can't get over the enduring hype of "WoW Classic" where the entire gimmick is "roll back over a decade of content."
Yes yes I get nostalgia and all that, but selling a product entirely on a lack of additional content still baffled me.
I dont get it either, because I hated vanilla even though i played it for...too long...BUT it's basically a completely different game from the modern WoW. If you want you can imagine it's people wanting to go play Master of Orion 1, after not liking Master of Orion 3.
Master of Orion 2 was cool and good, and I'd rather go back to that than all the way to 1, even if 3 was utter garbage.I feel the same way about WoW: some of the later content was good, especially pre-Cataclysm, and losing all of it in the name of "classic" seems like overkill.
MOO2 was really good, I played it for the first time 5 years ago or so and it's basically deeper than almost all modern 4x space games, with bad UI and the space combat becomes really tiring when you have large fleets but still
why did they have to re-invent the wheel and remove all the spokes??
The MOO3 people were "shot in the arm" assholes, the kind of Bad Robot-style trust fund failsons that were getting handed IPs left and right to "reboot" shows, movies, and the like, and the head asshole of the bunch even bragged about how funny it was to kill off all the "furry" alien races off-camera before the game's start.
about how funny it was to kill off all the "furry" alien races off-camera before the game's start.
ah a G#mer
Of course the primary new alien race addition was le epic space zombies. Which was the style at the time. And for way too fucking long.
its so funny that they did this with hearthstone too lol
yeah. some years after beginning to phase out old sets and have a current playable season of cards, they added a mode literally called Classic Hearthstone... and sold packs for it presumably making millions. game is hardly 10 years old lol
Its not necessarily nostalgia, but like rolling back to a pre-nerffed bosses version of Elden Ring. The old content still existed but it was fundamentally not the same experience and was significantly less challenging with the way the game had changed. I can definitely see the case for it, but I also think stuff like Season of Discovery and Vanilla+ were what people were really after, like with Old School Runescape. Which private servers like Turtle WoW do better, but still. I don't think its weird except in a bizarre "people hate our changes so much they want to pay us to undo them" way.
Just got my first 60 on Twow and it's real
old WoW is basically like a warm blanket for me as far as games go.
My first experience with WoW was Wrath of the Lich King, and WoW Classic was the most fun I've ever had with the game. Granted I was also medicated for ADHD for the first time in my life but still
Lich King was fun for a time but also had some of the most obnoxious ass-pulls, like the
spoiler
"oh you and your party actually aren't epic enough to complete this raid fight with Le Epic Arthas, so down you all go and watch the DMPC step in and jerk himself off while you watch in presumptive awe"
moment in the final battle.
I remember being enthralled playing through a copy of StarCraft 2 I "appropriated" from a friend's house (yes I was that friend, we exist and we DID steal your copy of that game you thought you lost). The story was pretty damn good by the standards of videogames, especially at the time, and I basically ate slept and breathed that campaign for the week or so I was playing it. StarCraft 2 had so much hype and totally failed to live up to the quality of that campaign.
It's not even a matter of rose tinted glasses, Wings of Liberty was decent and was pretty well-produced but all its best moments were just callbacks to sc1 and brood war.
(And JESUS CHRIST, nobody who gave two fucks about that storyline was asking for all the boring trite Kerrigan redemption plotline across sc2's campaigns, brood war was sick because it specifically tossed aside the idea that she wanted to be redeemed, she was a great character and villain until they just made her sci-fi Sylvanas Windrunner. My theory is that all the now-obvious sexism at Blizzard is why they cannot conceive of a woman having a role in a story that isn't ultimately concerned with her being fixed for the sake of a dude who wants their cool monster gf to become a blonde wife)
It's true, the gameplay in 2 was pretty slick but let's be honest, story disappointment stings like nothing else when it comes to games
Sure, the StarCraft 2 story is whatever, but when it comes to classic RTS games, the StarCraft 2 games and expansions offer some of the finest campaign gameplay in the entire genre. Fully agree
Every Blizzard game since WarCraft 3 (maybe even Diablo) has been: "THE PROPHECY IS COMING TRUE! Listen to this prophet who was seen as a bad guy in previous game, but is now Team Good Guys because the world will end!" Medivh, Zeratul, and Tyreal/Caine/Adria. You have to stop the Burning Legion/Amon/Prime Evils.
