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 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:

Blizzard still makes the best games on the market, by a huge margin.

!?!
Would you mind turning down your hyperbole generator, it appears to be stuck on 11. Blizzard make competent, if bland, games which are financially successful but they are a long, long way from the 'best games on the market'

I'm not even a fanboy. WoW put me to sleep last time I tried to pick it up and I hate Starcraft II. I'm seeing beyond personal preferences. Blizzard games are the most well-rounded games on the market. Tightly developed, well-maintained. What you consider to be bland is your personal preference, not what the games really are.

 Sigvatr wrote:
I'm seeing beyond personal preferences.

Yet you say this entirely without irony.

 Chongara wrote:
Have you considered it's not blizzard that's changed, but you? Assuming you were roughly 12-15 playing these games the first time around, you're approaching or in your 30s now. You're a different person than you were then, you're an old man now (or at rather what your younger self would have called an old man). Have you considered that your capacity for enjoying click-click-click-click fests with relatively little depth has simply gone down, when not fueled by nostalgia?

In my case... oh I have changed. But I never considered even the original SC to be a particularly good game (IIRC my opinion about it at the time was "eh, it's passable", and I've grown to dislike it more because of what it represents than because of any inherent quality it has). It's no secret that during the TA / SC rivalry years, I was firmly in TA's corner, and still am.

 Melissia wrote:

 Chongara wrote:
Have you considered it's not blizzard that's changed, but you? Assuming you were roughly 12-15 playing these games the first time around, you're approaching or in your 30s now. You're a different person than you were then, you're an old man now (or at rather what your younger self would have called an old man). Have you considered that your capacity for enjoying click-click-click-click fests with relatively little depth has simply gone down, when not fueled by nostalgia?

In my case... oh I have changed. But I never considered even the original SC to be a particularly good game. It's no secret that during the TA / SC rivalry years, I was firmly in TA's corner, and still am.

Jeez Louise, that's an old dog to have in a fight. I'm inclined to think of a popular Disney song here.

Still, that's fair. If you never liked Starcraft of course you're not going to like Starcraft II because it's not substantively different at the core of things. It's the same basic game with a fresh coat of paint and some new units in the true style of the Megaman franchises. I think let's less fair to blame liking Starcraft but not Starcraft 2 wholly on some sense of blizzard golng bad without at least considering "Hey, maybe my tastes have changed. Maybe I've outgrown this."

 Chongara wrote:
I think let's less fair to blame liking Starcraft but not Starcraft 2 wholly on some sense of blizzard golng bad without at least considering "Hey, maybe my tastes have changed. Maybe I've outgrown this."

Obviously tastes change, in the case of D2+D3 though I literally played them back to back. I started playing on the D2 ladder late last year and managed to find a D3 key for about a tenner so I gave it a go. I think it says quite a lot about D3 that I can barely remember any of it; none of the boss fights, only a couple of enemy types, a handful of areas and I genuinely can't even recall what class I was (barbarian maybe?). Given that this was only last year its fair to say that it had a minimal impact on me.
D2 on the other hand was much the same as I remember it, although I have played it so much that I really don't have the will to play it like I used to.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Chongara wrote:
I think let's less fair to blame liking Starcraft but not Starcraft 2 wholly on some sense of blizzard golng bad without at least considering "Hey, maybe my tastes have changed. Maybe I've outgrown this."

Obviously tastes change, in the case of D2+D3 though I literally played them back to back. I started playing on the D2 ladder late last year and managed to find a D3 key for about a tenner so I gave it a go. I think it says quite a lot about D3 that I can barely remember any of it; none of the boss fights, only a couple of enemy types, a handful of areas and I genuinely can't even recall what class I was (barbarian maybe?). Given that this was only last year its fair to say that it had a minimal impact on me.
D2 on the other hand was much the same as I remember it, although I have played it so much that I really don't have the will to play it like I used to.

What I'm saying is that because of nostalgia factor, you can't really trust your own experiences on this one. Any kind of criticism that can be addressed and quantified really needs to take the form of

"D2 had this feature, D3 does not. The lack of this feature changes things in <this> specific way"
or
"D2 has this pacing where it takes this amount of time to do this task, D3 has this same task but takes this amount of time. This change in timings causes <this> specific problem."
or similar.

"Feels Samey" and similar criticisms are kind of shaky without any kind of bias. When you're playing an old favorite they're totally worthless. Human perception is a funny thing and something you enjoyed at the peak intensity of your emotional/identity/memory-forming life just isn't the kind of thing you can examine with relative experience. You gotta take a dryer approach if you're going to get anything reliable out of it.

Which isn't to say you haven't made the kind observations I'm talking bout here, or I think you can't present them, just that you haven't yet.

On a quantifiable scale, there is significant downgrading of gameplay mechanics in Diablo 3. Primarily in character choice and customization. I played through the first act on a friend's copy, and I think I spent half the time being annoyed by the lack of any options for stats, abilities or buffs. It was all a static progression tree instead of options, which considering all the time they put into it, feels cheap to lack major features of previous games, only in a year or so to release it for consoles.

In essence, I think the problem is, they made it for consoles first and the PC release was a quick hack to test out any bugs and progression for the console players and to test out the RMAH, which we all know where that ended up.

 AegisFate wrote:
On a quantifiable scale, there is significant downgrading of gameplay mechanics in Diablo 3. Primarily in character choice and customization. I played through the first act on a friend's copy, and I think I spent half the time being annoyed by the lack of any options for stats, abilities or buffs. It was all a static progression tree instead of options, which considering all the time they put into it, feels cheap to lack major features of previous games, only in a year or so to release it for consoles.

In essence, I think the problem is, they made it for consoles first and the PC release was a quick hack to test out any bugs and progression for the console players and to test out the RMAH, which we all know where that ended up.

Well lets not forget that was under a terrible design lead, then a new design lead (Travis) has significantly improved the game. And the game is now very successful and is enjoying having a very active community and player base. The game at launch was terrible. The game is actually pretty good now. Not as good as it should be. But it is much better. It has great gameplay and juiciness but it is nothing like diablo 2. Infact the skill options are quite diverse compared to diablo 2's. In terms of viable builds there are very few, which is much better than "Runewords only" in diablo 2.

The Diablo franchise is so last decade. It's all about Grim Dawn now

 Asherian Command wrote:
Interestingly overwatch is a highly wanted by the female demographic according to alot of people in the gaming press. It strikes a certain chord that appeals to ALOT of people.

I love about half of the aesthetics of the game, but mechanically the game looks like gak. The best thing about the game is the stuff that fits into the Infinity-style near future aesthetic - characters like Winston, Tracer, Pharah, Bastion and Zarya. But a few of the other characters *cough*Torbjorn*cough* clash terribly with that, and the gameplay itself is one dimensional. The game only has a single game mode, two if you're being extremely generous:

- Point Capture, where one team has to stand on Point A, then on Point B, while their opponent stops them from standing there.
- Payload, where one team has to stand on Point A, then on each intermediate point leading up to Point B, while their opponent stops them from standing there.