I haven't played Overwatch, but I bet it's the same plot.
oh and they skeleton crewed Wings of Liberty after launch to work on the game that got cancelled and scavenged into Overwatch
I was so very sick and tired of Blizzard's "corruption" cliches and waifu characters getting "corrupted" but redeemed through some Dudebro McManPain wanting to fuck them (again) real, real bad and yet the dogmatists cheering on Wish Dot Com Cthulu cliches on top of that were part of what permanently drove me off from WoW and Blizzard games in general. The "Epic" storytelling wasn't.
Baseline warcraft stories were almost good, like if I squinted I could pretend they were doing a big and at times subtle plotline about stuff like imperialism and indigenous displacement/resistance but those days are long gone even if I was giving too much credit
This is a side question, but when I peeked at recent Diablo games ("do you guys not have phones?!" mobile grifting aside), I noticed yet another fucking corrupted feeeemale villain on the cover. Yeah yeah "Lilith" and all that, but probably just Kerrigan/Sylvannas. Again. Right?
I haven't played d4 since release but I'll be honest the story actually wasn't their worst and did not fall into that trap, you just fight Lilith at the end. Iirc she was just Mister Diablo's daughter.
There could have been potential if the Blizzard hacks bothered to anything with the pre-Old Testament Lilith character, but that might take some writing ability.
When Blizzard's "rock stars" decided to unravel their setting's own complexity to have "Alliance good actually" and "Horde evil now actually" and then put Sylvanas in charge of it for extra Chaotic Stupid with generic "corrupted" waifu characteristics, I was done.
How naive I was to think Overwatch 2 would actually get half the things they advertised for.
Turned out to just be an enshittified version of the original.
I still remember the first Overwatch having the usual "Epic Blizzard Storytelling" promise since before launch, where there was supposedly some grand story arc that would play out and never fucking did. It was more profitable to hint and tease at one while peddling more costumes and skins for the committee-designed waifus.
Remember kids, Blizzard has been gone for years, and is now simply a collection of intellectual property owned by Activision.
It's been downhill since the people that actually made the older classic games left (and received tweets saying "FUCK THAT LOSER" on their way out) and those that remained or came later described themselves as "rock stars" and were too busy getting high on their own farts and being sex pests to maintain their undeserved reputation.
Starcraft Ghost could not be made today because having a badass female protag is woke even if she's
I'll never be able to think about Blizzard or any of their games again without thinking of that hilarious horrifying story of one of their employees stealing a coworker's breast milk from the fridge. Like, it's so disgusting and perverse and invasive, it actually loops back around to being a little funny. It sounds like a dumb Nick Mullen bit, like how is that real? How pathetic and weird do you have to be to do something like that? Actual freak shit, actual freak behavior. Imagine being that poor fucking woman, just knowing for the rest of your life that the milk your body worked so hard to produce to feed your beloved child, an ancient primal mammalian biological tradition between mother and child going back millions of years, some fucking anonymous bozo compsci grad who wears pre-faded superhero tees from target stole it and... did who knows god what with it. Drank it? Jacked off with it? Who fucking knows?! And she just has to live with that now?!
as much as I enjoyed Overwatch at its height, I can't see it or WoW or anything else Blizzard related without remembering
"oh yeah, the fucking tiddy milk guys. the mommy's milker thieves. the grown toddlers who stole some lady's milk."
like its so absurd that its hilarious. what an absolute embarrassment and disgrace that they didn't use any company resources to find out who this loser was and name and shame him - they're a massive company, you can't tell me those fuckers didn't have security cameras in their office. And if they didn't, well they pretty fucking clearly need cameras to supervise their gamer staff from stealing each other's precious bodily fluids.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
